Does hair make the man? Some styles send an unmistakable message—though with dreadlocks, what that message is can be complicated. For Ashe, a professor of English and American studies at Richmond, the desire to adopt the Jamaican look, if not the whole Rasta/countercultural life, took twenty years to realize. He did extensive research on the style —even developing his findings into a course—and his memoir combines the socio-cultural history of dreads with his own experience of how they changed the way others perceive him.
