Kim Kankiewicz

Immortal Coils

by Kim Kankiewicz

I hid a Ziploc bag of hair in a half-attic behind my childhood bedroom. Sobered by the milestone of my tenth birthday, I wanted to amass evidence of my everyday existence. For weeks, I plucked a daily strand from my brown mane and added it to the bag. I wanted to see a wispy lock grow into a thick tress one tenuous thread at a time. I collected enough hair to clog a drain until, fearing that my mother would discover my stash, I smuggled it out with the garbage.

I first encountered a Victorian hair wreath on my honeymoon, at a museum in Florida. In a shadow box frame, flowers constructed from human hair were wired together to form a horseshoe. My groom grimaced, but I was thrilled by the overt accumulation of hair to betoken life.

Years later, as a mother with tendrils of my children’s hair pressed between the pages of their baby books, I read about a Missouri museum dedicated to hair art.
I imagined touring Leila’s Hair Museum on some future vacation.
I pictured dim corridors and gilded frames with clip-on lamps illuminating magnificent helixes of hair. Engraved nameplates would identify artists and subjects, and I would pause to observe each name.

Two hundred years after
George Washington’s death, a lock of his hair turned up in an envelope tied in string and tucked inside
an eighteenth-century almanac.
An authenticator valued it at $3,000. A strand of Elvis Presley’s pompadour sold at auction for $115,000. Among celebrity hair collectors, a pop star is worth
38 presidents. Elvis’s barber
made out like a bandit, saving clippings in a plastic bread bag
and selling them off piecemeal
after the King’s death.

All my life, I’ve longed to create something that proves I matter, an immortal work tethering me to a larger story.

An unforeseen twist: My husband’s career relocated our family to Kansas City, twenty miles north of Leila’s Hair Museum. We were still unpacking when I paid a visit. Among the 3,000 items on exhibit, I discovered:
a genealogy wreath assembled from the hair of 150 people;
wedding wreaths coupling the hair of Victorian brides and grooms;
hair wreaths memorializing deceased children;
cameos painted with
pulverized hair;
arm bands braided from
soldiers’ hair;
and hair from the heads of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Elvis Presley.

Leila Cohoon began collecting
hair art in 1956. On a shopping trip for Easter shoes, she instead purchased a tiny hair wreath from an antique store. A hairdresser by trade, Leila had been fascinated with hair since childhood.

A century before “the personal is political” became a feminist rallying cry, middle-class white women took up hairwork to resist erasure of their personal lives. Hair jewelry had been popular since the Middle Ages, relegated to professional artisans. Then the Industrial Revolution made mass production possible. Nineteenth-century newspapers described warehouses where assembly-line Rumpelstiltskins spun fashion accessories from anonymous piles of hair. Sentimental Victorians feared entrusting their loved ones’ tresses to fraudulent artisans and receiving baubles made of somebody else’s hair.

I must have borrowed a thousand library books enfolding strands of hair that fluttered to the ground when I opened the pages, unaware of my brush with other lives.

Today Leila is a platinum-blonde great-grandmother who favors gauzy blouses and hair brooches. Along with conserving hair relics, she’s intent on preserving hair art techniques. She deduced these techniques by reverse engineering pieces from her collection, and students come from all over the country to learn from her.

Supplies for Leila’s tutorial:
Fine-gauge wire and cutters. Knitting and sewing needles.
Small locks of hair my mother
and daughter let me cut
from their heads.
A bag of practice hair my stylist scooped nonchalantly from a drawer, as if every new client
asks for castoff ponytails.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:29-31

As a teenager, I shed hair with the extravagance of someone secure of her permanence. My father would extract a strand of my hair from his dinner and present it to his prodigal daughter with a frown. “Thanks,” I would say. “I’ve been looking for that one.” Beneath my flippancy, I yearned for assurance that my ordinary days had meaning. It’s a yearning that never relents.

In a workroom at Leila’s museum,
I glued slender ropes of hair to aluminum foil and cut shapes
from the hair after the glue dried.
I decoupaged snippets of hair
to cardboard petals. I folded wire over a knitting needle and threaded hair back and forth around the wire, withdrawing the needle to leave a hair-sheathed filament.
The Victorians fashioned these filaments into curlicues and flowers. Mine looked like something plastered to
a shower wall.

“Dead stuff is neat!”
– Lucy Gafford, shower hair artist

In Leila’s workroom, a certificate of authenticity for Ronald Reagan’s hair hung beside a painting of an eagle disentangling an American flag from a communist hammer and sickle. Lulled into strange intimacy by our morbid task, Leila opined about estate tax hikes written into Obamacare. “My grandchildren should inherit my museum, but Obama wants it,” she said.
I almost laughed at the image of a triumphant Barack Obama surveying his purloined collection of hair wreaths. But I wondered what would happen to Leila’s life work after all. Would her grandchildren want the museum? Would anyone? If uneasiness about one’s legacy is ridiculous, then I too am worthy of ridicule.

“Hair contains a very small quantity of water, manganese, iron, and various salts of lime, which have been found by the various methods of analyzation, and it is owing to these properties that it is peculiarly indestructible.”
– Mark Campbell, Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work, 1867

What clearer plea for significance than to mount the cells of one’s body in the parlor for generations to remember?

Yet we have forgotten. On my three visits to Leila’s museum, I never learned the name of a single hairworker or family member whose hair is ensconced behind glass. There are no engraved nameplates. I left Leila’s tutorial with a shoebox of grotesque hair assemblages and the certainty that I lack the dexterity to create keepsakes from my family’s hair. Once again, I stashed a cache
of hair in my closet.