Girls Like Us
Page 20
“I would have done it,” Nana Sue said with zero doubt. “I love Katherine more than life, but that father of hers is a jackass.”
Nana Sue and Grandma Sippi laughed out, seemingly relieved to have spoken their truths aloud. A lightness came over them. But Gran Izella was growing heavier by the moment.
“I had a sister,” Gran Izella said, bringing the laughter to an unnatural halt. “A beautiful sister named…” Izella looked off into nothing. “I don’t dare say her name. Sippi, say it.”
“Ola,” Grandma Sippi said without hesitation. “Her name … was Ola.”
“Ola Mae Murphy,” added Nana Sue with a reassuring smile.
Izella smiled at them, grateful. “She was having a boy. Probably a boy named Walter Jr., suffice to say. No choice back then, like Sippi said. No choice, so we made the choices ourselves. Just us girls. Little girls making big-girl choices. And no way on God’s green earth I’m letting you, Tyesha, go through this same shit alone. SIS is with you. Well…” Izella stood and began to clean Tye’s untouched collards and Jiffy. “We better put this up before it gets cold.”
“Can I ask,” Tye began. “What happened to Ola?”
“I killed her.” Gran Izella’s face showed no emotion, but the plate she held tilted from left to right like a seesaw. Nana Sue leaped for it before she dropped it completely. “I was the stupid one who thought I was smart enough to help, and I killed her.”
Sippi and Sue led Izella back to the table, and they honed in on one another. Tye disappeared to them as they fell into a long talk about life and choice. Still, Tye felt proud to listen to three powerful women who’d once been just like her—powerless. No control over which way their lives went. Forced to choose for themselves while the boys and men went on to lead companies and congresses and courts that chose for them.
How many women have gone through this? Tye thought. How many still are? Silently and alone.
Fuck that, she thought before quietly picking up her phone to open Twitter to write a stream of consciousness poem. Her thumbs took on life.
THREAD
to my followers: yesterday, while sitting in the waiting room at an abortion clinic, I found out my right to rid my body of this unwanted pregnancy was taken away. I’ve got a full ride to Harvard next year. Wtf am I supposed to do with a baby?
how many girls have gone thru this? how many of our mothers & grandmothers have dealt w/ this sht throughout history? how many girls have to die b4 the rest of us wake the fuck up? HOW MANY GIRLS R OUT THERE JUST LIKE ME?
fast girls,
slow girls,
rich girls,
poor girls.
lit girls,
it girls,
no girls,
know girls.
broke girls,
fixed girls,
nick’s girls,
jack’s girls,
ted’s girls,
dead girls,
loud-mouthed girls to speak for the girls who don’t know how,
quiet-lipped girls who hold their words for max impact,
traumatized girls,
open up your eyes, Girls,
do you a twirl, Girl,
change the fucking world, Girl! #girlslikeus
SEND
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Life is a circle. Many iterations in the English language attempt to make these four words sound more profound—what goes around comes around, there’s nothing new under the sun, history repeats itself. In the end, it all means the same thing—life, in fact, is a circle, and these four words sum up the real reason I wrote this novel.
As one of my resolutions for a wise life, I intentionally gravitate toward the eldest person in the room. To illuminate the invisible pitfalls at the feet of society, I want to hear the eighty-year-old woman’s perspective. I want to hear about how things used to be in all veins of life—socially, economically, politically. I want to approach her and ask, Where did you step, madam? Do you regret stepping there? If so, lead me to that particular spot so that I may avoid it.
I’ve never been turned away, not once in my life, and I’ve asked a lot of seniors a lot of questions. Our elders are more than willing to share this merry-go-round called history, but dear Lord, no one is listening. Usually, when I approach them at the bus stop, or in a restaurant, or at the family reunion, they’ve been left alone to sit comfortably with their brilliant insights still stuck inside their time-wise heads. Then, enter me.
Bring on the four-hour breakdown of World War Two, I say, and help me understand what the ’40s really felt like. The ’60s, too. I want it all, madam. Where were you when Nixon resigned? When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his rousing speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? And when Roe v. Wade became law? Did it penetrate into your social consciousness? Or was it just another piece of legislation? What was life like before Roe became law? The answer to the latter question led to the inevitable topic of backwoods abortion.
I grew up in the southern United States, and most of my elders were black women raised in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia. These women were champions to me, but their faces twisted with pain at the topic of backwoods abortion. They had known, or known of, someone who died in those backwoods, and the death of an unwed black girl didn’t make the evening news.
Back then, unmarried pregnant black girls sat at the bottom of the bottomless pit of judgment with zero hope of rising out of it. The lucky ones had at least one supportive family member to help them navigate their predicament, but most were tossed aside as soiled human beings. In a small town filled with such antagonism, a girl could get desperate. And at the core of desperation rests a dangerous lack of restraint, which, in many cases, came in the form of wire hangers, homemade concoctions, and female death.
There’s no way to know how many young women died in the backwoods, but regardless of political stance on the law itself, Roe v. Wade eliminated a fair amount of that death through safer options. I know this from the mouths of those who lived through it, many of whom are still living to tell the tale to anyone who cares to hear it.
One particular pregnant black girl who died in the backwoods inspired the writing of this novel. I will never reveal her name or the person who told me about her, but I’ve known her my whole life. Intangible her. The ghost of her, staring at the clear blue sky before dying in her mother’s arms a few hours later. The ripple her death created within her nuclear family and her neighborhood still exists today. And unbeknownst to any of them, that ripple eventually morphed into the tsunami inside me called Girls Like Us.
Still, I toiled with whether to release this book. The concept lived in the notes of my iPhone for many years. And the original draft was an intentionally detached contemporary tale relating in no way to the girl who inspired it. Then, in the summer of 2018, the Supreme Court flipped, and I thought, life is indeed a circle.
I scrapped the majority of what I’d written and rewrote the whole novel as historical fiction. The voices of my elders helped me along in writing this book, too many to name here.
Today, the pendulum swings dangerously close to those backwoods. And if life is a circle, the string that holds the heavy weight of the law could snap under societal pressure. Leading so many choiceless girls back to 1972.
Thank you for reading this Feiwel & Friends book.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Randi Pink is the author of Into White, which Booklist called a “debut [that] ought to inspire readers to have conversations among themselves about family, empathy, community, and respect for others” in a starred review. She lives with her family and two rescue dogs in Birmingham, Alabama, where she works for a branch of National Public Radio. randipink.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Ola and Izella
Missippi
Sue
Izella/Ola
Missippi
Sue
Ola
Izella
Missippi
Sue
Izella
Sue
Missippi and Izella
Now
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Randi Pink
A Feiwel and Friends Book
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271
fiercereads.com
All rights reserved.
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pink, Randi, author.
Title: Girls like us / Randi Pink.
Description: First edition. | New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2019. |
Summary: In the summer of 1972, three girls from very different backgrounds struggle to come to terms with being pregnant.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019002029 | ISBN 9781250155856 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250155863 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Pregnancy—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | United States—History—1969–—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P565 Gir 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002029
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442 or by email at [email protected]
First hardcover edition/First paperback edition 2019
eBook edition October 2019
eISBN 9781250155863