Hair (A response to Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street)
by Eric Arndt

My parents both have shiny black hair. My dad’s hair is thin and there are flecks of grey in his beard. My mom’s hair is short and wavy, not like the old pictures in black and white, when it was long and perfectly straight, like it was posing for the picture too. My brother and sister both have red hair. They get it from aunts and uncles and gramma and grampa and other folks from way, way back.

Not orange hair, as my older sister will tell you. Her hair is red, not orange like our cat, red, like peppers. Red, the color of so bossy. That is why it doesn’t make sense to me that I have boring brown hair, the color of the bare undersides of fir branches when you look up from your hiding place, the way dirt looks like when nothing is growing on it. My sister used to tell me I was probably adopted, but I thought she was, because red was more different from black than my brown. I was the brownhairedmiddlekid who didn’t talk much, didn’t fit.

As I got older, I only got weirder. Sweaty palms and loneliness were my middle school memories. But I had a secret then. I knew where I came from, even if nobody else knew. But I couldn’t really tell them. The curly hair that started growing –shhh- (down there) was red! Not orange, but red like loud. Red like home.

Eric Arndt graduated from Fairhaven College in Spring 2005. He will be entering graduate school in the fall to study teaching. He plans to become a liberatory educator.