I AM A PERSON OF COLOR. Orange, for the most part, but more than a little salmon-y pink as well. I am a person of pattern, too–with many summers’ worth of freckles accumulating on my arms and shoulders and other sun-exposed parts. Spotted, a zoologist might say, but not for camouflage, except perhaps when hiding in the leafy branches of late-autumn New England trees, which I don’t do very often. Color consciousness came to me early. As a child, I knew I was one of several living creatures set apart by color and spot. I’d ponder the connection between the leopard and me, thinking he had the better pattern, but I the better life. His jungle was free, but he had to kill to survive, which didn’t seem much fun, and besides, were I ever able to trade places with him, I wasn’t sure my mom could come along. I liked my life as it was, and my own confetti-like orange spots.
Thinking photographically, I sometimes imagined having a close-up taken of my back–where my spots are biggest–and marketing the pattern. The Skinner Freckle Print could have been used on scarves, wallpaper, car seat covers (for those gaudy muscle cars), pants, shirts, and so on.
I could have worn one of those shirts, donning a print identical to the one on my skin underneath. Has anyone ever tried dressing a leopard in a leopard print? Well, they should.
Anyway, having freckles seemed to me a good thing, and though I had more than most in my neighborhood, frecklefaces were common enough that mine didn’t cause much comment. Except on one occasion.
I was with my mother at the supermarket. She was in the middle of her negotiations with the cashier concerning a clipping from her vast file of very embarrassing coupons. A kid–he was thin and swarthy–came over with his head jutting forward and his eyes and mouth wide open. “What happened to your face?” he asked breathlessly. It could only be my freckles he was inquiring about, so my response was all haughty disdain: “What?”
“What happened to you? Were you in an accident?” It was hard to remain unaffected by the boy’s obvious compassion for his fellow man, er, boy. To coax the awful truth from me, he said, “Don’t worry. I won’t make fun of you.”
“This?” I said, touching my arms.
He gasped–as if he hadn’t realized the affliction was actually all over me. “Does that hurt?” he asked.
I don’t remember how I answered, but an almost identical incident occurred at my local liquor store a few weeks ago. Just as I moved to sign for my credit-card transaction, the cashier, another thin and swarthy citizen with eyes and mouth wide open, asked what had happened to my arms.
I thought I must be bleeding. But looking to make sure, I saw nothing unusual about the short, orange limbs extending from the sleeves of my T-shirt.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Did you burn yourself or something?”
“No.” It now dawned on me what he was talking about.
“Do you use medication for that?”
“No.” I wondered if he would have been so inquisitive with a guy who really had suffered burns up and down his arms.
We then had the usual conversation one has about freckles:
“Do you get those from the sun?”
“Well, it’s partly the sun, but more than that it’s the melanin of my skin that causes it to freckle in sunlight. My ancestors were from Ireland and a lot of Irish people have freckles.”
The cashier, who spoke with a heavy accent, seemed relieved that having freckles didn’t cause pain.
And yet, these days, freckles are said to be “in,” with it, a sign of the times. As Kara Jesella, an editor at Teen Vogue, told the Washington Post, freckles are “fresh faced and all-American.” Which, she added, “ties into what’s going on politically.” Lancôme, the cosmetics company, couldn’t agree more, and is marketing a special crayon for drawing on freckles. “Freckles,” Lancôme artistic director Ross Burton told the Post, “are a symbol of freedom.”
Gone are the days of Howdy Doody jokes or worse. (When we were kids, a cousin said I looked like I’d stood behind a screen while someone threw an unmentionable substance at me.) Now freckles speak of national resolve. Over there they have the axis of evil, over here we have freckles.
But for me, this distinguishing characteristic signals something besides America and freedom, something far deeper and more personal. I say it loud, and I say it proud: Freckles are the essence of what it means to be orange like me.
–David Skinner
