My goodness gracious! My e-mail address was certainly a hot communication destination last week, as about 20 really mad Black women from around the country — some whom I knew and most whom I did not — vented their spleen about Chris Rock’s documentary, “Good Hair.”

I generally get a lot of e-mail daily on a wide variety of subjects, but I usually I don’t get such a high volume of e-mail responses on one topic unless I’ve written something uncomplimentary about Bernard Parks.

But hey, I hadn’t written a word about Chris Rock or his movie In fact, I didn’t know anything about it. But oh boy! A whole lot of Black women seemed to know a great deal about the comedian and his documentary and they let me know in no uncertain terms how extremely offended they are by him and his film.

They accused Rock of having a “slave mentality,” of “tearing down Black women for the world to see,” of “making Black women his punchline,” of “outing Black women and trivializing their hair issues,” of being “disrespectful,” “hypocritical,” “hard up for money,” “absolutely not funny” and on and on.

After receiving a barrage like that, I dropped everything and went to the Magic Johnson Theater Sunday evening, plopped down $10 of the hard-earned money I get from The Wave and saw the movie for myself. (Actually, the outing cost me $20 — $10 for the ticket and $10 for a medium bag of popcorn and a medium size diet Coke!)

Based on the reaction it stirred among my e-mailers, the movie was not at all what I expected. It was good. It was interesting. It was informative. It was as advertised — a documentary about the concept of “good hair” among African-American women and the lengths (that’s a pun) to which they have gone and are going to achieve that concept.

While Rock is a comedian, his documentary is no joke. He didn’t put on a comedy act and make fun of Black women and their hair. Sure, he made several humorous asides that were more ironic than funny, but on the whole this was a serious film. In fact, the only time the theater audience had a really good belly laugh was when Rock asked the Rev. Al Sharpton if his wife would let him touch her hair. After a pause to think about it, Sharpton replied: “The real question is, would I let her touch mine?” That was funny.

I learned a great deal about Black women’s hair from the documentary — from the days of Madame C.J. Walker’s hot pressing irons to the torture sessions associated with dangerous sodium hydroxide relaxers to the present must-have and extremely expensive hair weaves. Did you know that many hair weaves cost a minimum of $1,000 just to put it in and hundreds more for its upkeep? In the film, women admitted to paying for their weaves rather than paying their rent, and the men in their lives decried the fact that they couldn’t list their wives’ weaves as a dependent on their income tax returns!

Then there’s the economic retardation associated with Black women’s quest for good hair. It seems, according to the documentary, that everybody is making a fortune off Black hair except Black people. Almost all the pioneering makers of Black hair products have been taken over by White people and Asians — mainly Koreans, who seem to own every wig and strand of weave in the world.

A Black woman can’t get a weave without putting money directly into the pockets of a long line of Koreans — starting with the owners of the store in the ’hood where they sell the pieces of hair, all the way down to the procurers who grab it up from the Indians who routinely shave their heads for you in a solemn religious ritual. The only Black person who makes any money off weaves is the woman who sews it onto your head.

And then, of course, there was the obvious subtext: Why are Black women so obsessed with their hair and why do they go to such extremes to make it look like something it’s not? Oh, there was the obligatory discussion of self-esteem issues, of seeking the European standard of beauty, of wanting to look White, etc., but I did not find those explorations to be either a “put down” or derisive of Black women, because they were a natural segue from earlier discussions of the physical pain, health hazards and personal costs of achieving Black beauty as perceived by Black people.

Actually, all the permed and weave-wearing women in the film were adamant and unapologetic about the things they do to their hair. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all about looking good, and having a head full of long, flowing tresses that blow in the wind makes them look good. And that’s that.

Only two women in the film wear their hair as it grows out of their heads: a student at Santa Monica High School and actress Tracie Thoms. The teenager wore a coarse natural in that random, haphazard, I-just-got-out-of-bed style and it was becoming. She had a lovely face and her overall appearance was quite stunning. She looked like a pretty little Black girl who just woke up. However, I felt a little sorry for the teenager because she was surrounded by three of her perm-wearing classmates, and while one of them admitted that the natural wearer’s hairdo was cute, they, nonetheless, talked about how they didn’t believe she could get a job or get ahead in life with that kind of hair. The pretty young lady looked a little sad by the time the segment ended.

Thoms, on the other hand, was a forceful wearer of natural tendrils who maintained that her own God-given hair looks better than the Indian hair many Black women wear on their heads. “Who are they fooling?” she asked. “Everybody knows it’s not their hair! It takes an abundance of self-esteem and conviction to wear one’s hair as I do. And I look good!” she asserted.

So you see, Rock’s much maligned documentary is very elucidative — it doesn’t pass judgment or resolve any conflicts, but provides information and food for thought. I think my $20 was well spent on the experience. I also think my angry e-mailers were reacting to whatever Rock may have said or done during his appearance on Oprah and on something called the “Wendy Williams Show” and not to the film itself. I didn’t see either of those TV shows, so I don’t know what was said on them.

If Rock’s appearance on those shows provoked such disdain among the Black women who contacted me, then he did a terrible disservice to his documentary, which was a good one that ought to be shown on PBS or the History Channel — once they clean up some of the language.