Our Hair: How I Found Community and Coconut Oil in France

Across the thousands of miles, and the hundreds of years of historical and cultural distance, Albertine and I had our hair in common.

Faded letters above the large windows told me my new hair salon had once been a cordonnerie, a shoe-repair shop. The mannequin head in the window stared at me from her perch between a basket of fruit and a bolt of batik fabric, her wig askew. Hairstyling was a footnote to the long list of this shop’s offerings. I hesitated as I stood outside the door on the uneven cobblestone street, telling myself I was pausing to enjoy the mild weather and bright sun.

But, really, I was scared. I wasn’t sure I was ready to have unfamiliar hands braiding my hair. I didn’t even have the vocabulary in French to explain what I wanted. But with my hair divided into four misshapen braids and wrapped in a scarf, I didn’t have a choice.

I’d arrived in France two months earlier and made my way from Paris to Chauny, the small town in northern France where my seven-month teaching fellowship began in October. I was one of approximately 1,500 Americans who applied and were chosen to be a part of TAPIF, the Teaching Assistant Program in France, right after college.

On the day I arrived, I am sure I looked more than a little disheveled. I was wearing the clothes I’d been wearing when I left the United States the day before, carrying a backpack and wheeling along an overstuffed suitcase. My eyes were swollen from a lack of sleep and crying over a passport mix-up at the airport. My hair was neat enough, but I knew in the back of my mind I’d have to figure out some way to deal with it eventually.

Though my mom used to get her hair relaxed, I’ve been natural my whole life. Somewhere during my elementary and middle school years, she let her hair transition to its natural curls. My mom grew tired of chemical burns, just as the natural hair care movement began to grow in the US. Soon, products for Black women and men with natural hair became commonplace on store shelves, and natural-hair-care tutorials were popular on YouTube.

For me, so much of my identity is tied up in my hair. It needed to be freshly braided for church on Sundays. It was scrutinized by relatives at family gatherings. I didn’t want straight hair like Naomi Campbell or Tyra Banks, but I wanted that length. For years, I had wished for long hair—grown it out, cringed at the haircuts needed to keep it healthy. Going to a new stylist, let alone in France, was a risk.

Though she wasn’t a hairdresser, my mom knew how to braid and part hair like one. She had experience with natural hair when she was a teen, and she cared for my hair as I grew up. But while natural hair was all I knew, that didn’t mean I knew how to style my own. My parts were hard to distinguish and never straight. My braids never quite met my scalp. My twists were lumpy and unruly.

In truth, I hadn’t tried to style my own hair since the summer before my freshman year of college. The inconsistent effort is immortalized in my smiley college ID photo, which I had to live with for the next four years. I’ve learned a lot about myself since then. How to manage my time and money. How to live away from home and negotiate life with messy roommates. But nothing could have truly prepared me to move to another country where I’d never been, with no friends or family and no one who cared about me.

Chauny is a rural commune in northern France’s Picardy region. It sits just seventy-five miles from Paris, an hour-and-a-half-long train ride away. Against recommendations to try and get a placement in the sunny South, I had selected the northern region as my first choice on my TAPIF application. It had the proximity to Paris, without the Paris prices. I knew little else about it.

As it turned out, Chauny had a population of merely ten thousand, the size of my college campus. Its hottest attractions were the three different bakeries on Rue de la République, Chauny’s main street. One was fancy, the other two humble. All served pastries and breads fresher and better than the best stuff I’d ever had in the US. Chauny had a friendly small-town feel. Each time I entered one of the small shops, I was greeted with a friendly “bonjour.” Each time I made a purchase and thanked the cashier, I was told “je vous en prie”—it’s you I should be thanking.

Chauny’s downtown is anchored by its hôtel de ville. This town hall was rebuilt in the 1920s after being destroyed during the First World War, in the traditional French château style: red bricks, white accents, bell tower and clock, emblazoned with the phrase liberté, égalité, fraternité. I lived just one street over from the hôtel de ville. In the mornings, I drank my coffee to the pleasant sounds of the bells chiming on the hour.

Life was pretty quiet in Chauny. I kept my eyes peeled for Black hair salons, or even just Black hair-care products. But every salon I passed was full of streaked brown and blonde heads, full of straight and wavy hair. I knew they wouldn’t have a clue what to do with mine. Sometimes, I imagined myself walking in with my hair unbraided, my Chaka Khan curls on full display, just to see the fear in the stylists’ eyes.

Honestly, it overwhelmed me too. I had packed no hair-care products with me, no comb, no hair oils or co-wash. I’d assumed I could pick them up somewhere in town, just as I’d packed no towels or sheets. They were a waste of space, I thought; I could buy them at any supermarché or pharmacie. But the natural-hair-care movement, it seemed, had not yet reached Chauny. The L’Oréal I saw on the shelves would only strip my hair of the moisture it needed; the fine-toothed combs were not meant to be dragged through thick curls. I worried what I would do when my braids were no longer neat.

