Summary

Shay sits through the long, slow process of getting a pedicure at a beauty shop regarded as the best on the island – expensive to locals, catering to tourists. Another customer arrives – Caroline, a Malagasy woman with a long blonde weave, there to get the hair of the weave cared for and re-tied to her own. Caroline is young, beautiful, and dominating in personality.

As the two hairdressers remove the weave, wash it and trim it and re-weave it, Shay reflects on blondness, an experience that she, as a Black woman, has considered a great deal. She considers how blondeness has been a status symbol that she has both ridiculed and sought, and how she herself made attempts to improve her status by making her hair as blond as possible, “her own hair [being] a mass of natural kinky curls that her husband loves, but...