Sinclair, 15, in the 11th grade at St. James College in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
ecently, while shuffling through a stack of old family pictures, a strange young girl’s face appeared, and startled me. There she was—a wide-eyed teenager with a dark cornucopia of dreadlocks falling around her shoulders, her mouth stitched into silence, searching the water for meaning. I studied her gaze, suddenly dizzy with the memory of a promise I’d made to myself long ago: to burn every picture of myself from this time once I was older, to leave nothing of this version of myself behind.
Except, it didn’t feel like armor. The first time I left my house after my mother had knotted my hair into dreadlocks, I was wracked by the catcalls of men in the street, wailing out “Empress!,” a patois term for a Rastawoman. I was only eight years old. When I arrived at school, I was immediately hounded by a student who chased after me and taunted, “Lice is killing the Rasta,” a common insult in Jamaica in the 1990s, co-opting the melody of a popular reggae song.
“Can you even see with those…things in your face?” one of my high school teachers asked me once, with scorn. Her mouth was permanently downturned at the sight of me. While I wore my dreadlocks, I wore my father’s mark. They were the primary sign of my purity and my father’s message to Babylon: this evidence of my righteousness was also a sign of his. Everywhere I went, I was an outcast. Eventually I learned to bear the disdain at school and the heckling in the street every time I left the house.
At 19 years old, between the warm hands of my mother, I committed the first sin. What I had spent years dreaming of, as I longed for my own independence. I knelt under the blades of scissors for the first time since I was born, and I cut my dreadlocks. My father didn’t speak to me for a year. We lived in the same house and he looked through me like a ghost.With this began my family’s unrooting; I had pulled at something that soon came swiftly undone in my hands, parched roots yanked from earth.
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