Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PRAISE FOR TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE
“Captures Allison’s raw gifts as a storyteller.... She ponders the uses and limits of fiction in a world where truth can be the most brutal story of all.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A model memoir, harrowing in its depiction of family truths, however painful ... generous to others and unsparing of the author, and written in simple language that verges toward a kind of rough-hewn poetry.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Any time she says, ‘Let me tell you a story,’ all she has to do is name the time and the place. I’ll be there.”
—Geoffrey Stokes, The Boston Sunday Globe
“Her stories—and life—are a triumph of love over cruelty. Read it aloud and savor the rhythms.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A book of wisdom, a book of medicines.... One feels the vicious, devouring cycle of rage and pain defeated.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
DOROTHY ALLISON is the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of the novel Bastard Out of Carolina; Cavedweller; Trash; Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature; and The Women Who Hate Me. She lives in northern California.
“WITH THE GRACE AND SURENESS THAT ARE THE VERY HALLMARKS OF HER EXQUISITE STYLE, [DOROTHY ALLISON] HAS DONE IT AGAIN ... WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL, PROVOCATIVE, AND PROBING MEMOIR.”
—NEW YORK NATIVE
“Poetic and allusive ... Allison eloquently reveals as much about her art as her past.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Evocative storytelling ... beautifully written, powerful stuff.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Unflinching ... sinewed and muscular prose.”
—Buffalo News
“A lyrical meditation on what it is to be young, poor, and female.... At once touching and funny.”
—City Paper
“Beautiful ... a spiritual autobiography that renews the human spirit.... I never want to stop reading this story.”
—Jennifer Hemler, Philadelphia City Paper
“Allison is a literary treasure ... her volume of memories is written in powerful, fiercely beautiful prose.”
—Etcetera
“A rich memoir.... Allison ... tells her sad tales with a lyricism that lifts them into another realm. ‘Let me tell you a story’ is her refrain. And we do, we let her tell away.”
—Kirhus Reviews
“SHE IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A WRITER WHO HAS TAKEN ON THE DIFFICULT TASK OF BEING HONEST ABOUT HER OWN LIFE ... SHE ENLARGES OUR WORLD.”
—RALEIGH NEWS AND OBSERVER
“A tapestry of remembrances both bright and muted.”
—Booklist
“Her graceful pen has become a tool for mining wisdom from painful experiences.”
—Santa Rosa Press Democrat
“Beautiful, powerful, touching.”
—In Pittsburgh
“Compelling, mesmerizing ... masterfully celebrates her family’s indomitable women.”
—Portland Williamette Week
“Allison’s unsparing, pungent memoir is at once funny and chilling to the bone.”
—Greenville State
“A powerful, spare, sharply written memoir ... moving.”
—Greensboro News and Record
“Allison’s storytelling shifts into an act of profound healing, a survival tool for mending the heart, sending you back into the world strong, ready, and deeply, deeply loved.”
—The Advocate
Also by the author:
Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature
Bastard Out of Carolina
Cavedweller
Trash
The Women Who Hate Me
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Published by Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Plume Printing, August, 1996
Copyright © Dorothy Allison, 1995
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Allison, Dorothy.
Two or three things I know for sure / Dorothy Allison.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-12798-8
I. Allison, Dororhy—Drama. 2. Women authors, American—20th century—
Drama. 3. Poor women—United States—Drama. 4. Feminists—United
States—Drama. 5. Lesbians—United States—Drama. 6. Family—
United States—Drama. I. Title.
PS3551.L453Z476 1995
812’.54—dc20
95-17752
CIP
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For my sisters
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE
“LET ME TELL YOU A STORY,” I used to whisper to my sisters, hiding with them behind the red-dirt bean hills and row on row of strawberries. My sisters’ faces were thin and sharp, with high cheekbones and restless eyes, like my mama’s face, my aunt Dot’s, my own. Peasants, that’s what we are and always have been. Call us the lower orders, the great unwashed, the working class, the poor, proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum. I can make a story out of it, out of us. Make it pretty or sad, laughable or haunting. Dress it up with legend and aura and romance.
