Black hair and identity

Black hair and identity is a recurring concern in the novel, where hair is never only a matter of appearance. It carries family practices, demands time and skill, and becomes visible to other people as a sign they may judge or try to regulate. Through Nella Rogers’s memories and conversations, and through the contrast between her experience and the treatment of Black characters in publishing, the subject links self-definition to who has authority to describe Black women accurately.

Family Inheritance and Early Ideals

Nella Rogers’s parents raised her in a predominantly white neighborhood and sent her to predominantly white public schools. They deliberately surrounded her with affirming signs of Black identity: they gave her Black history assignments throughout the year, bought her Black dolls, and encouraged her to be proud of being Black. Yet this protective effort could not keep straight hair from becoming an ideal. Nella encountered that ideal at school, at sleepovers, in the appearance of her dolls, and at home. Her mother had been relaxing her own hair since the mid-1990s, after becoming a dean at a small private university. Nella’s account therefore presents hair preference not as an isolated choice but as something learned amid family affection and wider expectations about appearance.

After Nella began sixth grade, her mother took her to a salon in New Haven. They made the visit together every six weeks, sitting with magazines and novels while their hair was treated. The ritual continued until Nella passed her driving test and her high-school newspaper editorship helped give her a fuller social life. The repeated salon visits make hair care part of an intimate mother-daughter routine, while also showing how early and regularly Nella encountered chemical straightening as an ordinary practice. The later shift in her relationship to her hair does not erase that inheritance; it gives her a new perspective on how long it took to question it.

Learning to Wear Natural Hair

Nella eventually cut off her relaxed hair after starting a new life in New York City. Her decision came amid reflection on wrongful police killings, reading Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, and seeing the range of natural Black hair-care products in a Brooklyn Target. She found that she liked the hair beneath the relaxed style, but regretted how long it had taken to discover that preference. The change is both physical and interpretive: Nella does not simply adopt a different look; she recognizes that an earlier standard had shaped what she thought desirable.

That recognition does not instantly make natural-hair care easy. Nella tells Hazel-May McCall that she has wanted to wear scarves like Hazel’s but has struggled with online tutorials. Repeated attempts to French-braid her own hair leave her arms aching, and she has trouble following the steps even when she slows and replays the videos. She also says that flat twists elude her and that her braids often look rough to her. These details make the transition a process of practice rather than a simple declaration of pride. Nella’s account of being too tired to twist her hair at night, and of the difficulty of sleeping with her 4C hair loose, further establishes the daily labor involved.

Hazel responds with practical encouragement rather than treating the difficulty as a failure. She tells Nella that styling becomes easier as hair grows and offers to show her techniques. Hazel explains that she resisted braids and scarves herself before finding them useful with her locs, particularly in hot weather. When Nella describes the challenges of her 4C texture, Hazel relates it to her own hair, which is mostly 4B with a 4C section at the nape. Their exchange makes shared knowledge concrete: experience with different textures and styles gives Hazel a way to help Nella that a generic tutorial has not.

Appearance, Work, and Authority

Nella’s hair also sits within the expectations she anticipates at work. Before beginning her Manhattan office job, she worries about the logistics of the commute and whether she and her editor, Vera Parini, will get along. She has mainly worked behind bars and coffee counters, environments where she met people from many walks of life and could wear what she wanted. She doubts she could have worn a Black Lives Matter shirt to her interview with Vera. Her apprehension connects the office’s perceived rules of dress and conduct to a broader concern about whether professional belonging requires suppressing visible forms of political or racial identity.

The sharpest example comes from Nella’s recollection of Richard Wagner’s advice during her first week at Wagner Books. Richard had invited her to dinner, where his wife advised her to tame her hair and speak as though she came from Northampton rather than Newark. Later, Richard dismissed Burning Heart as too niche, while suggesting that Diana Gordon’s appearance and Nella’s intelligence might help the book find an audience. His judgments place Black women’s appearance, voice, and marketability within the same field of evaluation. The demand that Nella alter her hair and speech is not presented as neutral professional coaching: it makes acceptance conditional on moving toward someone else’s idea of respectability.

Nella’s unease also reflects how limited an outsider’s reading of workplace behavior can be. She recognizes that Owen, her white cisgender partner, may not understand publishing’s racial dynamics as she does; conduct that seems harmless from his position can carry a different weight for her. In this context, hair is one part of a larger question about whose interpretation of a workplace counts. Nella’s experience gives her knowledge that cannot be replaced by an apparently neutral judgment of professionalism.

Representation and the Right to Define

The novel extends the question from how Black women present themselves to how others render them. Shartricia, a fictional character created by a white male author, is presented as nineteen and pregnant with her fifth child. Her uncertain account of the child’s father, her strained connections with family and friends, and her mother’s explanation of her name all contribute to a characterization built from hardship and stereotypes. Nella judges the portrayal as a collection of unflattering tropes that leaves Shartricia unchanged and without a redemptive development. Hazel-May McCall likewise calls the book badly written, contrived, and caricatured, and says its treatment is offensive and embarrassing.

The criticism does not make Shartricia’s hair the issue in isolation. Rather, her characterization illuminates the wider problem of who gets to define Black women’s lives and whether an individual character is allowed complexity. The contrast is significant: Nella’s own hair story includes family influence, practical difficulty, changing preference, and gradual learning, whereas Shartricia is described through a narrow bundle of social assumptions. Set beside one another, these accounts distinguish lived experience from an external construction that mistakes recognizable hardship for a fully realized person.

The concept also recurs in the portrayal of Jesse Watson. When Nella meets him, she notices that his appearance differs from the images she remembers: his beard is closely cropped, his twists are gone, and his hair lies flat and looks greased. The scene makes hair an immediately legible part of a changed public presentation, though Nella cannot yet explain the difference. Elsewhere, her toast with Malaika marks Nella’s relief at no longer being the only Black woman in her workplace, adding a social dimension to the motif: being seen in isolation is different from having another Black woman present. Together, these moments make hair a visible but not self-explanatory sign. Its meaning depends on personal history, relationships, and the unequal power to decide what Blackness is supposed to look like.