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CounterPunch
October
12, 2002
Proverbial Wisdom:
Red!
by SUSAN DAVIS
"Be the Reds!"
Soccer Fan T-Shirt, Seoul,
Korea 2002
"..beat him like a redheaded stepchild."
Proverbial expression, Illinois,
2002
"I feel
really sorry for you middle-aged women..."
The voice is coming from behind me. Is that all my birthdays
trailing me through Bergner's department store, or is that Lucy,
my 14-year-old Natalie Wood-look-alike?
"... I mean, you have no place to
shop. Look what they're offering you." There's outrage in
her voice.
We are stalled in Better Sportswear between
Ralph Lauren and Liz Claiborne. Truer words were never spoken,
Lucy. There's the Polo look of deep navy, gold and green plaids
on one side of the aisle, and Liz's country club look, bold stripes
and cabled knits in primary colors on the other. From the ceiling
hangs a poster of a perfectly made up blond women hugging a Golden
retriever. "You're right, let's split."
We're shopping for red sweaters because,
even though it's September 22 and 82 degrees outside, last winter
I had a serious sweater crisis. I'd landed in central Illinois
from Southern California with a box of wool clothing I hadn't
worn in twenty years. By the time I realized how cold it was
getting, it was January and far too late. There was nothing in
the stores except "cruise wear."
Actually, my sweater problem was a color
problem. A BIG color problem. By February, the Illinois sky had
been low and gray for months, and there were months to go. Months
of gritty parking lots and winds whipping down from Canada. Unbroken
glacial plains from Dodgeville, Wisconsin to the Indiana border.
Months of long underwear. It was so dark in the morning that
we ate oatmeal by candlelight. In January there had been a brief,
remarkable hot spell, and my witch hazel trees suddenly bloomed
bright red. Birds began to nest prematurely. The next week an
ice storm wiped out the witch hazels and stomped some foolhardy
crocuses. The birds must have survived. My neighbors were taunting
me for being a softie. I noticed that at parties they all told
"great ice storm of 1991"-type stories. "We haven't
even had a power outage yet" they laughed. I could tell
they were looking forward to the big, weeklong power outage party
at the house of the guy with a generator.
I brought with me that chic Southern
California winter wardrobe -- all black. Except for a few pieces
from the year when the New York Times style pages told us "Gray
is the new black," I had black pants, black skirts, several
black sweaters, a black vest. Admittedly, I also owned a brown
dress and a grey dress, too, and they could be brightened up
with scarves. True, I had fuchsia and chartreuse blouses that
could occasionally peek out, like those poor crocuses, from under
my black sweaters, but in Illinois you have to wear so many layers
that it hardly made any difference. I had a black woolly hat.
Well, black was tres chic in San Diego. This shouldn't
have been so hard, I've lived cold places most of my life, including
Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Wyoming. But by February I
was afraid to look in my closet.
My students were making things worse.
They were all coughing what I think of as the "Illinois
cough" -- it starts before midterms, a deep wet bronchial
hack that just never goes away. They sat palely in class, hungover
or overworked, or both, and glared at me for assigning whole
books. They wore the Gap/Abercrombie/surplus store palette: black,
gray, navy and "dirty" blue denim, the faded disaffected
dingy colors of college kids. (Their belly-buttons all showed,
too -- on purpose -- but in February?)
And my workplace wasn't helping. My refurbished
WPA-era building had not yet been repainted. The inside of Gregory
Hall was still that hospital green people in the '40s thought
was soothing. Under fluorescent lights, the foyer looked like
the bottom of an aquarium. I felt like I was swimming underwater
as I passed the busts of the barons of the 19th-century press
-- Medill, Scripps, St. Clair. The only bright face was Elijah
Parish Lovejoy, the Illinois abolitionist editor murdered for
publishing antislavery tracts at Alton. The dean had proudly
pulled the plaster portrait out of the lineup and given Lovejoy
a spot of honor in an alcove, right over Daily Illini box.
I gave Elijah Lovejoy an admiring glance every morning as I headed
to my office.
I started exercising more. I considered
dyeing my hair red. I wore more makeup, but it made me feel embarrassed
whenever I saw Elijah's unclouded face. I wore Chanel No. 5 to
class to cheer myself up. The students snoozed on. I dug down
in an old chest and found a red sweater from the 1980s, snipped
out the shoulder pads and tried it on. It had two moth holes
(fixable) and a dark stain near the collar, probably from nursing
Lucy. It wouldn't come out, but my students would never notice.
For two months I wore that red sweater like a life preserver,
and I didn't feel better until my neighbor's redbud began to
bloom, producing something I've never seen before, a tree outlined
in bright violet. Redbuds flower before they leaf out.
This is not going to happen again. Lucy
is going to help me get a collection of new red sweaters.
What is it about red? The proverbial
wisdom about red is suspicious and contradictory. Red is the
color of magic and power in folklore, but it also the color of
betrayal. Brewer writes "the red haired have been popularly
held to be unreliable ...." In tradition, Judas Iscariot
was said to have red hair.
It is also the color of shame. One can
be caught red-handed, the red stain disclosing some horrible
secret, the scarlet letter, searing Hester Prynne's breast.
