Black barbers give recollections

Craig Marberry, a journalist from Greensboro, N.C., has written a gem of a book based on oral history accounts he gathered all over the country from black barbers. It's sort of a sequel to his popular "Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats" (which has been adapted into a play).

Inspired by his memory of his own first haircut at L&M Barber Shop in Chicago, Marberry visited numerous shops and talked to proprietors, employees and customers. One of the many barbers he interviewed was Vernon Winfrey, Oprah's father, who cuts hair in Nashville, Tenn. At 71, he was asked if Oprah was his only child, and replied, "The only one so far!"

Marberry also talked with Wheeler Parker, now 65 and owner of a barber shop in Chicago. Parker's cousin, Emmett Till, was the young boy who was viciously murdered in Money, Miss., in 1955 — for whistling at a white woman. Parker and Till were 14 when they were visiting relatives in Mississippi, and Parker remembers sleeping in the same house where angry white men came looking for Till, to kill him and dump his body in the Tallahatchie River.

The author considers the barber shop "as much a think tank as it is a comedy showcase," a place where both serious and funny conversations take place when a barber meets a customer, and a trust develops that allows them to talk about almost anything.

Many consider a boy's first haircut to be "a rite of passage," something that must be done with sensitivity. One story circulated that said if a boy had a braid at the top of his head, the barber could cut that off first, then the mother should save the braid in her Bible, thus conserving her son's strength. Some boys would have hair so long when it was first cut that the barber would think they were girls.

Alexander Parker, a 70-year-old barber, has been cutting hair for 50 years. He remembers that black barbers would put a "CW" on their barber's permits if they could cut white men's hair and "CC" if they only cut "colored folks' " hair. A barber who could do both made a lot more money.

Parker said he learned early on that "you should have a new head in your chair every fifteen minutes. Four and 32. That's the formula. Four heads an hour, 32 heads a day — 40 on a Saturday. In my day, I was a workhorse."