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I was born into this world with a full head of thick, curly black hair. Unfortunately, it covered my face as well.  Much to my mother’s relief, I didn’t have to go through life as a circus attraction as most of that face fluff fell off in the few days after I came home. My luscious afro grew into a puff that grew into long jet black braids punctuated by multicolored barrettes and ribbons. “Oh, what beautiful hair,” the aunties, ladies, friends, neighbors and strangers would coo. While I couldn’t claim to have the silky straight tresses of the girls with “good hair”—the kind you could toss over your shoulder like the ladies in Vidal Sassoon commercials—at least I had long hair, which meant that I’d never have to spend my Saturdays in wig shops or getting expensive extensions like all those neighbors and strangers. Instead, I’d spend 20 years in the grips of terrible addiction.  Yes, at six years old I fell victim to the creamy crack.

While the brown, beige and coffee-colored girls with “good hair” could wash-and-go, I would spend years shunning the community pool and even the rain in an effort to avoid water at all costs. Like some small, brown Wicked Witch of the West, I’d keep an arsenal of shower caps, umbrellas and other prophylactics in reach. Because if you’re not born with “good hair” you can either buy it or you can make it.

Before my addiction, the glorious beast that was my hair was tamed by a legion of tools that would make a handyman cry. There were brushes to detangle and brushes to smooth, and there were combs in every shape and size. There were flat irons and curling irons and even a crimping iron for a short  and unfortunate period in the early ’90s, as well as a number of creams, gels, potions and other magical tonics meant to hold hair in place or make the hair blow in the wind. But of all these elixirs, only one is so powerful as to make the others next to useless in isolation. Only one could turn my wicked and wild mane of kinky, curly coils into a future object of envy and rage, and its name is Sodium Hydroxide, better known as crème relaxer.

Crème relaxer, the undisputed king of the hair kingdom, could turn even the most tangled mass of kinky coils into the kind of silky straight tresses that I envied. “Bad hair” is almost instantly transformed into “good hair,” but in true fairytale fashion the effects are temporary, because like any wish granted from the gods that alters the natural order of things, there are caveats. In order to conceal my true nature and walk among “normal” girls, the gods required a sacrifice.  I’d have to give up endless Saturdays and spend hours checking and rechecking to make sure that my hair was all lying down as it should, lest my cover be blown.

Every four to six weeks for 20 years the creamy mash-up of mineral oil and lye was spread onto my scalp to break the spirit of my wild hair and make it beautiful in an oh-so-conventional way. Before the lye could eat into my skull, my dealer/fairy godmother would wash the noxious chemical down the drain, though not before it left a few chemical burns to help me remember who was boss.

I hated the beauty salon, but what I didn’t hate were the comments, the raw jealousy that spewed forth from lesser girls whose hair never transformed like mine. My hair was as black as a starless sky and shone like obsidian; it blew in the wind and hung heavy past my shoulders.  Under the rule of the relaxer, the untamed beast was a prized show animal, putting the other jungle cats to shame.  I reveled in it, and then a funny thing happened. It got old.

I got tired of the sacrifice. The initial two weeks after the relaxer were a sweet romance where I loved my hair and it loved me back. It behaved, and I adored it for its submission, but as the third week rolled around, I’d spend half my morning with flat iron in hand trying to bring back that lovin’ feelin’ I’d had just weeks before. By the fourth week, I’d pull it all back into a ponytail of defeat and hang my head in shame until my next hit of the creamy crack.

I began to hate my hair and its hold on my sense of self, but I was addicted.  I didn’t know how to stop, and I didn’t know many who did. My mother had given up the drug in favor of dreadlocks, but could I be as brave as she? Would people think I was radical? Would I be able to get a job? I asked all of these questions and decided to play it safe—safe in the arms of my addiction—until I got a wake-up call.

God sent me an angel to free me from the tyranny of chemical burns and sweaty hours in a salon chair. God sent me Don Imus. As the crotchety cowboy commented on the impressive championship win of Rutger’s women’s basketball team, he ignited a firestorm by anointing the women “nappy-headed hos.”  Meant to be an insult, I had to wonder, why the word “nappy” had taken on such a derogatory meaning. What’s wrong with a nappy head? I realized that I had helped turn the word into an insult, a degrading term, something “other” than pretty, beautiful, normal. From that day on, I vowed never to give someone else power over my own sense of beauty. I let the beast free and quit the creamy crack cold turkey.

In the beginning, everything was new. I had to learn what my “real” hair liked, what kinds of shampoo worked and what oils I needed to use. My wild curls laughed at my feeble attempts to contain them, and my coils broke the teeth out of several combs. I giggled as I watched in amazement as my true hair texture revealed itself to me. At last, the emotional rollercoaster stopped at a high.

Fortunately my hair can no longer be contained; its beauty is not conventional or proper. It is untamed, a thick curly, coily, kinky and yes, sometimes “nappy” black tower of loveliness that is everything but normal, but it is unapologetically and authentically me. In a true reckoning at the end of the fairy tale, I changed my “bad hair” into “good” and all I really had to do was  change my mind.

Shanna Miles lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband of three years. She is working towards a degree in School Library Media and is just beginning to work on her first great American novel.