Four days after I arrived, I visited Noyon, a commune just a train stop away. On the ten-minute train ride, I watched green fields roll by, dotted with the occasional crumbly gray building with slate or tiled roof. At Noyon, I got off the train, unsure of which direction to go. From the station, I crossed the street toward a hotel built like a Tudor cottage. Nearby, flapping in the wind, were the flags of France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many others—the Allied forces, celebrating the centenary of the First World War. I’d never thought of myself as especially patriotic, but in a country where little was familiar, the stars and stripes seemed as good a guide as any. I followed the flags.

I spent the rest of the day floating in and out of historic buildings, taking photos with my 35 mm camera, and having tea with the woman working at the local tourism office. I visited the town hall, a Gothic building with a fountain outside dating back to the eighteenth century. I visited Noyon’s own Notre Dame Cathedral and climbed to the top of the bell tower.

From there, it seemed I could see all of Noyon. The narrow streets and ivy-covered buildings looked quiet and picturesque. Everything was overwhelming during those first few weeks in France. It was difficult to navigate even the simplest tasks, from counting change to making phone calls. But as I looked out over the unfamiliar scene, I was reminded that this was what I came for, to see something new and to immerse myself entirely in another culture.

Hours later, I made my way toward the Noyon train station and stopped to sit in the park. A family passed by—a mother and two girls, with braids. Their hair was done, it looked natural, and it looked good. In Paris, I saw other Black women everywhere, but Picardy was a different matter. The little group paused as the mother stopped to dig in her purse and seemed to admonish the girls about something. For a few minutes, I debated whether or not to talk to them before I hurried over.

Sometimes, I imagined myself walking in with my hair unbraided, my Chaka Khan curls on full display, just to see the fear in the stylists’ eyes.

Nervous and self-conscious about walking up to a family of strangers to ask about their hair, I blurted out, in French, “Where hair you hair do?” She looked at me kindly, and mercifully did not ask me to repeat myself, but told me in hurried French: There’s a shop with a flag. Straight ahead on the right.

I thought, Right. Left. A droit. A gauche. She said right, didn’t she? Okay, look right.

But as I headed down the street she indicated—the street with the Allied pendants, in fact—I second-guessed myself. I kept looking on both sides of the narrow street. Then, a storefront on my right caught my eye. A large French flag was draped out in front, and there were mannequin heads in the windows wearing cheap wigs, along with shelves full of soft drinks, baskets, odds and ends. This must be it.

Inside, wire shelves and baskets overflowed with yams, plantains, peppers, spices, and fresh okra. There were beaded necklaces, hair extensions, and Dark and Lovely—the first Black hair-care products I’d seen in France. There were giant bags of rice, swatches of batik fabric in African prints, freezers with whole fish, and jars of pickled food I had never seen before.

I walked hesitantly up to the man at the checkout counter. I asked, “Est-ce que tu . . . um . . . vous faites de cheveux?” He called to a woman sitting in a corner at the front of the shop. She, in turn, called over another woman, who she introduced as Albertine.

Albertine had immigrated to France from the Ivory Coast. She had thin brows made for stern looks. I guessed she was in her forties. Her dark brown eyes were kind but sharp as she assessed me with curiosity. Together they asked me questions about where I was from and what I was doing in France. They told me it would cost sixty euros to do my hair.

No way.

“Ça va coûter plus de soixante euros,” I told her. “J’ai beaucoup des cheveux.” I have thick hair, was born with a full head of it. Maybe she couldn’t understand, only seeing it braided; my hair is a lion’s mane.

But no, Albertine answered with a very French kind of finality. Everyone pays sixty euros.

When I returned to my little room in Chauny, I photographed my hair and face in the mirror while it was still neat, so I could show Albertine how I liked it. I kept apprehensively reviewing the route to the shop in my head, with no address, no website, and no name that I had seen. I would need to find my way back to it on my own.

The next month, I began to look for hair-care products in earnest. It was my understanding that I should arrive at Albertine’s shop with my hair ready to be braided. That meant my hair should be washed and, ideally, oiled. My mom mailed me the co-wash all the way from home, but I still needed to find hair oil. Every time I went into a new shop, I kept my eyes peeled.

I knew coconut oil was used for cooking and hoped to find it on the shelves of the food aisle. By now, I had given up on finding any natural-hair-care products for Black women nearby. Then, the internet gave me an idea: to check in the nearest bio (how the French refer to anything organic) store, which led me out of little Chauny. I found coconut oil in a bio store in, again, Noyon. It was meant for healthy cooking, but I figured if it was high-quality enough to eat, I could surely use it in my hair. I bought a large tub and was ready to get to work a few days later.

