Haircut

I get off the IRT in front of the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture after riding an early Amtrak from Philly to get
a haircut at what used to be the Harlem “Y” barbershop. I’m on
the street at ten to ten. Waiting, I eat fish cakes at the Pam
Pam and listen to the ladies call out orders: bacon-biscuit
twice, scrambled scrambled fried, over easy, grits, country
sausage on the side. Hugh is late. He shampoos me, says “I
can’t remember, Girlfriend, are you tenderheaded?” From the
chair I notice the mural behind me in the mirror. I know those
overlapped sepia shadows, a Renaissance rain forest, Aaron
Douglas! Hugh tells me he didn’t use primer and the chlorine
eats the colors every day. He clips and combs and I tell him how
my favorite Douglas is called “Building More Stately Mansions,”
and he tells me how fly I’d look in a Salt ‘n’ Pepa ‘do, how he trained in Japan.

Clip clip, clip clip. I imagine a whoosh each time my hair lands
on the floor and the noises of small brown mammals. I remember,
my father! He used to get his hair cut here, learned to swim in
the caustic water, played pool and basketball. He cuts his own
hair now. My grandfather worked seventy-five years in Harlem
building more stately mansions. I was born two blocks away and
then we moved.