Trash (2 page)

“In a ditch,” my Uncle Jack told me a decade later. “Had a stroke halfway between our house and your Uncle Bo’s. Just lay down and died.”

“Oh.” I just stood there.

“Oh.” I was living in Tallahassee then, in a feminist collective household, and fiercely determined to learn more about my grandmother, my aunts, even legendary Great-grandma Shirley. But my uncle’s brutal comment was all I gathered in that visit, and almost as soon as I asked about it, one of my aunts denied that was how it happened.

“She didn’t die down there. She died in the hospital two whole days later. She just fell in that ditch and lay there awhile before we went out and found her.”

Maybe that was the story I should have written, but it was not. By the time I got back to my big complicated household, I was working on the story of what Grandma Mattie Lee might have been like as a girl. What if? And I was in it, watching Shirley beat on the steps with that broom handle. Would I have made Mattie Lee so heroic if my own mother had not hidden her death from me, if my uncle had not spoken so brutally? Maybe. Still, what I wrote felt right on the page, and from this distance that seems the primary fact. I did a lot of things because it felt right on the page, or sounded right when read out loud in an empty room. I did not finish that story in Tallahassee. I did not finish that story till Brooklyn, fully fifteen years after my grandmother’s death. Even then, I think I finished it because I fell in love with that teenage girl, her mouth full of white and her eyes full of fire. It worked well enough that it was another of the stories my mama would never talk to me about. “Now that’s mean,” my mama said about one of the stories I sent her. She smiled and gave a little shudder when she said it. That is what I intended, I told her. I want it mean. I did not say that I also wanted the story to be about love and compassion. For that sometimes I had to dig deeper, into the muscle of character. Still, I think you can tell that I loved my impossible grandmother with my whole heart, her black brows and wide face, her bulldog glare and frank inclination to tell me things my mother never intended me to learn. I knew she worked her children the way her mother had worked her, putting them out to pick strawberries for neighboring farmers and pocketing the money to buy snuff. I knew she was quick to slap and full of desperation, but I knew also that in the context of how she had been raised and what she had survived, she was almost gentle, almost sweet-tempered. But not quite. I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures—that is who you will find in my stories—and little girls who were not me. What are these stories about? Shame and outrage, pride and stubbornness, and the vital necessity of a sense of humor. I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated. I wrote to celebrate. I wrote to take a little revenge, and sometimes to make clear that revenge was not what I was doing. Always, I tried not to use the flat metallic language of politics and preaching, but sometimes I knew no other way to frame what I had to say.

 

I wrote to give back to others who had given to me—sometimes reflexively. I would write particular stories in response to those I read. I began to write about incest only after reading Toni Morrison’s novel
The Bluest Eye
. That book felt like a slap on the back from my mother’s hand, as if a trusted, powerful voice were telling me, You know something about incest—something you fear, but had best start figuring out. I began to figure things out in story.

I wrote “Mama” to talk about how deeply intertwined love and resentment can be in a family in which violence and sexual abuse are the norm. “River of Names” was an attempt to stop being ashamed of running away from the lives my cousins were living—and, bluntly, it was a slap in the face of all the women I knew who seemed unable to imagine lives different from their own.

Some stories I wrote in apology, but I cannot say the writing was ever simple or straightforward. Even as I tried to apologize on the page I was aiming at an audience who I imagined recoiling at the facts and people I portrayed. I published “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” before I told my mother I would be unable to have children, though that is the subject of the story. Only much later did I begin to think about what it would have felt like for her to read that story, my heartbroken mother who wanted nothing so much as the grandchildren I could not give her.

Some stories were about trying to figure things out, to understand what had happened and why. “Mama,” “Gospel Song,” “Lupus,” “A Lesbian Appetite,” and “I’m Working on My Charm”—all those began with a mystery. Sometimes the mystery was simply how to tell the story at all. How do you write about lust with a sense of humor? Shame? Lesbian desire?

Some of these stories are easily ascribed to rage. “Monkeybites,” “River of Names,” “Her Thighs,” “Muscles of the Mind,” “Demon Lover,” “Steal Away,” “Violence Against Women Begins at Home”—all of them began with me walking back and forth in front of my desk in the dark of night. Sometimes it was a person that had filled me with outrage, but sometimes it was someone else’s story. I had to figure it out. I did it on the page. Reading these stories again, I go back to the time in which they were written. The early women’s movement was a genuinely remarkable moment in history, perhaps most of all because we were all so sure that we were going to change the world. Talking to twenty-year-olds these days, I find it difficult to get them to understand what it was like being part of the early liberation movements that so impacted this country in the sixties and seventies. We were fighting for our lives, I say, and I mean it literally. The life I was meant to have is what I was fighting. I did not want to be a waitress my whole life, to be poor or to come to accept being treated with contempt. I did not want to be ashamed of my family, my sexuality, or myself. I did not want to despair or commit suicide out of hopelessness. One generation back, I can name people who did just that—who despaired and died. They were no fiction. When I talk to young people, I find myself telling very specific stories. I tell them about my first decent job, the one with the Social Security Administration, where I was put on probation and almost fired for wearing pantsuits to the office—tasteful, respectable outfits with high-buttoned white blouses, paired with low heels and nylons, even in that Tallahassee humidity. A shinyhaired eighteen-year-old boy at Stanford laughs and says, “What were they thinking?” What indeed? I tell how when, at twenty-three with my respectable government job, I tried to get a credit card, I was asked to have my stepfather cosign the application. We were never quite adults, I explain, we women. You have no idea how different was the world we set out to change. That was the world in which I began to write these stories. That was the context. Reading them over, I fall back in time and remember the writing of them. I remember working long hours, hurrying home, and napping briefly in order to have the ability to spend more long hours at my desk in the night. I never went after a grant, never believed I could get one. I took it as a given that a woman like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything anyone would want to read. But I never imagined not writing.

