1001 Black Men–#368

We’ve all had the experience of hearing a song that gets stuck in your head for hours. Well, the same thing sometimes happens with the things you see. You catch a glimpse of something interesting or unusual–or even something you see every day, but that somehow catches your attention in an unusual way–and you continue to notice the same kinds of people or places or objects wherever you go. One example of this took place after I read the first Harry Potter novel. Once I finished the book, it seemed, all of a sudden, that everywhere I looked there were little boys in round glasses and little girls with bushy, brown Hermione Granger hair.

Last week I watched a DVD of one of my oldest friends performing in a recent flute recital. She played several solo pieces and two duets, one with her older son on violin and the other with her younger son on piano. At the time of the recital her younger son was sporting a remarkably large afro, reminiscent of my grammar school years in the 1970s.

Ever since I saw that DVD I have been noticing Black men and boys with lots of hair. I guess you can say that brothers with big, bushy, afros or long, luxurious deadlocks are on heavy rotation in the part of my brain that governs what catches my eye. The man in this drawing is the best of both worlds. The size of his cap says nothing if not that he has some very long deadlocks, but they’re piled up onto his head and tucked under his cap in the shape of a big, bushy afro.

Ajuan Mance

 

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