It took hours to unbraid, untangle, comb through, and wash my hair, section by section. By the time I was done, I was so frustrated I thought I might end up cutting it all off before I left France. But I had an appointment with Albertine waiting for me, so I divided my hair into four uneven sections and four big twists. I went to Noyon the next day.

That’s how I ended up hesitantly standing outside of the shop. What if Albertine didn’t really know how to braid well? What if she couldn’t really handle hair that had never been touched by chemical relaxers?

“Oh la la, ma chérie,” Albetine told me when she saw my hair. What? I had shocked her into French stereotypes. She undid the four long twists, which I had wrapped up in a scarf for my trip to Noyon, and continued, “Vous avez des longs cheveux, comme une fille blanche.” You have long hair, like a white girl.

“Votre famille est de quelle origine?” she asked. “Est-ce que votre famille est d’origine nigériane? Ils ont les cheveux épais.”

I told her I didn’t know. For the same reason that the knowledge of how to do our own hair was lost, I did not know whether my family had Nigerian origins or not. But Albertine nodded and said simply, “Je suppose la majorité des Américaines ne connaissent pas.”

Hour after hour, Albertine worked. Four or five hours in total, which was normal for me when I got small braids like these. I worked to be a good client, turning my head this way or that, as she directed.

It became a monthly routine. It wasn’t exactly what I was used to; my hair was much shorter when she braided it because I usually had it blow-dried beforehand—not enough to lose its texture, just enough to make it easier to part and comb through. She created sharp, angular geometric parts whereas I was used to straight, simple rows. She secured each section with a small black band before braiding it, whereas I was used to my braids starting straight from the scalp. Regardless, I was grateful.

“Je suppose la majorité des Américaines ne connaissent pas.”

I never fully understood Albertine, or anyone else in France for that matter. No matter the topic of conversation, there were always little things I missed, an unknown word or some hidden nuance. When I was in her chair, sometimes she’d ask about my family or tell me about her kids. But more often, she’d talk to customers and people who came in and out of the shop. I’d sit quietly while conversation I barely understood swirled around me. Talk of the election that year or some acquaintance I didn’t know. But I learned new phrases I hadn’t learned in class. Phrases like “grosses vanilles” and “je fais mes tresses.”

Even though we never fully understood each other—her accent was too unfamiliar, my French was too shoddy—we came to an understanding. She’d let me take a packet of banana chips when I was hungry and pay once my hair was done. Once, she stopped midway through because she too was hungry, then warmed me a plate of chicken and rice. The chicken was tender, and the spices reminded me of the Caribbean food I’d tried back home. It was the first home-cooked, mom-cooked meal I’d eaten since coming to France. I cooked for myself, of course, and ate my roommates’ cooking too. But there’s some secret, extra, mom ingredient that always makes your mother’s cooking better than yours. It seems to be international.

Another time, as she began to part and comb my hair, I felt her annoyed energy and knew something must have happened before I arrived. I offered to leave and come back a week later since the school where I worked was on spring break.

She readily agreed—“Oui, je suis énervé aujourd’hui”—and I knew better than to ask about it. Before I left, she braided my hair into two plaits free of charge, telling me with authority that this was what all the girls were asking for lately. “Boxer braids” were popular that year.

Every time I sat in her chair, Albertine braided for hours, while I daydreamed or texted or people-watched the customers coming in and out of the shop buying beer, rolling papers, and hair.

My hair that I had struggled with, that had untangled as I cried. My hair that I had felt embarrassed about when I was little. My hair that I wore in two buns, that kids would ask about, that they would call my “poof balls.” My hair led me to one of the most meaningful relationships I built while I was in France. Across the thousands of miles, and the hundreds of years of historical and cultural distance that separates Africans and African Americans, Albertine and I had fundamental cultural things in common. Our hair.

My hair led me to one of the most meaningful relationships I built while I was in France.

Just like at any Black beauty shop in the US, someone was always coming and going at Albertine’s shop. Someone was always annoyed. Someone was always sharing the latest family gossip. Someone was always on their way out, running late. Hairdressers were deep in conversation with someone who could have been a cousin or just a really close friend. And you never found out whether they truly were related or not. There was even the photographic tribute to a deceased relative hanging prominently on the wall.

Even the way she sat me in an old chair and did my hair, as the rest of the world whirled by on the other side of the shelves, reminded me of sitting on the living room floor or dining room chair while my mother braided my hair and the rest of my family came and went.

On the day of my last appointment with Albertine, I told her I was leaving the following month. My seven months in France had come to an end. She wished me the best, and I knew we were both regretting the end of our monthly visits. We talked a little about what I would do when I returned to the US and asked a coworker to take a picture of us together.

Later, I looked at the picture on my phone. The photo was blurry. The camera lens had been covered with coconut oil.