Perfect braids show depth of dad's devotion
By MICHELLE HISKEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/15/08 Clifton Green waited a decade to become a dad, imagining he would be like the man who raised him and made him feel like the most special kid in the world.
That day came in 2005, when Green and his wife adopted daughter Miriam Tigist from an Ethiopian orphanage.
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</TD></TR><TR><TD ="caption">Emory Professor Clifton Green braids his daughter Miriam's hair.
</TD></TR></T></TBODY></TABLE><!--startclickprintinclude--><!--begintext-->Suddenly, fatherhood demanded a task few white men ever contemplate: hours of cleaning, combing, twisting and braiding African hair.
Such skills typically are handed down from older family members and, as this Emory University associate professor of finance discovered, take hours of practice. In the wrong hands, hair like his daughter's can break off.
"Besides the color of her skin, her hair is one of the few ways we are different," Green said last week as he twisted the thick curls of Miriam, now 4. "The more tangled it is, the more it hurts, the more she protests — in that way, it's pretty universal."
By knowing how to make straight parts, neat twists and careful braids, he has earned high-fives from stunned African-Americans.
"That meek and mild guy? He does not do her hair! You could have picked me off the floor when I found out," said Latise Egeston, an African-American counselor at Miriam's preschool. "Her hair looks fabulous every day, and I know what it takes."
This Father's Day story has two strands familiar to all parents: careful plans and unpredictable kinks.
Green, 37, and his wife Jennifer, 36, a seminarian, got engaged in 1994 while she was studying in Kenya. They knew they wanted to have biological children and to adopt from Africa.
"There seemed to be a need, and it was a way to enrich our lives," he says. "It wasn't a sense of charity. Everyone makes their own family choice. This was our choice."
After a decade building their academic careers, they started the adoption process that led to finding their little girl in an orphanage in Addis Ababa (the same one featured in "There is No Me Without You," a book by their Druid Hills neighbor Melissa Fay Greene).
For a year, the couple saw only pictures of Miriam while the adoption went through. The brother of an Ethiopian cashier they met at their local Publix lives in Addis Ababa, and sent a video of Miriam. Her cries made them long for her even more.
The bald patches on her scalp "were from bouts of malnutrition," her father says of Miriam. "Early on, she didn't have much."
The same year, their plans for pregnancy moved faster than expected. Son Nathaniel was born seven weeks before Green's spring break, which he spent flying 40 hours round-trip to get Miriam, then a year old.
"If she had been our only kid, I probably wouldn't have done her hair," he says, his wife agreeing. "But with Nathaniel barely home from the hospital, I was more involved with her."
With frequent shampoo and combing — what the rest of her family does — Miriam's springy hair would dry and still tangle. Her parents considered letting her hair go as a statement of freedom. After all, they wanted their children — their family now includes another biological son, 10-month-old Adam — to accept others and be accepted, regardless of looks.
But her hair was such a strong link to her roots, a past they wanted her always to know and appreciate, they chose to neaten it the way they saw in many African-American families.
Green researched the best products to keep her hair from drying and breaking. He noticed and copied styles he saw on kids at places like playgrounds. With practice, his fingers became deft.
"I had learned to braid rope necklaces in junior high," he says. "But this is hair, not string."
Friends with children from Africa lent books and support. Their Ethiopian baby sitter showed him cornrows, a daylong task he hopes to master some day.
He stopped trying new styles before church, because haste led to bad hairdos. "We wanted her to know her hair isn't a burden but something really wonderful, something beautiful to be celebrated," her mother says.
"I can do it, but it looks better when he does it. He's more creative, and he cares more about changing it up. It's a little gift he gives her, the little joy of feeling nice and getting good vibes from other people."
At stake, the Greens learned, was far more than hygiene or looks. Her hair was a litmus test of their parenting, he and his wife read in books such as "Inside Transracial Adoption."
"There is no tolerance in the community for not taking care of a child's hair," the authors write. "The end results of your efforts will be judged by the high standards of the black community and not the laissez-faire white model."
Green also heeded the criticism piled on celebrity couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who adopted daughter Zahara from Ethiopia around the same time Green went there for Miriam.
"By and large, most whites are oblivious to the cultural minefield young black girls are born into, just by virtue of having hair that doesn't bounce and behave," wrote the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris last year. "From the moment Zahara was adopted in 2005, there was an almost unanimous consensus that her parents should be doing something else with her hair."
Hair like Miriam's takes a lot of time, a time of tender bonding between dad and daughter. This is his routine.
Once a week he shampoos and conditions her hair. It takes about five times longer to rinse out the water compared to her brother's straight, fine hair. He combs and parts it. This takes 30 minutes or more.
The next steps he does at least once a day, more if she musses her hair while playing or napping. He works on one section of hair at a time.
He sprays it with a brown froth called Carol's Daughter Black Vanilla Leave-In Conditioner for Dry Hair. The extracts of lavender and rosemary smell nice, wafting with the cartoon noises from the TV that Miriam watches only during hair time. Her Ethiopian middle name, Tigist, means patience, and she needs it while he works.
He gathers the hair into a ponytail, one hand over the other to get all the wisps, six times. He smooths it further, hand over hand again, 12 more times. Whenever he feels brittle strands, he adds some Carol's Daughter Hair Milk, a white lotion of soybean and sweet almond oils.
A plastic fork doubles as a rat-tail comb, just the right size for her tender nape, and he takes 10 passes with it. He secures the hair with a black elastic, twisting it seven times.
He divides the hair into two sections. His hands fly, thumb and index and middle fingers twisting 16 times.
To keep the long twist in place, he uses an elastic band with white beads in a figure eight. All this he repeats 11 more times, until her hair is complete.
"It's a fair job," he says this day. "Today her parts aren't as straight as they could be. The more parts she has, the better it stays."
He's done as many as 30 parts. His favorite was the pie design that radiated from her crown, each wedge of hair in a beaded braid.
When Green was little, his own dad "made me feel like I had hung the moon," he says.
That's what Green has always wanted to give his kids, and as he tosses Miriam high into the air, her smile and giggles and twists of hair show him he's doing all right.
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/stories/2008/06/14/braids_0615.html
Our daughter loved for me to do her hair. She says, because no matter what, I'm always patient. I think she just loved the attention. 
leaves mumbling curses under her breath
