Trash

Table of Contents

 

 

“Simply stunning . . . The special qualities of her style include a perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms; an unassertive cumulative lyricism; an intensely imagined and presented sensory world; and above all, a language for the direct articulation of deep and complex feelings.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“Allison uses strong, direct language to explore the fragile and tangled emotions between love and hate. It is what makes her characters live on the page and beyond.”

—
Los Angeles Times

 

“Compulsively readable . . . Allison can make an ordinary moment transcendent with her sensuous mix of kitchen-sink realism and down-home drawl.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Allison is abundantly gifted . . . She has a superb ear for the specific dialogue of her characters.”

—
The Washington Post

 

“A hell of a writer—tough and loose, clear and compassionate.”

—
The Village Voice

 

“Dorothy Allison writes straight from the gut, the brain, and the heart.”

—
Associated Press

 

“Spectacular . . . sensual . . . Allison has a spare gospel-tinged lyricism that few can match.”

—
Newsday

 

“Sensational.”

—
Esquire

 

“Powerful.”

—
People

DOROTHY ALLISON
is the bestselling author of
Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller,
and a memoir,
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
(all available from Plume). Born in Greenville, South Carolina, she currently lives with her partner and her son in Northern California.

 

 

 

 

PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Original edition published by Firebrand Books.

 

First Plume Printing, October 2002

Copyright © Dorothy Allison, 1988, 2002

All rights reserved

 

Versions of some of these stories have appeared in
Conditions, The Lesbian Fiction Anthology
edited by Elly Bulkin (Gay Presses of New York),
Off Our Backs, On Our Backs,
and
Out/Look.
Page 221 constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Allison, Dorothy.

Trash : stories / by Dorothy Allison.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11781-1

1. Southern states—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Working-class women—Fiction. 3. Women, poor—Fiction. 4. Lesbians—Fiction. I. Title. PS3551.L453 T7 2002

813’.54—dc21 2002066243

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

 

 

 

 

T
he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.

Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history. There is no story in which my family is not background, even as I have moved very far from both Greenville, South Carolina, and the poverty to which I was born. I remain my mother’s bastard girl, a woman who treasures her handmade family, my own adopted bastard child and the lover/partner who has nurtured and provoked me for more than fifteen years. We become what we did not intend, and still the one thing I know for sure is that only my sense of humor will sustain me.

Stories I began as a girl seem different to me when I read them now. It is almost as if I did not write them, as if that writer were another person—which of course she is. Twenty and twenty-five years ago when I first began to publish stories, I was a different person—not just younger but more girlish than it is easy for me to admit today. I grew up writing these stories. I made peace with my family. I forgave myself and some of the people I had held in such contempt—most of all those I loved. That forgiveness took place in large part through the writing of these stories, in a process of making peace with the violence of my childhood, in owning up to it and finding a way to talk about it that did not make me more ashamed of myself or those I loved.

When I was considering the question of the new edition of the stories, I worried that the conversation in which they had originated was specific to its time. There is a way in which that is exactly so—though much less so and in different ways than I had imagined. I thought they would have grown boring to me, but they have not. Rereading them, I find myself once more sitting forward and grinding my teeth, or putting the book down and pacing a bit, or sometimes just laughing out loud. Yes, it is true that I wrote many of these stories out of my own need, satisfying myself rather than some editor or university professor. I did not at first expect to publish anywhere except in the small literary magazines where I worked as a volunteer editor, which is not a bad way to begin.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people just as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read—sometimes most important what I should not try to write. I began in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser, aching to break the world open with what I had to say on the page. There were specific feelings I wanted the stories to create, realizations I wanted people to experience. Sometimes it was grief I wanted to provoke, sometimes anger, almost always a spur to action, to change. I wanted the world to be different in my lifetime, and I truly believed that stories were one way to help that happen. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be effective, and these are not always the same thing. Sometimes I was trying to write a poem, but the thing would not pare down enough to anything less than narrative. Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote to stop my own rage. Mostly I was angry, and drunk on words, the sound of words more than the way they looked on the page. It is quite literally the case that I wrote out loud, reading the stories out loud over and over until they were closer to what I wanted.

 

“If I die tomorrow, I want to have gotten this down.”

That is how many of these stories started. Once in a while, I had read someone else’s story and put it down in rage, beginning my own to refuse the one that had so confounded me. Going back into these stories, I remember those moments even when I no longer remember the actual stories I was refuting. Taylor Caldwell stories, I called them in an early journal—stories in which poor southern characters were framed as if they were brain-damaged, or morally insufficient, or just damn stupid.

 

“We are not stupid. We do pretty well with what we have.” I’d set out to put that on the page—but often I would go south. By that I mean I would not wind up where I intended. I started “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee” to work out in my own mind what it must have been like to have been my grandmother—and her mother, my great-grandma about whom I knew almost nothing, except that her children hated her and that she had lived a long time. How’d that work? I wondered, and made up a fictional Mattie Lee, a pretend Shirley. I gave the children names that actually figured in my grandmother’s conversations—names of cousins, second cousins, and lost uncles. I worked it out as if it were a movie, or the kind of story people in my family simply would not tell. Contrary to the myth of southern families passing stories along on the porch, people in my family kept secrets and only hinted at what might have happened. Some days I think the way to make a storyteller is to refuse to tell her what happened—as my mama and aunts did with me. I had to make up my great-grandmother, and I did it in a story that was originally to be about her daughter—a story I started when I was still in college, and my mother told me my grandmother had died—but three months after the funeral was past, and long past any hope I might have had of going to Greenville, attending the funeral or learning anything about how she had died.