The postslavery period

The postslavery period is the historical frame through which the novel examines the continuing significance of Black hair. It follows the rupture caused by slavery into later beauty standards, commercial practices, and arguments over natural and straightened styles, showing how a personal choice such as Natasha Kingsley’s Afro carries meanings shaped by history even when she does not intend it as a political statement.

From Cultural Identity to Erasure

Before slavery, hairstyles in African civilizations could communicate tribal or family background, religion, and social status. Elaborate styles could signify power and wealth, while subdued hair could indicate mourning. Hair also held spiritual meaning: because it was on the head, near the sky, it could be understood as a passage for spirits to the soul and a means of connection with God.

The slave trade violently severed those associations. Newly captured Africans were forcibly shaved aboard slave ships, an act the novel presents as dehumanizing and as an effective removal of hair’s connection to cultural identity. The postslavery history of Black hair therefore begins not with a free choice of style but with the imposed loss of a form of personal and communal expression.

Beauty Standards and a Commercial Industry

After slavery, hair acquired new and conflicting meanings in African American communities. Styles closer to European beauty standards were treated as good hair: straight and smooth hair was praised, while tightly curled natural hair was devalued. These standards turned hair into more than an individual matter of appearance; they reflected pressures about which forms of Blackness society would accept as beautiful or professional.

The novel connects those standards to a growing hair-care industry. In the early twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker became a millionaire by developing and marketing products for Black women, including an improved hot comb for straightening hair. In the 1960s, George E. Johnson marketed the chemical relaxer, which straightens naturally curly African American hair. By the period described in the novel, the industry was estimated to be worth more than one billion dollars annually.

The history also reaches into Daniel Bae’s family business. When Dae Hyun Bae and Min Soo Bae moved to New York City, Dae Hyun Bae’s cousin helped them with a loan and advised them to open a Black hair-care store, as other members of their South Korean immigrant community had done. This local opportunity had a larger commercial history: the popularity of wigs made with South Korean hair in the African American community grew in the 1960s, while South Korea barred exports of raw hair and the United States barred imports of wigs containing Chinese hair. Together, those policies helped secure South Korea’s position in the wig market, which expanded into the wider Black hair-care trade. South Korean businesses later controlled an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the market across distribution, retail, and increasingly manufacturing; distributor networks serving South Korean retailers made it difficult for other groups to gain a foothold.

Choice, Family, and Professionalism

The debate over natural and straightened hair persists from the postslavery period into the novel’s present. Wearing natural hair can be read as rejecting the idea that straight hair is the standard of beauty, or as making a political claim; straightening can likewise be interpreted as a response to those standards. The novel resists reducing either choice to a single meaning. Hair can be personal and political at once, while the wearer’s reasons remain her own.

Natasha wears her hair in an Afro without knowing the history behind the choice. Patricia Kingsley objects that an Afro can make her daughter look militant and unprofessional, reflecting fear that society may punish her for appearing too openly Black. Patricia’s response is also intimate: she has relaxed Natasha’s hair since Natasha was ten, and the new style feels to her like a rejection of a practice they shared. Natasha has been growing out her natural hair for three years. She likes both the Afro and the straightened hair she wore before, and leaves open the possibility of straightening it again. Her choice is to try something new, not to make a statement on behalf of anyone else.

The History in Everyday Encounters

The historical argument takes visible form outside Black Hair Care, a store Natasha has visited with her mother to buy relaxer. Its windows are covered with sun-faded posters of Black women with chemically treated hairstyles, images that make the accepted standard seem narrow and uniform. Natasha notices the contrast between those images and her own pleasure in having choices, even as she recognizes that Patricia has also absorbed expectations about professional appearance.

The store’s ownership and its place in the surrounding industry complicate Natasha’s first meeting with Daniel’s family. Daniel is nervous before she meets his father and brother; Natasha wonders whether he is ashamed of his family’s business, or whether he fears that his parents will be ashamed of her. Their encounter brings personal affection into contact with the racial and commercial history embodied by the store. Elsewhere, on Natasha’s Brooklyn neighborhood streets, she and Daniel attract curious looks as a Black young woman and a Korean young man together. Natasha wonders whether their relationship could withstand that attention. Daniel treats the stares as peripheral and refuses to let other people’s opinions determine what their relationship means. Set beside the history of hair and its public judgments, their exchange shows how inherited racial expectations remain present in ordinary life, while individuals still claim the right to choose how they live and whom they love.