Early 20th century

The early 1900s appear in the novel’s account of Black hair care as a moment when hair straightening became both a commercial enterprise and part of a longer struggle over identity and beauty. The period is associated with Madam C. J. Walker’s success: an African American entrepreneur, she became a millionaire by inventing and marketing hair-care products to Black women and improving the design of the hot comb. Her story gives a concrete shape to the industry’s growth, while the surrounding history makes clear that the meanings attached to hair extend well beyond commerce.

Historical Background

The novel places this period against a much older history. In fifteenth-century African civilizations, hairstyles could communicate tribe or family background, religion, social status, wealth, and mourning. Hair could also carry spiritual significance, understood as a passage between the soul and the divine. The forced shaving of captured Africans on slave ships violently disrupted these cultural meanings, severing hair from identity through an act of dehumanization.

After slavery, hair became subject to beauty standards that favored European features. Straight, smooth hair was treated as beautiful, while naturally curly and tightly textured hair was devalued. The early-1900s account of Walker’s products therefore belongs to a history in which hair practices were shaped not only by personal preference but also by racialized ideas about which appearances counted as acceptable.

Walker and the Hot Comb

Walker’s work links entrepreneurship to the practical tools through which those standards could be pursued. She marketed products to Black women and improved the hot comb, a device used to straighten hair. The account does not reduce her achievement to a single invention: it emphasizes both her business success and the market for products serving Black women. By becoming a millionaire, Walker demonstrates the scale of the commercial opportunity that hair care represented, even as the surrounding history explains the unequal beauty norms within which that market developed.

From an Early Industry to a Larger Market

The novel distinguishes Walker’s early-twentieth-century moment from a later phase of industry development. In the 1960s, George E. Johnson marketed the chemical relaxer, which straightened naturally curly hair. The text estimates that the Black hair-care industry is now worth more than one billion dollars annually. Its account also traces the later prominence of South Korean businesses to the 1960s rise in popularity of wigs made with South Korean hair. A South Korean export ban on raw hair and a United States ban on importing wigs containing Chinese hair helped consolidate South Korea’s position in the wig market; the wig trade subsequently expanded into the broader Black hair-care business.

This later development connects the industry’s structure to migration and community networks. When Dae Hyun and Min Soo moved to New York City, Dae Hyun’s cousin lent them money and advised them to open a Black hair-care store, as other South Korean immigrants in their community had done. The novel estimates that South Korean businesses control between sixty and eighty percent of the market, including distribution, retail, and increasingly manufacturing. Because South Korean distributors primarily supply South Korean retailers, the distribution network can make it difficult for other groups to establish a foothold. These later details do not describe the early 1900s itself; they set Walker’s era within the longer history of a market that changed in scale, ownership, and organization.

Hair, Choice, and Identity

The historical discussion informs the novel’s treatment of Natasha’s decision to wear an Afro. She does not make the choice as a deliberate political statement or because she knows the history: she wants to try something new, likes having straight hair, and may straighten it again in the future. Her natural hair takes three years to grow in fully. That personal choice nonetheless meets a history in which hair can carry meanings imposed by families and society as well as meanings chosen by the person wearing it.

Patricia Kingsley objects that Afros can look militant and unprofessional, fears rooted in the danger she believes society’s hostility toward Blackness poses to her daughter. There is also a personal hurt: Patricia has relaxed her own hair throughout her life and Natasha’s since Natasha was ten, so the change feels to her like a rejection. The novel presents this tension as part of growing up and separating from a parent, without making Natasha’s hairstyle a fixed declaration of ideology. In that contrast, the early-1900s history supplies context rather than a formula: a hairstyle can be shaped by powerful social histories even when an individual’s immediate reason is simply curiosity and change.