I'm watching Chris Rock's movie Good Hair. My sister and I were talking about it today. I joke about my hair drama with hair stylist breakup. I still have that Nordstrom gift card burning a hole in my wallet. My appointment every 3 weeks to cover my gray is is nothing like what a black woman goes through to take care of her hair. That's a whole other blog--which by the way, there are several blogs on black hair. My favorite "Celebrates the Dopeness of Black Hair."
All kidding aside, this reminded me of a story from my nursing days. I worked in the intensive care unit of a children's hospital. A 3 year girl was admitted through the emergency room. She had been badly beaten and was unconscious. She was put on a ventilator and neurosurgery was called in do a craniotomy (drill a hole in the skull) and to put in a drain and a way to measure the intracranial pressures. A neighbor had brought the little girl in. Her mother was a dancer. She had given the neighbor $1,000 to watch her little girl while she went down to Ft. Lauderdale to dance. I took care of the little girl the first night. The search was on to find the Mom. She was located early the next morning and rushed to the hospital from Ft. Lauderdale. The day nurses told me how the Mom screamed when she walked into the room. She said, "Who put a weave in my baby's hair?" Social Services had found out that the neighbor beat the little girl so she would sit still for several hours while she put a weave in her hair. Pictures of the weave were taken for documentation. The day shift nurses calmed the Mother down and gave her a pair of scissors. When I walked in that night, she had cut all of the weave out. She kept saying to me over and over, "my baby would never sit still for a weave." She also kept telling me she paid her neighbor $1,000. She felt like that amount of money meant her daughter would be cared for and kept safe. It was awful. Meanwhile, the little girl's intracranial pressures kept rising. I worked 12 hour shifts from 7pm to 7 am. The Mom got a bible and started reading it out loud. At about 3 a.m., she got to the word "Zion" and asked me how to say it and what it meant. I said, "Zion" and told her it was a sacred place. I was raised in a house where my Dad was baptized in a creek while wearing a suit when he was 12. He said at that moment he thought, "when I have kids they will never have to go to church." It was a battle between him and my Mom. My Father won. Zion was a place I could't describe to the Mom. I went and got the chaplain (they had one available 24 hours a day--Thank God). He came in and prayed with her. He explained Zion (to both of us). She spent the rest of the night lying in bed with her daughter while reading the bible. We helped her avoid all the tubes and wires. The Mom wouldn't eat and she wouldn't sleep.
A friend came in the next night and brought a boom box. The Mom said the little girl loved to sing and dance. She thought music would make her baby feel better. A song came on that the Mom said was the little girl's favorite. It was C'mom Ride This Train. I think of that little girl every time I hear it (thanks goodness it is an old song and I only hear it once a year or so). Here are some of the lyrics:
How sad that the song makes reference to a weave. The Mom said the little girl would run through the house and say "Choo Choo!"
I can smell them tranquil breezes from a mile away
Graduated from Boone up to Alize
Baby, you looking tough to death
Got your weave done right, it's on so tight
Now it's on tonight, yeah, yeah
Right about now it's about that time for me to holler
Girl, I wanna waller in the back of my Impala
Woo, don't need no tickets for this thing
Just jump on in, let me hit them switches on the train
And it ain't no thing, it's all the same
Get on the train tracks
Here we go, so get on the floor
And put a hump in your back
So pack your bags, come on, get ready, say what?
We're coming through your town
Move your arm up and down
And make that choo choo sound, like this
The next day the little girl died. Day shift told me the Mom's screams were blood curdling.
