Rion Scott - Insurrections

Sonny died during his son’s golden period. This is the time people talk about when they speak of The Barber’s genius. The son’s response to his loss was to chase greatness in each cut so that his dead father could look on in pride. He’d stare at a head for several minutes before starting. Then he’d pace back and forth like a lion sizing up his prey. Soon he’d be moving his clippers over the contours of a head like God moving across the formless void to make a world. Around that time he brought in a guy to sharpen his clippers after every fifth cut. Those things hurt, but that was the price of a perfect haircut and I got a few of those before his decline. In the height of his artistry The Barber renamed his shop Sonny’s II.

Young apprentices swept the floor for free. Several, it was said, even saved some of the fallen hair to study. His fellow barbers, those who rented neighboring chairs from him and competed for his meager overflow, would watch and discuss The Barber’s technique when they weren’t cutting.

All those barbers eventually deserted him for other shops, or the most disillusioned left haircutting for good. The chairs next to him now sat empty.

While he shaped up my hairline that day, The Barber stopped to take a phone call and started back on a different side. I wondered if he’d lost his place.

Maybe it was our silence or the clipper’s buzzing or the television’s droning, but I spoke: Man, people are saying you lost your touch.

As soon as I said it, I heard the click of the clippers switching off. The television still droned, but The Barber said nothing. I remained frozen.

After a moment he switched the clippers back on and started cutting, and then he stopped again, spun the chair next to me, and with a sigh collapsed into the seat.

My man, he said, I’m tired as shit. If you wasn’t a regular customer, I would have told you we was closed when you came in that door.

Sorry, man.

No need to apologize. I ain’t just talking about today. I’m talking in general. I’m tired, jackson, tired as shit. I know what people be saying about me. You ain’t the first dude that said it straight up. I am slipping. It happens to every barber. You start slipping, slipping, and then one day new kids come and take your place. I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me, but I was fooling myself.

But you’re so young. Your skills shouldn’t be fading yet.

I don’t feel young. I had like four, five, six careers, as many heads as I’ve cut. Made me a nice living. I was just too good. I ain’t saying that to be arrogant. I should have raised my prices to protect my talent like folks told me to do. Them people kept coming like zombies or some shit. My man Phoenix Starr offered me nearly a hundred G’s a year to go on tour and be the official barber for him and his crew. I turned that man down. I had to be amongst the people. I won the Golden Clippers award so many times they said I couldn’t compete no more. I didn’t care. All I wanted was a little shop of my own on the Southside.

You know, he continued, my dad had me practicing on my brother when I was just a little guy. I was cutting all the kids in my neighborhood after a while. For years I used to cut them neighborhood dudes for free, even after I got my own shop. Carlton, that cop that got murdered, he was the first dude besides my brother that let me cut his head. First to notice I was slipping too. He ain’t say nothing. Just got himself a perm. All them dudes I used to cut found new barbers. Even my brother.

He chuckled bitterly and let his head drop.

I know better than anybody that I’m slipping. Shit. Ain’t even as close to my customers as I used to be. People used to tell me they was having babies before they even told their parents. My cuts was the reason they even got to lay down with a woman in the first place.

What happened to you, man?

I’d been slipping for a while. I was so far ahead of everybody else that not too many people noticed. All the dudes I started out cutting, they knew, but I could hide it real well because all the barbers around here some trash. But the dude who used to sharpen my blades, he could tell, and he confronted me and I brushed him off like he was some stray hairs, man. He got mad and left me to go work with someone else. Still, it was going good enough until Carl got killed. Everything went crazy after that. Man, I had this notion — and my wife says it’s bullshit — that I could have gotten on track if I just got a chance to cut Carlton’s hair one last time.

Got this L’Ouverture fool, he continued, all over the television screen all day every day. Dude selling more records than he deserve off this shit. Ruin people’s lives and then want to gloat about it. Talking all that political shit. It ain’t politics, it’s garbage. You know, Carl had a wife and two little boys. The oldest one’s my godson. Young little handsome boy with yellow skin and a big nose. Got thick hair. Thick, thick hair. I used to cut it. His brother’s hair too, and then Carlton stopped bringing them to the shop. Shit.

He sighed again. It was a deep sigh, and when he was done with it I felt he had emptied everything that was stagnant inside him. There was a certain point a barber went past that there was no returning from. Things were worse than I thought.

Let me finish your shape-up, he said, struggling from his seat. He flipped on the clippers and went back at it slowly and methodically.

When he finished, he handed me a mirror and I looked at my mangled hairline. He had pushed it back several inches and, of course, it was lopsided and jagged at points.

He carefully swept the stray hairs from the cape and sprinkled baby powder on the back of my neck. I offered him a twenty, but he waved away payment. I thanked him, put on my jacket, and walked from his shop. It was raining a bit when I stepped out onto the street. Several police cruisers zipped by, their sirens blazing. I heard the door lock behind me, and I looked back to see him through the window sweeping the floor. He held the broom close to him as if dancing with a woman.

L’Ouverture became like a ghost haunting my every waking thought. I took a nap upon coming home from the barbershop, and he even entered my dreams. In my nightmare he was a barber mangling my head.

I saw his angry frown, and then I saw his perfectly trimmed scalp and the perfect crisp straight line that sat perfectly above his forehead, ending on both sides in perfect right angles at his temples. His tight curls rolled into waves that bobbed up and down on the top of his head.

I wanted to stab his barber. Not just for me, but for a whole generation who were going through it. People I knew went from being beautifully trimmed to unkempt nearly overnight. Cross River hadn’t seen so many Afros since 1972. A friend of mine described it as a crisis one day as he scratched at his bush. Flakes of dandruff fell onto his navy blue shirt like a light dusting of snow. My brother bought a pair of clippers and began cutting his own hair. It was a patchy affair, and his hairline was all out of whack, cutting diagonally across the front of his head. I had never seen him like this. If vanity were a religion, he’d be a fundamentalist. Each week my brother used to visit the barbershop. An aura of freshness always surrounded his head. My brother now appeared scarred.

At a family gathering, my little sister looked up at my brother’s massacred curls and then at the ruins of my Afro and said, Y’all look like some fools.

She was right. We were loyalists, though. How could we see another barber? Such an act would feel like cheating on a sick lover. I wanted to hold L’Ouverture down and shave bald patches into his head. I wanted him to feel what we all felt. I wanted him to hear his wife howl, same as I heard mine when she came in the night of my shape-up and saw my jagged hairline.