A constant reminder of my outcast status

During the first school week in first grade, my teacher gave all the students an assignment: draw a self portrait. She gave us each a sheet of paper and a box of crayons and told us to get started. Even looking back on it now, that's a pretty daunting task for a 6 year old. And to add to the pressure, she told us she was going to hang all of the drawings on the wall. She said she'd place our name under our picture to help the students remember each others' names. That means it should be at least somewhat of a realistic portrayal.

I didn't even know where to start. Should I draw a profile? A full body head-to-toe picture? I looked around the room, trying not to look like I was cheating (not that that's even possible for a self portrait). It seemed like the other kids were sticking to mug shot style drawings. Most of the kids around me had started by drawing a big oval. I followed their lead and pulled out the black crayon.

I drew sort of an egg shape on the sheet of paper, then added to circles for eyes and a big semicircle for a smile. Not a bad start really. By this point I was feeling pretty confident. My picture wasn't awful. The border of the egg shape was nice and smooth, and the eye circles were perfectly round. I was moving right along now.

I decided I had to give my picture some characteristics that would let the other kids know it was me - some uniqueness. I have blond hair and blue eyes. Easy. I added some yellow lines for hair and a couple of small blue circles for my eye color. Not bad. But it felt like something was missing. The picture had the bright areas of yellow and blue, but mostly it was black lines on a white background.

Ahh yes! Skin tone. I wanted to fill in the face with some skin color, so I scanned the crayon box for something appropriate. Nothing. No "flesh" or "tan" colors. I was using the classic Crayola 8 pack.

I mulled over the decision for a few minutes then decided to go with the closest color I could find. I pulled out the orange crayon and started filling in one cheek. It looked kinda weird, but maybe that's because I had only filled in a small section. I moved on to the other side of the face, then the nose area, then the chin. Soon, my entire face was filled with bright orange. It looked terrible, but I could only assume that all the other kids had the same problem. In that moment, I remember thinking the black kids in class were lucky that Crayola included "brown" in the 8 pack.

The teacher started wandering around the room, collecting everyone's drawings. As she lifted up each sheet, I started to notice that some of the other kids left their faces white. They didn't bother to color it in. I thought maybe they were lazy or slow. I pitied them.

The teacher finished collecting the papers and then hung them up on the wall one by one. She started on the top left corner of one wall, and put them all in a row from left to right across the top of the entire wall. As she tacked up each picture, I began to realize that it wasn't just a handful of slackers who forgot to fill in their skin color - it was everyone. Even the black kids left their faces white.

She hung up maybe 15 pictures before she got to mine. And as each picture was revealed, my actual face turned redder and redder with my growing embarrassment. By the time she got to mine, it felt like my skin was on fire. I was sweating. Then she got to my picture. It would have been more realistic if I had used red instead of orange.

Of course all the other kids laughed when they saw it. And who could blame them. This is probably the first life event I can remember where I felt truly different. All I wanted in the world was to be like all the other kids. My orange face remained on the wall for weeks, surrounded by all those white faces, a constant reminder of my outcast status.