Black Tax: The Back-to-Back-to-Back Breaking of Black Hair, Black Bank Accounts, and Black Beauty Salon Culture by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
What may stand out first to the reader while exploring Exodus Oktavia Brownlow’s personal essay, “Black Tax: The Back-to-Back-to-Back Breaking of Black Hair, Black Bank Accounts, and Black Beauty Salon Culture” is how it demands to be read out loud. This cultural identity essay is filled with strong alliterative sounds, rhythmic repetition, and poetic turns of phrase. Brownlow also asks reflective questions which, while targeted, acknowledge that the physical realities of identity are complex, especially for Black women. She asks, “Will I have to cross an entire ocean just for someone to try with me? Succeed with me?” Here Brownlow is ostensibly talking about the interaction between a hairdresser and their Black clients, but points to a much more profound truth about the cost of beauty, and the Black tax for achieving happiness.
Brownlow weaves cultural truths into her discussion of how Black women (and their hair) are treated. She writes about “recipes lost for substitutions that don’t taste near ’bout the same.” The metaphor itself (that the march of time has diluted her heritage) is relevant in any number of ethnic and cultural traditions. But Brownlow crashes that line against the utterly particular, “Three hundred dollars for a quick weave, five hundred dollars for medium-length braids, extra if your hair is thick, extra if your hair is long, extra-extra if your hair is thick and long and tightly twisted in the way it curls.” Black women pay the price (literally) for the respectful treatment of their hair. Brownlow may be putting the onus on Black women with the songlike repetition of “And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?” but her prose dances around the shared responsibility for the predicament she finds herself in.
In the craft essay, “Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition,” Bernice M. Olivas writes, “At some point in their academic career most students will be asked to think about the conditions of failure and systems of oppression that function in our society. They will be asked to think and write about conditions they have no control over, conditions to which they have been subjected.” Brownlow takes this idea and spins it; the exquisite care she takes in treating her hair as an extension of herself turns these systems of oppression into places to discover joy and struggle, simultaneously: “No breaking of my hair, and just a little breaking of my bank account because good hair products still high.” Exodus Oktavia Brownlow cannot remove herself from the conditions that Black women face, but she can name them, celebrate them, and invite the reader to witness them. —CRAFT
Spring 2025
When did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
Is what I think alongside sitting underneath a hooded hair dryer for thirty minutes, the plastic cap bubbling a brewing smell of onion juice, garlic, and cayenne pepper, prepoo mud brown and sweet-scented.
African and Ayurvedic remedies I’ve adopted because if anyone knows anything about beauty, it’s the loves of Africa and South Asia. Beauty that conducts with them. Regimens that remind me of music, melodic fingers playing notes on the strands scale that rhythmize by using earth, using kitchen, using home.
By harmonizing with my own hair, I have learned that beauty can be easy. Beauty can be a religion to believe in. A practice of products set out the night before at the bathroom’s altar, palm-hair-palm in a prayer. Vulnerable, and darling, and so very mindful of this thing called a body being a temple.
Months prior to, my used-to-be hairstylist says she’s going to start charging me an extra twenty dollars for every ten minutes it takes to detangle my hair.
What is a religion but a decisive dedication to what is worthy of our love?
I take to taking my religion back home, to be with me.
And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
Expectations of hair to be silk-pressed just to install cornrows, when cornrows were made for the coiliest of textures to properly grip so the braids do not slip out?
We have forgotten how to pray, religion uprooted and recipes lost for substitutions that don’t taste near ’bout the same.
And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
Three hundred dollars for a quick weave, five hundred dollars for medium-length braids, extra if your hair is thick, extra if your hair is long, extra-extra if your hair is thick and long and tightly twisted in the way it curls.
Too many hairstylists not enough hairdressers.
And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
There’s a YouTube video of a Black American woman in China, at a Chinese hair spa, and for the Chinese hairdresser her texture of hair is all and everything alien, but my goodness is she gentle, and she tries. Tries and succeeds at carefully parting the hair, squeezes lines of shampoo as she softly exfoliates with her lily-pad fingertips. Tries and succeeds at adding moisture back in with conditioner, a hair steam, a waterfall to rinse. If Jesus could get his hair done in today’s time, this would be the standard. About as close to a Mary Magdalene moment as any of us could get.
