Curls, Coils and Kinks: A Black hair coloring book by Imani Rose

Crayola Colors of the World crayons, 24ct

A rainy Tuesday evening.

The first woman I color has hair that looks like mine today — center-parted and pulled back into a low puff. When I returned to coloring books a decade ago, I released myself from making realistic color choices. I colored the sun blue, grass red, trees purple. I colored the hairs of princesses all shades of the rainbow, which actually felt less revolutionary than the unrealistic sun, grass, and trees since my own hair had been dyed every color imaginable between the ages of 22 and 34.

But this woman needs to be realistic. Needs to represent what I hadn’t let myself daydream of becoming when I was a child: the woman I turned out to be. A crayon called medium almond for the skin. At the height of the summer, this is the color I turn into and I think it’s how I look the best.

I use various shades of brown from the regular 96ct crayon box to give her strands dimension because our hair color can be multi-dimensional, even if the tight curls sometimes obscure that. I stopped coloring my hair when I was 34 because I wanted to see how much gray hair I was getting (so far three strands). Almost every time I’ve flat ironed my hair since then, someone has asked me, “did you just get highlights?” No. I have natural highlights. It’s possible for us, I promise.

When I was young and getting my hair chemically straightened, my natural golden highlights were something my grandma always made sure to comment on. “Your hair is such a pretty golden brown,” she’d say. I went through a modeling phase around age 10, and even my comp card has my hair color listed as “golden brown.” Brown, just regular-ass brown, wasn’t special enough.

For an instant, I feel annoyed at remembering my grandmother’s insistence to emphasize the lightness of my hair. It became one of the ways I convinced myself (and tried to convince my peers) that I was more like the white girls in my class than the Black girls. For an instant, I resent her for convincing me that I was special for having golden highlights. I remind myself that my tendency towards colorism, towards privileging lighter skin, hair, and eyes in my youth was not her fault alone. I give her grace and consider that maybe pointing out my highlights was her own source of empowerment as a fellow light-skinned girl who was born in 1943 segregated south Louisiana. She passed the paper bag tests, the

I think of all of this as I scribble the goldenrod crayon onto the woman’s bamboo hoop earrings. Then I give her rosy cheeks, because brown girls can blush, too.

I didn’t finish. I got too excited to explore who would be next.