In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.
Books can offer a counter narrative – another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don’t know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.
No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.
Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.
She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet.
I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.
Whatever magic Jesus’ grace promised, I didn’t feel it.
Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.
Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other.
I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals.
Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.
The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries.
Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is a regular part of life. That everyone does it, that they just don’t talk about it in public.
When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell.
She was an actress in the theater of true life.
What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.
I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.
The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing.
Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.