Thus the red-handed stepchild, more despised
than any other of the mix and match kids, because he or she gives
up some skeleton in the genetic closet. Irish blood, perhaps,
in the days before was cool to be Irish.
But red is also the color of ecstasy,
and courage to the hilt. And sometimes the two go together. In
the French Republic, the "Red Republicans never hesitated
to dye their hands in blood." They took it all the way.
And of course, red signals anarchy and revolution. But this year
in Seoul, Korean soccer fans could apparently ignore the color's
political implications and urge their team to "Be the Reds!"
But not so easy in the U.S. given our history, not for a long
time. My friend who brought me back the T-shirt cautioned "be
careful where you wear this."
"T. J. Maxx," announces Lucy,
and I know I can trust her. T. J. Maxx is a super-discounter
dealing in manufacturers' overruns and overstocks from the upscale
retailers. It's "the only place to shop in this town"
according to Ruth, my deeply-artificially- tanned, botoxed and
very stylish haircutter. T. J. Maxx organizes clothing by size
("Misses," "Womens") and type ("Sportswear"
"Career,") rather than by designer or department. There
are no unionized saleswomen, no alterations shop, no counters
where you can get a makeover, no extra overhead at all, just
huge racks of clothing that go on forever. You find your size
("Medium") and start sorting through the world's overproduction.
In fact, T. J. Maxx signals the end of the department store,
and you can tell this by the mix of poor and well-dressed people
shopping there. The merchandise comes from China, Macao, Korea,
Honduras, everywhere, just like the clothing at Nordstrom, Saks,
and Marshall Field. Most of it's not dirt cheap, but it's definitely
cheaper than retail.
"Sweaters, Mom," gestures Lucy.
We fill a cart with about forty, and start winnowing. What I
want is a color without a speck of gray mixed in. There's cherry
red (too reminiscent of last year's angora lifesaver), brick
red (yes), flag red (no, too Ralph), terra-cotta (yes), ruby
(no), garnet (yes), burgundy (no no no), red and burnt orange
(yes), and fuchsia (yes!). We work our way through textures,
sleeve lengths and necklines, and end up with four that will
make me feel hopeful every time I look in my closet. Somehow
a blue green fuzzball with hydrangea flecks creeps in. That's
okay. A little electric blue-green never hurt anybody. On our
way through checkout, I snag a long thick muffler, brick with
a camel stripe, just to be safe.
Why was I so sure red would fix my problems?
It seems the most intense answer to black and gray. Wearing red
is definitely about NOT wearing black. In fact, red is
the new black.
Red is also associated endlessly in literature
and poetry with women, with their messy reproductive lives. Women
menstruate, they have bright red flowerings every month that
everyone covers up, despises like the red headed stepchild, and
tries to pretend aren't happening. Yet we also claim our messiness
defines us. Some mothers are embarrassed to talk to their daughters
about menstruation; others give them first period parties, with
pink cakes, harkening back to some earlier celebrations of menarche.
One friend told me of her deep resentment on finally figuring
out the female reproductive cycle. Her mother told her that when
she got her period she'd be able to have a baby. She deeply looked
forward to it, and then was very disappointed to realize it happened
month after month, year after year. Wasn't once enough? I can
see her point.
These days the drug companies want our
culture to want it both ways. Some advertise unending femininity
through hormonal replacement therapy that can give women side-effect
bleeding into their '60s and '70s. Others, or possibly the same
companies, argue that periods are a nuisance altogether, not
to be thought about unless you're planning a pregnancy. They
promote a constant low dose of estrogen so women need have no
monthly bleeding at all. No fuss, no muss, no red reminder, no
nothing. There's something weird about that. (Can you imagine
the drug companies and the paper products industry going mano
a mano over this issue? ) You can visit www.webmd.lycos.com
for all the details; the on-line Museum
Of Menstruation is a lot funnier, and includes a collection
of menstrual humor and an absorbing history of "sanitary
protection."
Who needs to be protected, and from what?
As lots of feminists have pointed out, at some deep level menstrual
blood remains fearsome, especially to men. But again, the attitude
is double, ambivalent. In folklore woman's monthly blood is also
sometimes treated as magical and life giving.
The great joke collector Gershon Legman
recorded several versions of a joke about a dying man resuscitated
by performing oral sex on a menstruating woman. The sick man's
relatives arrive at the hospital expecting to find him stone
dead, but he's up, showered, shaving and whistling "Hail
Brittania." "Another transfusion like that and I'll
live forever!" "My favorite joke," writes Legman:
"Analyze away!"
That's quite a different attitude from
the pill mongers who would like to make blood disappear from
our awareness, the same sorts of people, I suppose who would
never allow any of us to die either, at least not of natural
causes.
All that mess is a pain until it's gone.
Then some women miss it. Lucille Clifton has written the only
poem I've come across about menopause. In "to my last period"
she talks about menstruation like an unreliable girlfriend, a
hussy:
"Well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty eight years
thirty eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow."
now it is done,
and i feel just like the
grandmothers who
afterthe hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful, wasn't she beautiful?
(Cary Nelson, ed. Anthology of Modern
American Poetry, Oxford. 1991)
That's red. Beautiful trouble.
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is
the author of Spectacular Nature.
She can be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
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