My aunt is one heck of a woman. ^_^ She and her husband attended demonstrations with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X while in post-graduate school. They eventually became college professors, had seven children between them, and finished raising her younger siblings besides.

She told me that the dawn she woke up was after the day her parents died. A policeman she'd trusted and admired shot them both, after her father tried to stop him from raping her mother. She was fourteen at the time.

Aunt Ayna spent the whole night sitting on the kitchen floor, crying and rocking back and forth, silent and confused. But with the light of the sun, she took a kitchen knife to her long, lye-straightened hair -- the hair that so many had envyed and admired.

She's worn it natural ever since.