At Sharon’s Place of Beauty the women sitting in plastic caps under cone-shaped hair dryers occasionally peek over the tops of their magazines to take in the scene. The salon’s decorations are unremarkable: a few mirrors, a handwritten “customers only” notice posted above the pay phone, and a brown sign with gold lettering that reads “We Are Beauticians Not Magicians.” But packed in around the lemon yellow barber’s chairs are teenage boys, smoking cigarettes and talking noisily. They don’t even seem to have much hair. But the stylist they’re waiting for a turn with, the owner’s 16-year-old son Dupree, doesn’t need much to work with.
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On Thursdays and Fridays after school and all day Saturdays, Dupree makes art on their heads, clipping pictures or messages into their hair. Unless a customer makes a request, Dupree says, he never knows what he’ll do until he’s doing it. Except for a tropical scene Dupree calls “Paradise,” which he’s done three times, the designs are always “fresh.” “Whatever I got on my mind” is what he says appears on his clients’ heads.
The images wrap around the curve of his clients’ skulls and bear resemblance to enigmatic earthworks or landscape designs seen from the air.
Dupree recently chided a cousin who had come to the shop to sell cologne: “You ain’t got on no three-stripe.” His cousin quickly unzipped his coat and pulled up his sweater, redeeming himself by revealing a red Adidas shirt. Satisfied, Dupree bought a five-dollar vial of Red Egyptian Musk.
Dupree hopes to attend beauty school after he graduates. And he sees himself with his own shop someday, which he has mapped out in much more detail than any of the hair designs he currently creates. He says he would call his shop Chocolate Thunder–a name borrowed from lyrics by Ice Cube. He imagines that his shop would have a black, turquoise, purple, and white color scheme; that a wall of glass window blocks would line the stairway near the entrance; that the ceiling would be mirrored; that the chairs would be black leather; and that there would be no room for the sign disavowing magic that currently hangs in his mother’s shop.