What I did not imagine was publishing. I read my stories often—at benefits and open readings, and always afterward people would come up and ask me, Didn’t I have a book yet? I was startled every time. No, I had to say. I had been writing stories, not thinking about a book.

It is possible this collection would never have come about if I had not lost my temper. I read a review of a book I loved—
My Mama’s Dead Squirrel
by Mab Segrest, a witty, revealing collection about humor—full of stories about her family. The review was not critical, it was nasty. It made easy jokes about southerners and their “funny” families. In a rage, I called that woman who had asked me if I had a book. “I’ve got a book,” I told her. “I’ve got a book will make that reviewer’s teeth hurt.” It took me more than two years to finish the stories and let this book go. By then I had moved from New York to San Francisco, and was living month to month on what I could put together teaching and writing freelance for whoever would hire me. My temper had run its course, and my first impulse was long past. When I was correcting the galleys, I kept thinking back to that review, anticipating the criticism that would surely be directed at my stubborn girls and mean stories, regretting my temper but not the book itself. I gave the manuscript to a lover I had begun to take very seriously. All these years later she is still here, the mother of my son and the woman with whom I plan to share the rest of my life. Her review was the first. “It’s not bad,” she said. “You are the real thing.” After that, I decided to take everyone else’s opinion in stride.

 

Why write stories? To join the conversation. Literature is a conversation—a lively enthralling exchange that constantly challenges and widens our own imaginations. A skinny guy from the Bronx told things I never imagined about growing up a Puerto Rican who has never seen the islands. A tall woman from the Midwest talked about apple farms and hiding up among the half-ripe fruit so as not to have to think about dead and lost children. God yes, I murmured. Yes. In return, I tried to reimagine the world as my great-grandmother saw it, feeling in my low back the generational impact of giving birth to eleven children in fifteen years. A little later I retold the crime I committed against a woman who loved me with her whole heart, but who, for all that love, never knew who I really was.

Did she really say those things? No, but she might have.

Does it feel like that? Absolutely.

I try for truth, and language. Sometimes if the language works, I let detail slide. But I am a writer, and I know my own weaknesses. In the end, the stories have to have their own truth and craft.

Now for a word on “trash.” I originally claimed the label “trash” in self-defense. The phrase had been applied to me and to my family in crude and hateful ways. I took it on deliberately, as I had “dyke”—though I have to acknowledge that what I heard as a child was more often the phrase “white trash.” As an adult I saw all too clearly the look that would cross the face of any black woman in the room when that particular term was spoken. It was like a splash of cold water, and I saw the other side of the hatefulness in the words. It took me right back to being a girl and hearing the uncles I so admired spew racist bile and callous homophobic insults. Some phrases cannot be reclaimed. I gave that one up and took up the simpler honorific. By my twenties, that was what I heard most often anyway. Even rednecks get sensitized to insults, abandon some and cultivate others. I have not been called white trash in two decades, but only a couple years ago, I heard myself referred to as “that trash” in a motel corridor in the central valley in California.

In 1988, I titled this short story collection
Trash
to confront the term and to claim it honorific. In 2002, Trash still suits me, even though I live over here in California among people who are almost postconscious. In Sonoma County it makes more sense to call myself a Zen redneck, or just a dyke mama. What it comes down to is that I use “trash” to raise the issue of who the term glorifies as well as who it disdains. There are not simple or direct answers on any of these questions, and it is far harder to be sure your audience understands the textured lay of what you are doing—specially if you are in Northern California rather than Louisiana, and in 2002 rather than 1988. And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us—displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.

And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.

 

Dorothy Allison

Guerneville, California, 2002

 

 

 

 

T
here was a day in my life when I decided to live.

After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by misadventure that claimed so many of my cousins; after watching so many die around me, I had not imagined that I would ever need to make such a choice. I had imagined the hunger for life in me insatiable, endless, and unshakable.

I became an escape—one of the ones others talked about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and finally went away to college on scholarship. There I met the people I always read about: girls whose fathers loved them—innocently; boys who drove cars they had not stolen; whole armies of the upper and middle classes I had not truly believed to be real; the children to whom I could not help but compare myself. I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that consumed me. Like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death.

I began to court it. Cowardly, traditionally—that is, in the tradition of all those others like me, through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people’s violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.