Sunday Poetry: Elizabeth Alexander

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 hair cut at what used to be the Harlem "Y" barbershop. It gets me in 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 tender-headed?" From the chair I notice the mural behind me
in the mirror. I know those overlapped sepia shadows, a Renaissance rainforest, 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.
None of that seems to relate to today. This is not my turf, despite the other grandfather and great-aunt who
sewed hearts back into black chests after Saturday night stabbings on this exact corner, the great-uncle who
made a mosaic down the street, both grandmothers. What am I always listening for in Harlem? A voice
that says, "This is your place, too," as faintly as the shadows in the mural? The accents are unfamiliar; all
my New York kin are dead. I never knew Fats Waller but what do I do with knowing he used to play with a
ham and a bottle of gin atop his piano; never went to Olivia's House of Beauty but I know Olivia, who lives
in St. Thomas, now, and who exactly am I, anyway, finding myself in these ghostly, Douglas shadows while
real ghosts walk around me, talk about my stuff in the subway, yell at me not to butt the line, beg me, beg
me, for my money?
What is black culture? I read the writing on the wall on the side of the "Y" as I always have: "Harlem Plays
the Best Ball in the World." I look in the mirror and see my face in the mural with a new haircut. I am a
New York girl; I am a New York woman; I am a flygirl with a new hair cut in New York City in a mural
that is dying every day.

Elizabeth Alexander


(Note: Elizabeth Alexander will be reading a poem composed for the occasion at Barack Obama's inauguration.)