In the Kitchen is a memoir of growing up traced through hairstyles and the mechanics of maintaining them. Woven into this essay, themes of fashion and taste form a trope through which Gates explores black consciousness.
The essay uses an unusual strategy of deference and a non-judgmental tone to form a balanced portrayal of cultural mores and their shift through time. The things unsaid loom large over the essay, leaving it to the reader to construct the author's current position toward these fashions. Gates never makes the point that straight hair is a characteristic of white people. Gates never points that the emulation of white characteristics is ironic, given the observation that "the white man told me" was "used to punctuate especially preposterous assertions."
Describing the pains which people went to in order to straighten their hair occupies the three paragraphs before this revelation; Gates leaves it to the reader to determine if the efforts to straighten hair are preposterous or not. The major trope here is a sort of indirection, focusing on the fighting against nature represented by these hairstyles rather than the cultural forces that dictated the adoption of these risky and sometimes painful fashion practices. The rhetorical payoff is always deferred; a large amount of description is invested in the topic before the conclusions are drawn. Everyone wanted to have good hair. All was forgiven if you only had good hair. The nature of what constituted good hair is again deferred, and not explored until the final moments of the essay.
The criterion for good hair is almost entirely arbitrary. Gates' distinction between Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. is a matter of taste. Gates judges Nat King Cole worthy, because his hair "fit him." Hair is only briefly alluded to as an attribute of cultural consciousness: "From Murray's to Duke to Afro Sheen: that was my progression in black consciousness." The revelation that Gates still admired what Nat King Cole stood for places him in a different position from Jamaica Kincaid. The essay, in tone and message, represents a sort of acceptance for the situational nature of fashion. Cole was not undermined by his "patent leather hair" in the same way that Jamaica Kincaid's father was oppressed by his felt hat. Gates casual rhetorical stance of avoiding direct confrontation of the cultural issues suits a more accommodating pole of cultural rhetoric.
The pairing of these essays seems interesting from an editorial standpoint. Kincaid's essay was chosen by Susan Sontag, an outspoken cultural critic. Sontag's battle cry is for a more sensual approach to literature, so her choice of Kincaid's inflammatory rhetoric seems appropriate. Kincaid's choice of Gates' essay is appropriate for a different reason. Gates' essay reveals his engagement with a uniquely black rhetorical style, of troping on tropes, where the message is really found in the method of presentation rather than overtly passionate involvement. In The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifying Gates explores the nature of black "signifying" exchanges, noting that they are fundamental tropes based in irony, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, and hyperbole. Gates uses these tropes in a very "non-signifying" way to suggest, rather than demonstrate, the arbitrary nature of cultural conventions. Gates has used these tropes toward a broader audience, in an effective strategy of indirect metaphor. The encoding employed by Gates shares much with Phyllis Wheatly, mentioned in the essay.
However, what I found most curious about the article was that all the references to historical black figures were deemed to need footnotes. There was no footnote to describe Walter Cronkite, and yet it seems necessary to note who Fredrick Douglass was? In the grand scheme, surely Fredrick Douglass is important enough to be granted the same cultural currency afforded Cronkite. The choice of footnotes was a bit heavy handed; Odetta is perhaps more well known in some circles than Sammy Davis Jr., so I had a great deal of fun puzzling over the editorial choices of what constituted "difficult" references. Surely everyone has seen Fredrick Douglass's hair! Referring to it as "impressive" seems to be like calling Albert Einstein's hair "impressive."
While it is possible to argue that Gates' rhetorical choices were not exclusively black, the structure of the essay seems to grow out of a unique grasp of the way that signifying works. At first, I saw the hair as metaphorical, but as Gates points out in his Signifying essay, there are also roots in the Yoruba conventions of métáfò, or indirect naming. Rather than standing in for another concept, it becomes a part of the construction of a person's identity, indirectly naming who they are. The issues at stake are not just metaphors of cultural perception, but indirect methods of cultural identity. The lack of overt posturing, or value judgment, seems to insure that a more complete picture of the construction of those identities can take place in the mind of the reader.
