I loved dreadlocks long before I wore them, loved whatever I imagined they stood for, loved everything I thought they were supposed to mean. Before I grew my hair, a heartfelt question was lodged deep in my consciousness: “What would happen if a man who was, over the years, fairly consistent and quite conservative with his public persona, a man who was seen by his family, friends, colleagues and students in one particular way, suddenly exhibited himself in a way that ran radically counter to what people (thought they) had come to know in the years they knew him? What then?”

I had no idea. I was determined to find out.

It all started on a Monday morning in early March 1998, as I stood in my bathroom mirror, looking for dreadlocks. Every now and then fast-motion-photography strands of hair would shoot out, morphing my near-baldie into a thicket, into bushy locks, into a head of hair you could lose a hand in. That day I decided I wasn’t going to cut my hair again for a long, long time. I said it aloud, forming the words as they cracked the bathroom silence: “I’m growing dreadlocks.”

The declaration changed nothing. No sudden darkness as clouds passed in front of the sun, no rumbling, ominous music slowly emerging from underneath the scene. I simply said it aloud, and then said it again. “I’m growing dreadlocks.” No one knew. And no one would guess. As short as my hair was, the idea that I was growing dreadlocks would seem as absurd as a wheezy asthmatic insisting he was going to run a marathon. My hair was longer than it had been a couple of weeks earlier but it was still very, very short. When I stood in the bathroom and blinked; my hair shrank back to reality. I laughed at the notion. Dreadlocks? Me? Please.

Truth be told, it was my inner bohemian I really wanted to locate and bring to the surface. I’d grown up in safe, suburban Los Angeles, and it really wasn’t until I went away to school and met a wide variety of black folk—including some real-deal bohemians—that I realized what I’d missed in my black middle-class upbringing. I wanted to achieve that delicate, ideal, teeter-totter balance between the secretly bohemian Me I desired to be, and the Me I was to those closest.

I also wondered if I was running the risk of draining the anti-establishment value of dreadlocks—the very thing that attracted me to them. Straight up: Would dreadlocks still make a cultural statement if someone like me adopted the style? I didn’t know. At the time, I couldn’t know. I was troubled by the prospect of damaging a style I had so much affection for, and even if I was bringing that old Marx Brothers joke to life (said Groucho: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”), I went ahead with it. I was determined to do it. I tried to console my fears by assuring myself that it would take thousands, if not millions, of folks like me to effectively smooth out the bumpy cultural impact of American dread. I didn’t really think I could destroy it all by myself. But I knew that if it did happen, if dreadlocks became just another hairstyle—on my watch—that I’d never forgive myself.

As my hair grew long enough to get twisted—and as I painstakingly waited for my hair to lock—I busied myself by inhaling any knowledge I could about dreadlocks. As I minutely tracked my own origins, growth, and locking process, I also delved into the history, media portrayal, and cultural penetration of the hairstyle. All throughout my locking process I paid close and critical attention to what some Americans see when they gaze at twisted-and-then-dreadlocked me: I’m Jamaican, I’m Rasta, I’m a reggae musician, I smoke marijuana, I’m bohemian, I’m a drug dealer, I’m an artist, I subscribe to counter-culture values. Dreadlocks, I came to realize, are a thick, matted Rorschach test that personify the cultural chaos that churns in the American imagination.

I pondered the 1980s—what many consider the Golden Age of Dreadlocks, which ran from 1979 through the early 1990s—years that dreadlocks shocked, puzzled, angered, and, yes, amused a wide swath of Americans of all colors, including black folk. I identified and thought deeply about a wide range of dread appearances in our culture: on-stage shows like Whoopi Goldberg, Whoopi’s Broadway debut; films ranging from She’s Gotta Have It to Marked for Death; sitcoms like A Different World; sets by a range of comedians; in novels and essays from Alice Walker and Trey Ellis to Toni Morrison and Darius James. I was looking for any common understanding of a baffling hairstyle that, with its vague sense of form, its shapely lack of shape, seemed to be a symbol that emerged in the late 1990s along with postmodernism. Dreadlocks, I discovered, lie at the bewildering intersection of nature, style, immigration, politics, fashion, and personal agency. And yet, the more I delved into the various strands of the hairstyle, the more I felt like my own straight-laced persona, my own upright sensibility, might well be killing dreadlocks, might somehow be betraying the essence of the style itself.

If dreadlocks have been killed; I’m to blame. I take full responsibility. It’s all on me. If only I hadn’t tried and failed to use dreadlocks to explore the bohemian, hyphenated space between un- and conventional, I have to believe the hairstyle would still be the cutting-edge emblem it once was.

And yet, even though I do feel guilty about committing involuntary dreadslaughter, it appears dreadlocks, like hair persistently emerging from a cadaver, does, indeed, grow after death. The style—if not the spirit—somehow maintains a doggedly disruptive space in the American cultural imagination. Even though everybody and their grandma wears dreadlocks these days, the style seems to retain a slight trace of disturbing difference; those dangling locks still carry cultural weight. Even now, in 2015, they possess meaning—contested, ambiguous, somewhat unsettling meaning—that prompts ill-informed comments about red-carpet celebrities, prompts people like Anthony Mackie to suggest that “dreadlocks” equal “doing something wrong,” prompts police to target locksmen and women on the protest fields of Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities. Dread continues to assert, and continues to be “read,” long after its demonstrative relevance has receded. Its disruptive influence is a mere ghost of what it once was, but dreadlocks do remain an optical illusion, something that viewers peer into as much as they gaze upon. We’re going in, people still seem to say as they behold dreadlocks, even now, bringing all sorts of cultural baggage with them to the flight check-in counter.

But the question is this: Does the continuing cultural influence, the less-relevant-but-still-somewhat-relevant position dreadlocks hold in society today somehow reassure my twisted, tortured, guilt-ridden soul? Not really. The crime has been committed. I know the truth.

This essay is adapted from Bert Ashe’s memoir, Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles. He tweets at @Twistedbook.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]