Tries and succeeds even though she doesn’t have a clue how—to style Afro hair. The blow-dry she does is decisive, not rushed or forced. I assume there’s a heat protectant applied prior to. No rough combs, brushes, or picks, as she mainly uses her hands to shape the Afro, a Madonna’s halo adorned into place.
Hair looks soft. Good.
Most importantly, Black American woman looks happy.
And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
Will I have to cross an entire ocean just for someone to try with me? Succeed with me? That shame of excitability at the spark of See, see, they (non-Black folks) like us, they really, really like us! I wanna give my dollars, time, care to a Black hairdresser. Support a Black goddamn business. But where can I go where I won’t be charged more for being myself? Taxing my Black, breaking my strands with the tiniest teeth comb, breaking my bank account for styles that been for us. There must be gold in the hair oil, now. Diamonds in the sheen spray. There must be a reasoning for these precious-jewel prices.
I wanna go home. Home-home. I hear it’s different there. When the Chadian women wear plaits to preserve their lengths no one calls it childish. Home-home, where we take the time with the gift of time to do our own hair, not with an ughhh, but with an ahhh. Not with a defeat that seeks to get it done any kind of way, some kind of way, by somebody else who’s too heavy-handed, gritting our teeth against the cht-sht ripping of our roots.
And when did—
Even the brothers claim it’s $$$ for a fade.
Every Black body getting broken in places that’s supposed to have our backs.
Beauty shop culture cut back for a quick in-and-out the chair for another head to finish, for deposits placed down before appointments can be confirmed, for no walk-ins welcome, for don’t-be-lates.
The hell going on with us? I wonder, the soft ticking of the hooded dryer tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me that this is the way of Black life in America, sometimes, in someplaces.
So many theories, so many of them all right.
Too much of a headache to break down further, too much of an unneeded to study further when the understanding is part of my breath and bones.
And when did Black women get so impatient with our own selves?
I am home. Here, home. And I make it as much of a home-home as can be. Steps a simple seven of—prepoo, shampoo, protein-balance deep treatment, Ayurvedic deep conditioner, moisturize and seal. Sometimes henna. Once or twice a year, a hair trim. If I can catch the trim when the moon is no longer slim, uncut from crescent and baked back full, I do because if anyone knows anything about beauty, it’s the loves of Indigenous America.
I like black castor oil.
I like OLAPLEX.
I like Camille Rose Naturals.
I like rosewater.
I like Cécred.
I like Mountain Rose Herbs.
I love a good ole fashioned grease.
No breaking of my hair, and just a little breaking of my bank account because good hair products still high.
And when—
Ding!
Thirty-minute timer chings.
The browned-brew of the hair’s prepoo, the scalp treatment’s onion, garlic, and cayenne sizzle, done.
Onions are rich in sulfur.
Garlic, high in vitamins C and B-6, minerals of manganese and selenium.
Cayenne pepper contains a gracious amount of capsaicin.
All three put together make for a wonderful environment for scalp health, rich growth, and hair thickness.
The prepoo is of my Ma’s own making, which contains a behemoth of every butter and oil in the Bible, every herb in a holistic healer’s handbook. A miraculous concoction that conditions before I even properly condition. I wish I knew the recipe to a tee.
When I shampoo both out, my hair feels so good, and this Black woman feels so happy.
Scented lingerings of the onion treatment are no longer evident in my scalp or strands but soaked still inside the plastic hair cap.
Makes me wanna fajita like a mug.
EXODUS OKTAVIA BROWNLOW is a writer, sewist, author, and editor native to Blackhawk, Mississippi. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in creative writing. She is an associate editor at Fractured Lit and is the editor in chief of The Loveliest Review. Exodus has been published or has forthcoming work with Electric Literature, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, F(r)iction, BOOTH, CRAFT, and more. She has work featured in Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022. Her piece “The Terrible Darling” was featured as a Wigleaf Top 50 2022 selection. Exodus’s essay “When the World Was Ending We Wore the Cornrows. We Twisted Our Coils, and We Waited.” was selected for Best American Essays 2024 as notable. Find her on Instagram @CooCoo4AfroPuffs. Her favorite color is green.
Featured image by J Morgan, courtesy of Unsplash.
