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My love affair with my hair started before grade school, when I coveted my sister's long, Pochahontas-like braids. I can still remember watching her get on the school bus one morning while crying over my own plaits, which were more like twigs.

In exasperation, my grandmother suggested I pray for long hair.

I did. And it worked. Soon, it was growing down my back.

I'd heard older people say a woman's hair is her crown and glory, and although I didn't exactly know what they meant, I knew that for a black woman, long hair was something special. "Look at all that hair," the little old ladies would say at church. I'd beam.

Getting my hair straightened was a Saturday treat. Oh, I hated the daylong wait at the neighborhood beauty salon, a one-room shop that Sister Baker's husband built for her in their backyard. Sister Baker would wash our hair and then sit us under a dryer, where the hair would, over time, expand into a huge, kinky afro.

Next, she would comb out the kinks in sections, using a pomade with the consistency of Vaseline, and then -- to which a still-visible mutilation of my ear can attest -- pull a smoking "hot comb" through it. The hair would straighten as the heated metal teeth sizzled through the strands.

Invariably, someone watching would say, "Little girl, what are you going to do with all that hair?"

Most of my high school pictures looked the same: down-the-shoulder hair with a bit of curl at the end. I wore the Farrah Fawcett look before she did, and one summer, a friend spent the whole day braiding my hair like Bo Derek's in the movie "10."

The summer before my freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill, I got my first relaxer, which meant no more hot combs -- even if the chemical process came with its own set of problems. I've had many a stylist ask if I could stand keeping the solution in just a little longer, though it was already burning my scalp.

For me, it was all about having long, straight hair.

My worst hair experience didn't come from a straightening process, but a bad hair cut.

I wanted a long but layered style. So I made an appointment at a salon in Carrboro that was popular with the black college girls. I asked Margaret the stylist -- yes, I remember her name all these years later -- for the same layered look as the girl in the magazine I'd brought, only I wanted a longer version.

Apparently, I wasn't clear enough about the length. I can still remember the horrified look on my friend's face when she could see what I couldn't: I was near bald. Well, not exactly, but my hair seemed two inches long. I couldn't even remember a time when my twigs were that short.

Long hair defined who I was, and I just didn't feel like myself anymore. It was the one thing that others had always envied, the thing that made me beautiful.

It took almost two years to grow it back, and I vowed I would never get it cut again. Long, straight hair is who I am.

Over the years, I've tried different curls and twists and experimented with color at the "past the shoulder" length that I've maintained. But with a relaxer every two months, it mostly still looks like high school. And I don't mind one bit.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com