Pretty Red on the Emerald Isle

Carrot Top. Rusty. Ginger. Pippi Longstocking.  Forehead smack.  

“How original. I’ve never heard that one before,” I want to  respond. “Connect the dots with my

freckles? What a clever idea!”  “Yes, that’s right, someone did leave me outside in the

rain and my hair rusted.” Hardy har har.

 As a redhead, I’ve heard all the jokes and jeers.

The only tag that didn’t make me wince with shame was the pet name my grandfather coined. “How’s my Pretty Red?” I can still hear his sonorous voice ask, employing the tender name he’d used for me all his life. It was always “my” Pretty Red. I was always his.

I’m the sole redhead on a family tree of dark haired relatives (including a twin brother), whose roots sink four generations in the United States. Beyond that, the branches get a little blurry. I’m often asked where my red hair comes from and whether or not I’m Irish.  “I don’t think so,” is my normal response.

But on a recent trip to the Emerald Isle, I began to wonder if a homeland could only be defined by ancestral roots, or could feeling at home tether me to the land too?

My hair color had changed over the years, going form darker to much lighter (to hide the greys)

Growing up in Los Angeles, there was a certain circus-freak fascination with my hair. Step right up, folks, and get your tickets to see The Bearded Lady; test your arm wrestling skills against The World’s Strongest Man; and don’t forget to feed a nickname to The Redhead before you go.

The authenticity of my hair color—a nutmeg-cinnamon-ginger blend —also provoked prolific questioning over the years, an inquiry my mother says would send her into orbit when strangers asked whether or not her infant daughter’s locks were “natural.”

“Why would I dye a baby’s hair?” was her frustrated response. 

I spent my teens rubbing lemon onto my tresses to lighten them up, and in an attempt to obliterate my freckles, I slathered “Fade Out” cream on my face, hoping the dots and the attention to them would obey. Dating was hell, especially in Los Angeles, where blondes were bombshells, brunettes were sultry, and redheads had “great personalities,” the kiss of death in courting jargon.

 I remember during college, a friend set me up with her boyfriend’s roommate. On the night of the double date, while we primped at her place, the guy left a message on the answering machine.

“I’m looking forward to meeting your friend. She’s cute, right? Not some red-haired, freckle-faced girl?”

I went on the date anyway, but the remark stung, joke or not.

Names and commentary like this were frequent, and as a kid, my mom or grandmother tended to my wounds, braided my hair with ribbons, and soothed me with verbal band-aids like “special” and “unique.”

As I got older, however, it was my grandfather’s advice that got me through. “Pretty Red, you’ll spend your school years trying to fit in, and the rest of your life trying to stand out. Consider your hair a head start.”

As a redhead, freckles are part of life, and Emerald Isle green is my favorite color

The first time I went to Ireland was nearly 20 years later. I was in my early forties and once there, I wished I had visited decades earlier.  Though still a minority, redheads are found in higher concentrations on the British Isles than anywhere else in the world, and I read recently that an estimated 10 percent of the population of Ireland has red hair. At social events back home, I often felt like a zebra at the horse farm, but in Ireland there were always three or more members of my homogeneous herd roaming about.

Being a redhead anywhere is a bit like being in a club whose secret handshake blazes atop our heads. In a hotel, at a restaurant, on the street, whenever I cross paths with another redhead, there is an unspoken connection; an eye lock that I perceive to mean, “Yeah, I know what it’s like.”  In Ireland, at times, the connection was a little stronger.

At a pub in Belfast, I somehow ended up on the dance floor, pseudo Riverdancing and drunk (why else would I be Riverdancing?) with a blue-eyed, auburn-haired girl about 10 years younger than I who wore a swingy pleated skirt and Doc Martin ankle boots. When the music ended, she put her speckled nose up to mine and kissed me. “I love Irish girls,” she said in a sexy brogue.

Too stunned to break the probably-very-obvious news that I was not a real River dancer, nor Irish, I let her disappear into the bar’s crowded thicket, preferring to savor the souvenir of my first and only kiss as an Irish girl, with an Irish girl.

