“The way I see it,” Taalib-Din Uqdah tells me, “I’m coming to Springfield, Illinois, to free the slaves. I am a modern-day abolitionist. And the cosmetology industry is the last legal bastion of chattel slavery in the United States.” He’s calling from the hair salon he owns with his wife in Washington, D.C.; their shop is nationally famous among people who care about the upkeep and the politics of black hair. He’s black and Muslim, and in pictures I’ve seen of him he wears sharp suits with folded pocket squares, like Farrakhan’s. His voice is gruff with a preacherly tone. Someone described him to me as “the Johnny Cochran of natural hair.”
“By no definition could I be considered an ‘arranger’ of hair. I am a cultural artist, working on a live canvas,” says a locktician named Maevette Allen-Brooks, vice president of the just-formed Chicago chapter of Uqdah’s national association. (She’s one of two members at the moment.) “That law did not pertain to me.” The DPFR’s Division of Professional Regulation probably wouldn’t have agreed, but the term arranging was so vague that it didn’t have irrefutable cause to disagree. Allen-Brooks has been locking hair without a license since 1999. Of the roughly two dozen stylists I talked to, just one went to school and got licensed after 2001; the rest continue to practice in open defiance of the current law. Allen-Brooks never ran into trouble for practing without a license until last month, when the child-care support she got through an agency called Action for Children was terminated because she didn’t have one. Now she asks relatives to watch her kids while she works out of her in-home salon. Her partner in the Chicago chapter of AHNHA is another locktician, Arlanda Darkwa, who also works out of her home. Darkwa says that last year she got multiple letters from the department, and even a call from an inspector who’d seen her Web site and ordered her to cease and desist and get licensed. Darkwa shut down the site but not her business.
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That’s not exactly the way Daniel Bluthardt, current director of the Division of Professional Regulation, recalls the amendment being proposed (he was a legislative liaison at the time), though he agrees that the word “braiding” was added at the urging of the Illinois Cosmetology Association, a big, well-connected trade organization. “It was the feeling of the cosmetology association that braiding constitutes the practice of cosmetology,” he says, “and from my standpoint as well. When you look at the practice of braiding, it’s hard to say it’s not cosmetology. The association was concerned that at a number of braiding shops they were apparently doing more than just braiding hair, that there was cutting and shampooing going on as well. Also, certain potions, like the juices of berries, were being applied to the scalp and the hair without training, which poses a public safety concern.” (At the shops I visited, I saw braiders rub grease into their palms and dab commercial hair cream onto the ends of their customers’ natural hair before braiding in extensions. But they didn’t apply berry juice or other unidentifiable “potions,” and I never saw anything other than braiding and twisting going on.)
Uqdah says it’s the potential millions in tuition the beauty schools are missing out on that worries the Illinois Cosmetology Association. Getting licensed in Illinois takes a year of training full-time or two part-time, and costs anywhere from $7,000 (through the Dudley Beauty College on 95th Street, which has a largely black student population) to $17,000 at Pivot Point in Evanston, which bills itself as the “Harvard of beauty schools.” He says the ICA and the Division of Professional Regulation shouldn’t meddle with a cultural practice that, in his opinion, they could never understand. “From where,” he asks, “did the state of Illinois receive the authority to regulate a 5,000-year-old cultural institution that was handed to a particular people from none other than God himself? Race, money, politics, power, and control. That’s what this issue is about. Don’t let them fool you into believing it’s about public safety. Since when has the state of Illinois been concerned about the public safety of its black citizens?”
Unless they own a salon or are related to someone who does, most braiders work as freelance contractors in a loose word-of-mouth network, moving from shop to shop as they get calls from salon owners and getting paid by commission. Ewise’s current spot at Broadway and Sheridan is typical of the shabbier salons, with gray metal folding chairs and bar stools set in front of cracked, wobbly mirrors. The walls are white and bare save for the sign reading CUSTOMER MUST ALWAYS PAY BEFORE SERVICE. CUSTOMER MUST NEVER GET ANGRY WITH EMPLOYEES. NO REFUND, NO CREDIT. While Ewise and her coworkers braid, another braider sleeps on a couch under the storefront window; most styles require at least six hours of repetitive, standing work to finish, so invariably there’s someone napping in the shops I visit.
The profit margin in the African braiding industry used to be steep, before the state updated the definition of cosmetology and triggered the price-breaking epidemic. Most braiders paid nothing to learn their skill, and beyond the raw material–the hair–they require next to nothing in the way of supplies. One locktician said she knew African braiders who used to pull in $90,000 or $100,000 a year at their shops. The same women now worry about making rent each month.
