One Night by Eric Jerome Dickey

question?”
    â€œMay I touch your dreadlocks?”
    That made me pause and tilt my head. “Why would you want to touch my hair?”
    â€œI’ve never touched dreadlocks before, never experienced the texture.”
    â€œEver gone out with a black woman who has natural hair?”
    â€œNever.”
    â€œWow. But why am I not surprised? Seems like white, Indian, Spanish, and Asian men are more accepting of a black woman with natural hair than most black men are. Dude, you disappoint me.”
    â€œMay I touch your dreadlocks?”
    â€œSure you want to do that? Last guy who touched my hair died of sepsis.”
    â€œI have insurance. I’ll rush to Kaiser and let them fill me with antibiotics.”
    â€œYou have insurance? Must be nice. I break a leg, it’s bankruptcy for me.”
    â€œBreak your leg, buy some duct tape, and you can use my staple gun.”
    â€œWhatever. Letting someone touch my hair, that’s a big thing—monumental, dude—because letting someone put their unwanted energy in my hair, that could change my energy for life, could change me.”
    â€œOkay. Was just asking. No problem.”
    â€œNow I have a question.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œWhen you see a black man or black woman with dreads, what is your first thought?”
    â€œThey are Rastafarian. And the hair is nasty, ugly, unkempt, dirty, and probably has lice.”
    â€œYou’re living up to the black-hating stereotypes in Orange County.”
    â€œA lot of people think that way.”
    â€œMy hair is not nasty, not ugly, not unkempt, not dirty. My hair is clean.”
    â€œYour hair is amazing. It’s beautiful. Smells very nice. Your dreads are like very fine braids.”
    â€œThese are sister locks, but I still call them dreads. I have no hang-ups about the nomenclature used in the science of hair.
Dread
might sound negative to some, but I really don’t give two poots and a biscuit what anyone thinks. Nasty? Never. I put a lot of work into maintaining my hair. My hair smells very nice. My body always smells nice. I’m not a nasty woman. I dab when I’m done.”
    â€œDab?”
    â€œAfter I pee-pee. I don’t use the bathroom and just get up and walk away. I use wipes and dab. And you want to know what nasty hair is? Weaves. You have some women who will leave weave in their hair for six months, and when they go to remove the mess, they have mold growing in their real hair.”
    â€œWait. Women will pee and walk away without . . . dabbing?”
    â€œThere are some nasty bitches out there. If they don’t dab the front end, they probably don’t wipe the back end. That’s women of all colors and races. Guess what? I’m not one. I smell nice at all times.”
    â€œDidn’t mean to offend you. I will take that lecture as a long way of saying no.”
    â€œNo, I wasn’t saying no. You can touch my locks, but I wanted you to know that it is a big deal for me. I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of woman who lets any man, some stranger, touch her locks.”
    â€œYou sure?”
    I nodded again. He came closer, entered that invisible three feet of personal space, and ran his fingers through my locks, then across my hair. I thought that he would just take one and feel its power and texture, but he touched my roots as if he were trying to read my history, touched my roots and massaged my hair, massaged my scalp. It felt good. I licked my lips. He ran his fingers across hair that held the strength of a thousand ropes, of a thousand ancestors who won a thousand battles before they lost a war on the shores of Africa, a war that sent many into the Middle Passage, a lost moment that had sent a culture into an unrecoverable depression, and he smiled like he understood, this man who lived behind the Orange Curtain, away from the poverty of people who looked like him, away from the culture of men who