“Let me tell you a story,” I’d begin, and start another one. When we were small, I could catch my sisters the way they caught butterflies, capture their attention and almost make them believe that all I said was true. “Let me tell you about the women who ran away. All those legendary women who ran away.” I’d tell about the witch queens who cooked their enemies in great open pots, the jewels that grow behind the tongues of water moccasins. After a while the deepest satisfaction was in the story itself, greater even than the terror in my sisters’ faces, the laughter, and, God help us, the hope.
The constant query of my childhood was “Where you been?” The answer, “Nowhere.” Neither my stepfather nor my mother believed me. But no punishment could discover another answer. The truth was that I did go nowhere—nowhere in particular and everywhere imaginable. I walked and told myself stories, walked out of our subdivision and into another, walked all the way to the shopping center and then back. The flush my mama suspected
hid an afternoon of shoplifting or vandalism was simple embarrassment, because when I walked, I talked—story—talked, out loud—assum—ing identities I made up. Sometimes I was myself, arguing loudly as I could never do at home. Sometimes I became people I had seen on television or read about in books, went places I’d barely heard of, did things that no one I knew had ever done, particularly things that girls were not supposed to do. In the world as I remade it, nothing was forbidden ; everything was possible.
I’ll tell you a story and maybe you’ll believe me.
There’s a laboratory in the basement of the Greenville County General Hospital, I told my sisters. They take the babies down there. If you’re poor—from the wrong family, the wrong color, the wrong side of town—they mess with you, alter your brain. That was what happened. That was it.
You believe me?
I’m a storyteller. I’ll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended.
The story becomes the thing needed.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.
LET ME TELL YOU A STORY. If I could convince myself, I can convince you. But you were not there when I began. You were not the one I was convincing. When I began there were just nightmares and need and stubborn determination.
When I began there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story.
But where am I in the stories I tell? Not the storyteller but the woman in the story, the woman who believes in story. What is the truth about her? She was one of them, one of those legendary women who ran away. A witch queen, a warrior maiden, a mother with a canvas suitcase, a daughter with broken bones. Women run away because they must. I ran because if I had not, I would have died. No one told me that you take your world with you, that running becomes a habit, that the secret to running is to know why you run and where you are going—and to leave behind the reason you run.
My mama did not run away. My aunt Dot and aunt Grace and cousin Billie with her near dozen children—they did not run. They learned resilience and determination and the cost of hard compromises. None of them ever intended to lose their lives or their children’s lives, to be trapped by those hard compromises and ground down until they no longer knew who they were, what they had first intended. But it happened. It happened over and over again.
Aunt Dot was the one who said it. She said, “Lord, girl, there’s only two or three things I know for sure.” She put her head back, grinned, and made a small impatient noise. Her eyes glittered as bright as sun reflecting off the scales of a cottonmouth’s back. She spat once and shrugged. “Only two or three things. That’s right,” she said. “Of course it’s never the same things, and I’m never as sure as I’d like to be.”
Where I was born—Greenville, South Carolina—smelled like nowhere else I’ve ever been. Cut wet grass, split green apples, baby shit and beer bottles, cheap makeup and motor oil. Everything was ripe, everything was rotting. Hound dogs butted my calves. People shouted in the distance; crickets boomed in my ears. That country was beautiful, I swear to you, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Beautiful and terrible. It is the country of my dreams and the country of my nightmares: a pure pink and blue sky, red dirt, white clay, and all that endless green—willows and dogwood and firs going on for miles.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
IN GREENVILLE, halfway through the fourth grade, we got a substitute teacher right out of college and full of ideas. First she brought in a record player and got us to sing along to folk songs—“Cum by yah, my lord, cum by yah!”—until another teacher complained of the noise. Next she tried to get us to do news reports, each of us presenting something we had learned from the news the night before. Another time, it might have worked, but the nightly news was full of Birmingham and Little Rock, burning buses and freedom marchers. Our reports degenerated into shouting matches and mortal insults, voices raised in more than song. More complaints, and this time the principal came around.
