Better Dead than Red

Martha Wiseman

Word Count 770

No one believes I was once a redhead.

“When you were born,” my mother told me, “ I said, ‘She has red hair!’ The doctor said, ‘No, it’s just blood.’ And I said, ‘That’s red hair.’”

Whether or not, at birth, I had enough hair for its color to register, I don’t know. I do know that my mother liked to feel vindicated.

No one else on either side of my family had red hair, though when he grew a beard, my father called its color red, or at least brownish red, as if in alliance with me.

In my seventh-grade yearbook. Peter Barnes wrote, “Rather be dead than red in the head.” I was sure he meant it as a joke, referring to my red hair; I still think so—I doubt he knew the saying’s origin. I didn’t, either; at age twelve, I was limited in my understanding of politics and international relations.

My high-school roommate was also a redhead, though her hair was more in the orangey carrot-colored category. She was very pretty, knew how to wear makeup, knew how to sashay, but subtly. In our senior year, I’d hear her sing snippets of songs from Hair: “Where do I go, Follow the river”; “Easy to be hard, Easy to be cold”; and to make me squirm, “Masturbation can be fun.” I can’t remember if she’d seen the show (it had opened the previous spring) or listened to the cast album or had heard about the songs from someone else. I think she fancied herself a free spirit, something I was far from being. She liked to flick her red bangs across her face. I had no moves like that.

The summer before our last year of high school—it must have been that summer—I was introduced by a director friend of my father’s to the two young men who wrote the book and lyrics for Hair, Gerome Ragni and James Rado. They happened to be in the Russian Tea Room when we were. One of them did have an awful lot of dark curly hair, down to his shoulders, though I don’t know if that was Ragni or Rado. My father would have had little interest in the musical; I didn’t, either, square as I was then. A little blip on the screen of famous and quasi-famous people who, like shadow figures behind a scrim, served as a backdrop to my own artistic inclinations.

It was only when I returned to school that fall, and my roommate sang those songs from Hair that I realized how far the musical had penetrated the culture, at least the microculture that I found myself in.

Sonya, in the third act of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, says to her young and beautiful stepmother, Yelena, “I’m not attractive,” to which Yelena replies, “You have beautiful hair.” Sonya knows Yelena is trying to soften the truth: “No! No! When a woman isn’t attractive, they always say: ‘You have beautiful eyes, you have beautiful hair....’ For many years, I identified with Sonya in her self-assessment, hoping my auburn hair would offset my plainness. I must have believed on some level that my mother was right when she told me my hair was my best quality.

I’m not bothered by my white hair. I’ve never, ever been tempted to color it, to try to resurrect that auburn. I just want others to know what my hair once was. This desire is certainly a form of vanity.

But I must also recognize that what I once was is both relevant and irrelevant. The redheaded self is layered—not buried—within my changeable current self. We like to think we can figure out who we are, but we can identify only certain aspects, certain flashes of history, certain habits of mind.

My mother, in her sixties and early seventies, dyed her hair back to the black it had been, leaving, as if in partial acknowledgment of her age, a Susan-Sontag white streak. It strikes me now that when she decided to forego the painstaking dye job (which she did herself at home) and to allow her hair to be the white the black had covered—bright white and silky—she was accepting, to some degree, the inevitable effects of time and the futility of disguising them.

I suppose we use our hair—its youthful thickness (if we’re lucky), its lengths, its styles, its graying and whitening, its thinning—as a marker not just for our age but for our varying selves. I can greet, and I can say farewell—at the same time—to that redheaded person who, though she was told she had beautiful hair, struggled to be as vivid as its auburn brightness.

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. The Georgia Review has published four essays of hers, the latest in Fall 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and White Eagle Coffee Store Press brought out a long story, Double Vision (2004), as a chapbook. Her “Dreams of Foreign Cities,” a prize-winner in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Contest, was published in Fish Anthology 2021, and essays are out or forthcoming from Ponder Review, Under the Sun, and The Bookends Review. She has also published an essay on Proust, book reviews, and translations from French, and she has collaborated on dance-theater pieces at the University of Michigan.