On a more recent trip, it was instant kinship with redheaded Olive, whose fine features, fitted dress and heels, and contagious spirit seemed cut from quintessentially Irish literary heroine cloth. I’d met her on the vast and idyllic Liss Ard Estate in the countryside near Skibberdeen, County Cork, and when I saw her at our communal dinner table, I immediately planted myself next to her. She told me something I didn’t expect to hear.  “Even though redheads are more popular here in Ireland we were still made to feel different and awkward.” Garfield, Marmalade Head, Freckles, Ginger Nut, and Carrot Top were all names hurled her way.

I thought sure red hair would be more celebrated in a land where the trait is embedded in common Irish surnames such as Flannery, meaning descendant of the red warrior, and Flynn, meaning son of a red-haired man. Someone took a photo of me with Olive, and when I viewed it later, I thought we looked like sisters.  In a way, we are connected by recessive genes and shared experience. As redheads do, Olive and I eventually moved on to discuss curious superstitions linked to our kind.

“Ya know, some of my cousins were involved in building the Dunbrody replica ship moored in New Ross (the homestead of JFK),” said Olive. “They told me they had heard stories that red-haired women should not be allowed near the ship when it takes its maiden voyage. Bad luck.”

Another Irish woman told me that it’s considered bad luck if the first person to enter a house on New Year’s Day is a redhead.

And still more. During the Middle Ages, people with red hair were sometimes thought to be witches, and even Shakespeare, I’d heard, used red wigs on his most dastardly characters.  The list goes on.

Over the two weeks of my most recent visit to Ireland, I’d been quizzing redheads and non-alike to see if I could turn up any charms or folklore beyond the banal nicknames and typical omens of bad luck, witchery, and hellfire and brimstone. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but in Ireland, there’s a good chance you’ll find an answer, or at least have a late-night epiphany, at the local pub.

Skellig Michael is known for its well-preserved early Christian monastery

 Pubs are the epicenter and social glue of any Irish town, and certainly in tiny Port Magee, a crayola-colored fishing village on a rocky stretch of coast in the southwest of Ireland, where I’d landed for a night. Its pint-sized bar with beer-sticky floors was packed with young and old, couples and singles, working and retired, who had gathered like members of an extended family. Cheers and backslaps greeted new arrivals, while local musicians sat on wooden stools in the corner and jammed on odd-looking instruments. I’d struck up a conversation with the fleshy-faced, red-bearded man next to me, who belted out spirited lyrics of cultural anthems I wanted to know. During a lull, I acknowledged our shared “gingerness” and asked him what whacky stories and names he’s heard all his life.

“Don’t ya worry about dat,” he said, tugging on the ends of my hair. “Red’s the color of power, of candied apples and strawberries, of wine, and all things we can resist.”

He was right. The whole freckle-face, carrot-top thing has been a little like the story of the ugly duckling.  At a certain point in my mid to late 20s, I, like most redheads, began to feel more like the swan.

The splintered debris of a taunted youth eventually transformed into thick protective plumes, billowed by confidence and teeth-grit determination. And eventually, like most redheads do, I learned to love my fiery hair and embrace the attention and distinctness I had once shunned.

My grandparents as young travelers

In a taxi on the way to the airport on my final day in Ireland, the chatty driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror. 

“I can hear ya are American, but ya must have a little Irish in ya there, eh pretty red?”

There’s something about the Irish lilt that makes my knees weak and my eyes pinwheel. It took away some of the sting of hearing the beloved nickname I hadn’t heard for a while.

My grandfather had died the November before my last trip to Ireland. I sat with him on the couch holding his hand, he in visible pain and me teary-eyed, anticipating the goodbye. 

“Well, Pretty Red. It looks like I won’t make it until Thanksgiving,” he said.

He didn’t.

But in Ireland, surrounded by a coterie of Carrot Tops, Marmalade Heads, and Ginger Nuts, I felt like I belonged. I felt my grandfather near again.

I felt like Pretty Red.