Our teacher fell back on what seemed an utterly safe choice. We were to make our family trees, interviewing relatives and doing posters to show the class.
“You can check family Bibles for the names of previous generations, and if you’ve got pictures, you could glue them on the posters.” She blew hard on a strand of hair that had fallen over her right eye. Teaching was clearly not what she had expected. “Or you can make drawings or even cut pictures out of magazines to represent people—anything you like. This is where you get to be creative. Make something your families are going to want to keep.”
We watched as she rummaged through her skirt pockets until she found a hairpin. She spoke while using both hands to tuck her hair back into a rough bun. “Any questions?”
“She wants you to what?” Mama’s tone was pure exasperation when I came home that afternoon. She’d been talking with Aunt Dot, spreading clothes on the dining room table, getting them all sprinkled and rolled up before settling down to ironing. Now she looked like she was ready to throw something.
“This girl an’t from around here. Is she?” From the other side of the table Aunt Dot gave Mama a quick grin over the rim of her coffee cup. “I can just see all those children putting down Mama’s name, and first daddy’s name and second daddy’s name. Could get complicated.”
“Dot!”
“Well, you know I’m right. That brand-new teacher an’t gonna last out the month. Around here parentage is even more dangerous than politics.”
“Why is it so dangerous?”
“Girl, you getting too big to ask silly questions.”
“Well, I need to make lists. I need people’s names. Where’s our family Bible?”
“Our what? Lord. Lord.” Aunt Dot waved one hand in the air. “Girl is definitely not from around here.”
“We don’t have a family Bible?”
“Child, some days we don’t even have a family.”
“Dot, don’t get started.” Mama folded the sleeves of a damp shirt in over the button front, and then, gathering from the collar, rolled the whole into a closed tube. “And you just put down what you know.”
“What do I know? Aunt Grace said once that Granny had eleven children. I know six.”
“Eleven?” Aunt Dot took a sip from her cup and propped her chin on her palm. “Was it eleven? I thought it was nine.”
“Well, nine! I still only know six.”
“There’s no need to count the dead.” Mama snapped a work shirt open and sprinkled furiously. “Put down who you know. You don’t have to put down everybody.”
“But you’re supposed to.”
“Dorothy.” Her expression stopped me. I knew that look. One more word and I would be in trouble.
“Well, I don’t have Grandpa Gibson’s name.”
Dot put her cup down noisily. “Andrew, right?”
“Andrew James.”
“So, Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee.”
“Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee Garner. Now, that’s enough.”
I gathered up my papers and headed out the door. From the carport, I heard Aunt Dot’s booming laugh. “What you think? Should we get a family Bible?”
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.
MY MAMA DIED AT MIDNIGHT ON A SATURDAY. My sister An
ne was with her, holding her hands and trying to tell her we were on our way. My sister Wanda and I were miles away, lost in the parking garage at the Orlando airport. I had just flown in from Buffalo, shaking still with the effort of trying to make the plane go faster by sheer will.
“We have to hurry,” Wanda told me, and gave that bark of a laugh that meant nothing was funny. We ran. We dodged tourists and baggage handlers, squalling children and panhandlers for Jesus. “Get out of the way!” I yelled at a guy in a pale blue suit.
“No need to be rude, sister,” he said in a voice that any other day would have cut me to the quick.
In the parking garage we got lost. Wanda glared across the rows of economy vehicles, cursing, saying, “Damn, this doesn’t look right. Damn city growing so fast. Goddammit, this doesn’t look right.”
The elevator wasn’t working at all, and Wanda was only half sure we were in the right building. She kept shoving doors open, throwing herself into another staircase, and dragging me up another level, up three before she finally recognized the half-finished color coding.