“Shape-ups at Delilah’s”
by Rion Amilcar Scott
from the October 7, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
Rion Amilcar Scott is a completely new name to me but maybe not to many of you. His debut collection of stories, Insurrections, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize a few years ago, and his second collection, The World Doesn’t Require You, came out a couple of months ago. This is his first story to appear in The New Yorker.
Here we have a woman named Tiny opening up a haircutting business in Cross River, Maryland. From the interview in The New Yorker (here) I see that Cross River has come up in Scott’s previous collections, and that this town has been afflicted by the Great Hair Crisis.
The night after Jerome’s brother turned up on a Southside sidewalk, bloodied and babbling in and out of consciousness, Tiny took Jerome’s hand, sat him on a stool, wiped tears from his cheeks, draped a towel over his shoulders, and whispered, Relax, baby, you can’t go to the hospital like that. Your brother’ll wake up to that damn bird’s nest on your head and fall right back into another coma. For the next two hours, Tiny sheared away Jerome’s knotty beads until his head appeared smooth and black, with orderly hairs laid prone by her soft, smoothing hand. Back when they met, she’d told him she cut hair, said she was damn good, too. Jerome had nodded, smiled a bit, as if to say, How cute, and changed the subject. But now, the way his eyes danced in the mirror, the joy that broadened his face, it all said, Where in the hell did a woman, a W-O-M-A-N, learn to cut like that? She circled him as she did her work, looking at every angle of his head. She lathered up the front and went at it with a straight razor so that his hairline sat as crisp and sharp as the bevelled edge of the blade that cut it. Tiny imagined slicing her finger while sliding it across the front of his head; her imagined self then smeared the blood all over Jerome’s face. After she finished and had swept the fine hairs from his shoulders and back, Jerome and Tiny collapsed onto the floor, spent, as if they had just made love for hours. On a bed of Jerome’s shorn hair, they slept into the early morning.
I haven’t read beyond that opening, but I’m interested in a story that treats haircutting as both an intimate and a mystical art. And I’m very interested in the town of Cross River, which was, as Scott says in his interview, “founded after the only successful slave revolt in America.” Beyond that, I’ll let you discover the other mysteries of this town for yourself.
Let me know what you think!
Rion Amilcar Scott’s “Shape-ups at Delilah’s” triumphs in many ways telling us where we are as a culture and using the cutting of men’s hair as a talisman to get at truth that isn’t talked about much. I am old school positive so to me Tiny’s life is a huge tragedy. If a woman does something expertly, she should reap all the success. Like she cuts the hair of successful male Hollywood superstars who she makes look so good, they’re movies make millions and she is well paid. But expertise does not always guarantee success in the real world. Scott seems to reveal how men and women relate to each in Black culture but I think by going narrowly specific, he is getting at maybe how most women and men relate to each other even if very outside that particular world. True, there may be a lot of differences but there are a lot of similarities too. I think a good writer gets at a more general truth by sharply observing a particular truth in a particular language in a particular emotional or non-emotional manner in how men and women relate to each other in a particular situation. Tiny and Jerome always seem a little detached from each other after emotionally connecting with his first haircut. The first haircut is their highest level of trust and Scott has Tiny bring up trust to Jerome as though women and men never trust or having any hope of trusting each other anymore. If a woman has an expert skill, a man feels jealous if he doesn’t have one too and automatically feels they are in competition to the point that will always drift apart after they might have drifted together. Then as Jerome seems to do, the man tries to take the advantage away from the woman. Now the me-too movement feels all men are bad because they can never let the woman have the upper hand or be too expert at something because that threatens him. And if she can make money and he feels threatened, he feels he will lose. And then Tiny has to look for a man that doesn’t feel threatened even if some don’t seem to be, at least in the beginning. This is done very economically almost like a sharply observed Joan Didion nonfiction piece or James Baldwin fiction. This is one of the best New Yorker short stories I’ve seen in quite a while. I wish it wasn’t so sad but sometimes actual truth can’t be happy for whatever reason and it is probably good to look at rather than not talk, read or be written about.
I agree with Larry, this is a terrific story. What was so impressive was that it has much of the social and gender critique which he notes, but it is not heavy-handed and it never lets the points made get in the way of a really engrossing narrative. The story is also more involving and entertaining than many published in The New Yorker, many of which seem a bit wan compared to this rather impressive work.
Ken,
Your point that Rion Amilcar Scott’s short story “Shape-ups at Delilah’s” is “more involving and entertaining than many published in The New Yorker” is well-observed. I really hadn’t noticed the previous New Yorker short stories seeming a “bit wan” by comparison. But I looked up the definition of the word wan. Wan as an adjective is defined as (of a person’s complexion or appearance) pale and giving the impression of illness or exhaustion) example, “she was looking wan and bleary-eyed”. So the she in this case would be the “it” or “they” of previous New Yorker short stories.
Scott has such a lively image in the perfectly cut and shaped male haircut. I think Tiny, the hairstylist in this story, could have cut, shaped and styled soul singer James Brown’s sharp, flamboyant but very precise hair that went perfectly with how he sang soul and especially the theatrical preciseness of the way he danced. And so Scott brings this flashy exuberance to his story which makes other previous New Yorker short stories seem a bit pale in comparison.
Also, it is something, possibly, you could see in real life. I once noticed a guy who looked like a loan manager at a national bank branch who dressed in a nice suit and had a perfect James Brown style haircut. A few weeks later, I saw the same guy had cut his hair very short almost like a crew cut maybe at the bank’s suggestion he curb his haircut a little. But a bank customer came up and greeted the guy and seem very appreciative of the loan manager’s action on his behalf in some situation. So maybe the bank suppressed the loan manager’s choice of hairstyle but could not suppress the man. I think of the lady “Tiny” in “Shape-ups” as this kind of exuberant person in Scott’s very lively tale. Thanks for bringing up a nice particular aspect of this story that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.
What a beautiful story. I really enjoyed reading it. Both realistic and mystical. I don’t know if I agree with everything Larry wrote about the extensive implications for men-women relations, but it sure describes well one woman’s life experience. The woman is so worn done by men’s foolishness that she has to walk away.
I definitely agree with Ken that this story makes the last couple years of NYer stories look “wan” by comparison.
William,
One of the great things about a good short story is when it is really good, it can be enjoyed and doesn’t need to be looked at too closely to possibly infer what the writer never intended. And when you wrote, “The woman is so worn down by men’s foolishness that she has to walk away,” that better sums up what is happening in the story and closer to the writer’s intent. Tiny is a great heroine even if she has to walk away.
Larry B.
Larry —
Thanks for the nod. There’s another way to look at Tiny’s Exit: not that she is a hero despite her exit, but because of her exit. We She sees an untenable situation and has the courage to leave it. She learns something and acts on it.
Which brings up another point — the much touted and much maligned epiphany. Tiny has an epiphany, but it grow so organically out of the story that it doesn’t seem forced or trendy.