I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen’s eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.
When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes.
I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself.
For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.
I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours – out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.
Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don’t do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them.
It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.
She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn’t let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans – all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.
In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.
I passed whole portions of my life – days, months, years – in pure directed progress, getting up every morning and setting to work, working so hard and so continually that I avoided examining in any way what I knew about my life. Busywork became a trance state. I ignored who I really was and how I became that person, continued in that daily progress, became an automaton who was what she did.
We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.
You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.
Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.
Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.
Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.
I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman’s needs or desires.
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.
The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.