Red : A History of the Redhead (9781603764032) by Harvey Jacky Colliss

Author:Harvey, Jacky Colliss [Harvey Colliss Jacky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603764032
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2015-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

A Scotsman, Tam Blake, was perhaps the first of the Celtic diaspora to make it to the New World, in 1540 (although there are legends that the aptly named St. Brendan the Navigator beat both the Vikings and Christopher Columbus to it, in the sixth century, thus opening up a whole new field of possibilities for those Native American stories of red-haired giants). Tam would be followed by more adventurers in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Red hair—as with the Normans in Sicily—has always been a convenient marker of human migration. So it was to be again. In the 1650s, under Oliver Cromwell, tens of thousands of Irish were shipped as slaves to the West Indies. In the eighteenth century many more were transported as convicts to Australia. In what has been called the final act in the great Celtic diaspora, in the nineteenth century there were immense migrations from both Scotland and Ireland to North and South America, to Canada, and to Australia and New Zealand. Once again, the gene for red hair went with them.

Clara Bow herself, the “It” girl of Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties (a sobriquet coined for her by none other than Elinor Glyn) owed her head of bubbling red curls to her Anglo-Irish and Scottish ancestry. Bow emerged from a childhood and adolescence of great hardship and tragedy with an underlying sense of herself as being set apart and thus extremely vulnerable, which she sought to disguise for all she was worth. She spoke of herself as being awkward and funny-faced and was teased for her coppery ringlets at school as many redheaded children are, yet in front of a camera she had “It” and to spare. Hollywood, and America, had discovered the redhead.

It is one thing to have your hair color as a badge of your underclass status in the Old World. It is quite another to carry it as a marker of your identity into the New. Transpose red hair into this environment and it comes to mean something completely different. It becomes a mark of authenticity as well as of identity. Rather than a stigma, it becomes something to celebrate, a bold visual claim to your heritage and history. And it must be remembered that in America there was already an underclass, marked out by the color not of its hair but of its skin. Immigrants from the Old World might indeed be regarded as of lowly social caste by those white-skinned Americans born in the New World, just as the Irish has been by the Anglo-Irish in the Old. They might still suffer what Noel Ignatiev in his How the Irish Became White defines as the “hallmark of racial aggression, the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status.” But whereas in the Old World there had been no buffer, no slave community beneath them, in America there was. In fact there were two: first the black community, and then as another wave of immigrants reached the New World from the Old, Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms of the 1880s.

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