There are only TWO types of afros.

An alternate title for this post could very well have been “How to Get Away With Murdering . . . an Afro.”

As one who has stood at the elbow of Blue Magicians and Masters of taming the Almighty Afro, this proclamation must finally be made.  There are only TWO types of Afros that are hallowed.  A magician or a master will tolerate a “Jimi Hendrix” bed-hair-messy afro or a neat biscuit, shaped to perfection, that’s fit for a Prince.  Either the afro falls at the one end of the afro continuum or the other.

There is no in between.

Would someone please inform The Artist Forever Known As Prince that while the afro is a many-splintered thing and while it is symbolic of everything and nothing at all, what it is not is confused.  No one relishes a bad bush.

Prince and his band, 3rdEyeGirl, promote "Art Official Age" and "PlectrumElectrum" on Saturday Night Live.

The “Jimi Hendrix” is easy.  Wash hair with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, air dry, sleep, wake up, pick it and go.

The “Linda Henry,” those afros which are cultured and shaped like pearls, as the Japanese will tell you, is a whole ‘nother beast.  If the tresses are bone-straight like the Japanese, it requires a hurricane-fast technique to twist it into shape.  If the locks are Black & Virgin, the process is only a hair easier.

The “Linda Henry” requires Midnight Blue hair dye.  It cannot be off-black like an everyday pair of pantyhose worn to work.  It requires half a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil—the sweet kiss of life—so that it glistens in the Alabama sun.  It cannot be “gry” like athletes’ feet; it cannot be “gry” like the “Jimi Hendrix.”  Why?!  Because you’re not a rock star!  And you cain’t get away with murdering an afro and prancing around in public like that!  Dammit, that’s why!

Once the hair is blue-black, massaged to plushness with oil (baby, olive, coconut, or Blue Magic), face the mirror and afro pick the hair into form until the desired volume, like cotton candy, is achieved.

For the finishing touches, Linda Henry had a sneaky secret weapon!  The Perfect Afro requires a thin silk-like scarf or at the very least a hair net.  Drop the scarf over the afro like a magician’s cape, tuck it around the ears, and use the scarf to pat and shape the afro into a perfect sphere, a blue moon, or a bless-sed halo of nappy black loveliness.

Then comes the big reveal.

The Sylvers gave The Jacskon Five a run for the money...but only in the Afro Dept.

Just before the lifting of the scarf, I remember Cousin Linda smiling in the mirror and rolling her eyes—black as berries—toward me as I sat quiet as dust and entranced from the side of her bed.  While my cousins’ afros were as big and wavy as The Sylvers’ (the seventies R&B band) and some of them were as thick and woolly as sheep needing a shearer, no matter the texture or diameter, nobody turned the wearing of an afro into an art form to the stratospheric degree that Cousin Linda did.

One only had to see Linda work her Blue Magic to learn it.  Just don’t forget the best part.  Don’t forget to grin a lukewarm but knowing grin and roll your eyes, teasing like Prince, (as if in the mirror) at all admirers, big or small, of your black corona.

Prince is no stranger to the “Linda Henry.”  So what’s up with this thin and airy cobweb of an afro?  With three eyes, is he still blind?  Has he gone soft and lavender? 

Or is he stubbornly styling his aging purple self now?  This Saturday Night Live ‘fro is inches better than “the do” he (masquerading as Helen Keller) flaunted on The View.  However, this Saturday Night Live ‘fro is growing up before us as tender as a blade of grass, as roots out of gry ground without any true form or comeliness, so that when we see it, there is no real beauty that we should desire it.  (Sorry to go all Isaiah 53 on y’all, but the afflictions of the Afro are many, and may God deliver us from them all: the big blonde ones, the rainbow-colored ones, the ashy beeswaxed ones, and all those allowed to knot and mat like zombie wigs.)

Mutant afro or not, he sure is pretty!

For the crime of institutionalized racism; for the slaughter of the sons of Ham; for having to endure skirmish after blood-letting skirmish delivered at the hands of Israelis and Palestinians over a teeny strip of dirt, all our purple and bruised life we have learned to forgive over and over again.

For admitting (shh, in public) that he’s a Jehovah’s Witness; for showing up on Saturday Night Live to promote Art Official Age and PlectrumElectrum in common pedestrian shoes (without heels because stilettos on a man, he’s learned, are as dangerous to man feet as woman feet); for all these purple flaws, while perplexing, we can forgive.

What we dread and cannot forgive from a Purple Prince or pauper is the blatant and unabrushed abuse of the heavenly Royal Crown known as the afro.

Does it put a kink in your “do” that Prince won’t choose either the “Jimi Hendrix” or the “Linda Henry”?