One of my friends recently returned from a week on the Tom Joyner Fantastic Voyage cruise. It is an annual event sponsored by the popular talk show host Tom Joyner to raise scholarship money to help students attend historically black colleges.
I really wanted to be on that cruise, not to have fun, but to continue my nappy missionary work.
But as much as I wanted to be there for them, I was too busy counseling clients on land who are in nap denial. I had no time to break away to provide support for my sisters who had taken to the high seas.
Maybe it’s a good thing that I couldn’t make it on the cruise this year. The last time I went, I failed miserably in my attempt to comfort any permed-challenged souls. That’s because I my hair got caught up in a water war.
When I returned from that ill-fated trip two years ago, I shared my misfortune in a newsletter to my nappy readers. Read about it, and you will understand:
“Well, my dear readers, I am back from my excursion to the high seas, hanging out with nappies and wannabes during Tom Joyner’s Fantastic Voyage cruise. My reasons for going on the cruise had nothing to do with a desire to participate in all the hedonistic activities that we took an oath not to divulge.
My reason for going was purely altruistic. I knew that the cruise would be full of women who would be partying and working up a sweat in that Caribbean heat. I knew that most of them would be wearing perms, and that there would be a nappy epidemic when all that precipitation caused their hair to revert back to its most natural state. I knew they would be traumatized by that sudden textural change and needed to have Mosetta there to comfort them.
But even though I went on the cruise with my sisters’ emotional welfare in mind, I was not able to give them the help that they needed. That’s because I became a casualty of the cruise.
It happened when we landed on the tiny island of Coco Cay, where Tom Joyner, our demented ship captain, and his equally demented cohort, J. Anthony Brown, declared a water pistol war between the ‘light skin-ded’ and ‘dark skin-ded’ people.
The battle between the multi-hued black folk was fierce. But for the permies on both sides of the skin tone line it, was a particularly “hair-rowing” experience. I am still haunted by the sounds of their voices wailing in agony as the enemy blasted water upside their heads, causing their hair to snap right back to its roots.
I felt their pain, but I was unable to reach out and comfort them. That’s because I had also become one of the victims of the water war. While I was on my way to the john, a crazed bunch of ‘light skin-ded’ people ambushed me with Super Soaker water guns!
It did not matter to them that I was unarmed, choking and doubled over with laughter. They showed no mercy. They shot me to hell. But my nappy hair was in heaven. It was a hot day so my hair was more than happy to get the drenching it received from that bunch of melanin-envious morons. My hair, unlike the hair of my permed sisters in the water battle, did not have to ‘go back home.’ It was already there.
It was the rest of my body that couldn’t handle the attack. The soaking I received in the ambush gave me a case of the sniffles, and all that wailing gave me laryngitis. To avoid catching a full-blown cold, I cancelled my plans to comfort the straight-haired sisters who got naptized in the water war. I left them to their own coping devices and spent my time lounging in the sun and trying desperately to heal myself.
There were a few women who recognized me and insisted on seeking my counsel. I was in no mood to conduct any hairepy sessions, but it was not my nature to leave my perm-challenged sisters totally ‘stranded.’ I advised them to go spritz their hair with curl activator and see me after the cruise!”
