Some call burning flesh a `rite of passage’. Others say it’s an ugly throwback to slavery. But it’s a hot fashion statement, writes Lonnae O’Neal Parker
Imagine a carefully fashioned coat-hanger, slow-roasted over the blue-green flame of a Magic Chef range, heading for the fleshy expanse of your upper arm, your chest or the side of your behind.
For a fraction of a second, you can feel the heat before it touches your skin. Your heart races and instinctively you want to draw back. But you don’t. Because you want your brand to be sweet. Or if you think you’ll move, you brace yourself, holding on to a sink or table; or perhaps you get somebody else to hold you down.
Then comes the “hit”, a quick “pssssssst”. Or maybe it’s a “crackle” or “pop”. They say it doesn’t really hurt. But the smell of burning flesh can be weird. Especially when it’s yours.
Many people watching this year’s NCAA Final Four tournament caught sight of the big horseshoe-shaped scar on the arm of University of North Carolina’s Shammond Williams. Michael Jordan’s brand, hidden on his chest, is more discreet. Dallas Cowboy’s Emmitt Smith sported a brand on his arm for a 1993 cover of Sports Illustrated. Other folks have Greek letters melted into their calves or seared into their forearms.
Although doctors warn there can be complications – infection, excessive scarring, designs gone wrong – around the United States lots of people get branded. For some black Greek fraternity members (and fewer white ones) it’s a long-standing tradition, but experts say it’s also become something of a fad.
Gang members brand themselves to claim their set, while for others, brands are an extension of green Mohawks and multiple nose rings. Branding can forge a connection.
As Myyucca Sherman strolls across the Howard University campus, his baby dreadlocks standing at attention, he stops occasionally to slap hands with a buddy or trade barks with another “Que dog” who spots his bright purple sweatshirt emblazoned with gold Greek letters.
Sherman (19) has been a “Que”, a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity, since last year, and he’s got three brands – double, interlocking Omegas on his chest, and a large Omega with a small Greek A inside, for Alpha chapter, in the middle of his left arm. Of his initiation class of nine men, all chose to get branded.
It was the second time an organisation had made a permanent impression on him.
Sherman is reluctant to show the three- inch, five-point star that rides high on his left hip. He got that one at 13 to mark his membership in the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, a gang in his Akron, Ohio, home town. “The way our sect ran, you could get prayed in or beat in. I got beat in. Then there’s celebrating with drink and I was branded the day after with thick paper clips.”
Sherman credits the pre-college programme Upward Bound and rites of passage activities in high school with turning him from his gangster ways. He entered the University of Akron at 16 and transferred to Howard a year later.
After joining the fraternity at Howard, he says: “Initially, I wasn’t going to get a brand, but I thought about it and equated the whole fraternity life as another rite of passage. This was more ritualistic and traditional than the juvenile self- mutilation. This brand wouldn’t be like it was in a gang. It had deeper meaning, more history.”
In the past 10 years, branding has become a typical form of gang “tagging”, says Michael Borrero, a professor and director of the Institute for Violence Reduction at the University of Connecticut who has worked in gang outreach for more than 30 years. “It’s a ritual to say we are brothers, we are sisters, you are officially part of us,” Borrero says.
Michael Lyles (35), a Washington child welfare attorney who also heads his own Maryland law practice, has studied the historical origins of fraternity branding and its relation to African scarification practices and says burning carries a symbolism that crosses many cultures.
“Historically, branding probably came in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Lyles, an Omega since he was 17 who has brands on his right biceps and over his heart. “It took on a kind of widespread usage – mainly among the Omegas first, then the Kappas (Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity) and Alphas (Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity) began to do it also. One of the things that I guess solidified branding as something to do is the things that our fraternity is based on – manhood, scholarship, etc. It seemed to signify the `till the day I die- ness’ of it all, because supposedly you can’t remove it.”
In one scene from the 1988 Spike Lee movie School Daze, a girl is shown licking a brand on the chest of a brother from the fictitious Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity. Duane Filey (27), a fourth-grade teacher at James McHenry Elementary School in Lanham and a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, acknowledges wryly that, for some reason, women seem to find his scar compelling. Still, Filey, who has a diamond with a K inside branded on the left side of his chest, now says he regrets having it done.
“I was young and thought it was a cool thing to do,” Filey says. “I was like `I’m in Florida, I can have my shirt off and the babes will look at it.’ Women are into that. The brand, the frat … it was a conversation piece, they wanted to touch it.”
He now calls the practice barbaric. “As I got older, I started thinking about slavery and that sort of thing. I can’t even find the words to describe how ill it was to get a brand to identify you as a slave. This clearly isn’t for that purpose, but now I think people have just gotten out of control. It’s a big fad right now.”
When Suitland High School math teacher and basketball coach Eric Jeter (31) first came home with his Phi Beta Sigma brands – he has three – he says, “my parents were like, `Do you think you’re a piece of meat or something?’ They said, `We fought so hard to get away from slavery and branding and you go ahead and brand yourself.'”
Jeter says he understood their concern, but disagreed. He calls it a personal choice. “It’s not slavery. It’s basically something you want done. It’s more of a pride thing. You want people to know which fraternity you belong to without asking. When they see the brand, they know.”
Just down the hall, Suitland’s vice- principal, Mark Fossett (30), who has Kappa brands on his chest and arm, says, “The first question everybody always asks is, `Did it hurt?’ When I first got branded, it didn’t really hurt. But when it was healing, then it hurt. The actual brand was like an instant of pain.”
Fossett got branded in a hotel during the annual summer Greek picnic in Philadelphia. “This was a Kappa brother who was hitting other brothers.There were about 10 to 15 of us. He hit me on my arm – straight from the fire to my arm – then he heated the brand back up and hit the next guy behind me. Then he went from his arm to my chest. The iron couldn’t be as hot, it’s not like you have all that meat there so you don’t want it to be too deep.”
“When the skin is branded, the skin is actually burned. The degree of the burn depends on how hot the brand is,” says Rebat Halder, a professor and chair of Howard’s department of dermatology.
“If the burn is deep enough, then the normal skin comes off, and it is replaced by scar tissue. If it’s a first- or second- degree burn, skin doesn’t come off but you can have a blister develop in the area of a brand,” he says.
Of course there can be nasty complications. They include, Halder says, infection, pain, hyper- or hypo-pigmentation, where the skin actually changes color, and itchy or hypersensitive keloids, raised scar tissue that spreads beyond the actual boundaries of the original injury.
Halder, who has been at Howard since 1982, says he’s treated upward of 300 people with brands, mostly men who got fraternity brands in college, but at least 50 to 75 women, some former gang members and others. He says a number of his patients inquire about brand removal, which can be done surgically.
Kirk Blackman (30), a senior manager with the KPMG accounting and consulting firm in Washington, says that even though he works in a highly professional setting, he’s never regretted getting the Que branded on his left arm.
When folks who are unfamiliar with branding see it, he says, they are often overwhelmed by a certain tactile urge. They gotta touch it. They want to know why.
“Why would someone subject themselves to what they perceive to be very painful?” he’s asked. “You explain it to them and they say, `Oh, okay.’ It’s kind of like a `Man, that’s really deep’ kind of response. I don’t know if they ever really grasp it fully, or if they’re afraid to ask more questions,” he says.
Probably a good thing, since Blackman isn’t sure he has all the answers anyway.