Tameka Stigers’ business, a storefront on Delmar east of Skinker, is called Locs of Glory—inspired by the biblical verse that hair is a woman’s glory. There’s double poetry in the name: She’s certified to do Sisterlocks, looping her clients’ hair into fine “locked” ropes that last a full six weeks.
I ask for a demo. Stigers beckons to Rachel Bates, a 21-year-old with a glowing smile who went to cosmetology school because of Stigers’ example. Bates sits down.
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“No, in my chair,” Stigers says. (There’s territory to any art.) Bates moves over, then spins in the chair.
“Girl, I’m not going to do all your hair,” Stigers tells her. “Why are you so excited?” As Stigers picks up the Sisterlocks tool, Bates’ entire demeanor changes. Earlier she was sassy and smart, telling me how a woman’s hair could reveal “if you’re tired, if you feel like being fancy, if you want to be fierce.” Now she’s quiet, leaning a little forward, hands folded in her lap. Waiting to be made beautiful. Stigers begins, using a knit-purl motion.
Sisterlocks’ inventor is JoAnne Cornwell, a professor in California whose grandmother studied under Madam C.J. Walker. And Stigers learned about Madam Walker in grade school: how she lived in St. Louis in the late 1800s, how she made millions with her custom pomade and heated combs, how she “revolutionized hair for black women.”
Stigers listened hard; she already knew hair mattered. When she was 8 years old, her mother glugged too many chemicals onto her scalp, trying to relax Tameka’s tiny Jheri curls. Tameka felt the burn, then looked in the mirror and screamed. She had to go to school the next morning with a boy’s flattop haircut. “It looked like a box!” she wails, 8 again. “I had horrible hair for years, until I could do it myself.”
The secrets to styling black hair are usually passed down, mother to daughter. Stigers’ mother tugged, burned, did damage. “Not everybody is hair savvy,” Stigers says, her voice resigned and forgiving.
Later, she says she only lived with her mother until middle school. At church, she met kids from Westminster Christian Academy and begged to go there, too. She found herself a ride, and when she lost it, a new friend’s family took her in.
Didn’t her mother mind? “She didn’t care.” Her voice goes flat. “Around that time, she pretty much was just doing her own thing on the street.”
Was it hard to join another family at age 12? “No!” she exclaims. “I had my own room. We had family dinner every night. The mom stayed home and took care of the kids.” She gave Tameka everything she’d hungered for—except practical advice about her hair. So Tameka taught herself to braid. And while she was earning a master’s in public health at Saint Louis University, she started a home business braiding hair.
As she talks, a woman leaves the salon with a zillion bright-red braids, swinging them gaily. I catch sight of my limp, short, dishwater-gray hair in the mirror and sigh. So Stigers digs out a book and shows me a white guy with sparse, fine locks. “That’s why you’re not going to see too many white people with locks, ’cause they don’t want to look like this,” she says, “but look where he ended up!” Sure enough, his locks are longer and fuller, and he looks a lot more hip. “When your hair is free, different things cause the ends to split and kind of impede the growth,” she says. “This is what we call protective styling. The Rasta locks, even though they have a lot of crazy-lookin’ matted mess at their head, they still have the length. This is just a more organized, neater form.”
Once Stigers perfected her technique, she wanted her own shop. Then she found out that Missouri requires 1,500 hours of schooling for a hair braider to become licensed. For a technique that went back to ancient Egypt?
“An EMT doesn’t even need that much, and I’m not savin’ anybody’s life!” Stigers blurted. She’d specialized in public health policy, and this was ridiculous. Besides, cosmetology school could cost as much as $16,000, and she didn’t have the money. After college she’d taken on the raising of her four younger siblings, ages 9 through 15, because her grandmother was too weary to continue.
Stigers got around the law by hiring cosmetologists. Now the Institute for Justice has filed suit on her behalf, calling Missouri’s law “arbitrary, excessive, and anachronistic.” Illinois has dropped its requirement to 300 hours of training. Braiding’s not dangerous, a Utah judge noted: “If you get a bad braid, you just don’t go back.”
Sisterlocks are painless and require no harsh chemicals—which makes them especially great for children, Stigers says, nodding toward her stash of lollipops. There’s a flyer on her front door, looking for foster and adoptive families because, “so many kids are waiting for homes.
“Anybody who comes work for me knows, we take care of the kids.”
