ࡱ> U ;bjbjnn .aa+.....BBB8z><B%zzkkk%%%%%%%$`'*f'%.kkkkk'%..<%% % % k..%% k%% % % Q|)% $R%0%% |*|*% |*.% kk% kkkkk'%'%% kkk%kkkk|*kkkkkkkkkB : The Power of the Story and Writing for Ones Life: Dorothy Allison and Excavating Stereotypes By Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, ϳԹUniversity Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities I want to break the heart of the world . . . and then heal it.Dorothy Allison, Albert Gallatin Lecture, NYU Bildungsroman: From Greenville To Tallahassee and Beyond Dorothy Allison explained in a 1974 essay why she had become a writer and a storyteller. I make fiction, construct it, intend it to have an impact, an effect, she said, to quite literally change the world that lied to my mother, my sisters and me. The fiction I make comes out of my life and my beliefs, but it is not autobiography. What I have taught myself to do is to craft truth out of storytelling (Shotgun Strategies 55). Storytelling, for Dorothy Allison, has not been merely a vocation, an avocation, an art, or a pastimeit has been an act of survival, a necessity to understand the awful complexity, the fearful symmetry of life as Blake framed it, and to make sense out of acts of everyday cruelty. In Deciding to Live, Allison wrote this: For me those stories were not distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of my life, and they were necessary in ways I could barely understand (5). When she is composing a story, Allison says, she is writing for [herself], trying to shape [her] life outside [her] terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way. Books have always been the soul of her world: I was a child she says, who believed in books (4). Stories, particularly those she conjured in her imagination as a child, were attempts, in the darkest of days and the depths of shame, to find a reality she could offer as a counterbalance, a fantasy, or simply an imaginative way to seize a narrative that might destroy her and turn it into something palatable. She closes Deciding to Live by saying, I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what Ive seenthe condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed, working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine (7). Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1949. She writes in History Is a Weapon that she was 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 had me (1-2). Her mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, little more than a child herself when Dorothy was born, was from a family on the long and the wrong end of White Horse Road in Greenville, labeled rednecks and written off even as they were stereotyped and othered. My people were not remarkable, she writes. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they everyone talks aboutthe un-grateful poor (History 1). David Reynolds explains in his iconic essay White Trash in Your Face: The next-to-lowest class considered themselves poor but honestthat is, the honest poorwhile the lowest class of poor whites were shiftless people or white trash (356), a stereotype that had been around since Colonial days when poor Scot-Irish from Ulster settled in the Appalachian Mountains as a barrier between the English flatlanders and hostile native Americans. A genetic theory that white trash were a biologically inferior group of late arrivals allowed the myth of America as the land of opportunity to remain intact: poor whites were simply different from normal whites (Reynolds 359). It was a comfortable myth and an easy stereotype, allowing the sanctity of white superiority to thrive in America and the condition of othering to remain in place even today. Allison writes about spending her life trying to outrun this stereotype and the label bastard. My mama, she says, had eleven brothers and sisters, of whom I can name only six. . . . It was my grandmother who told me about my real daddy, a shiftless pretty man who was supposed to have been married, had six children, and sold cut-rate life insurance to poor Black people (History 3). Allisons mother married when her daughter was a year old, but her husband died shortly after her younger sister was born. Then when she was five, her mother married her stepfather who molested her on the night her mother gave birth less than a year later, as the two girls waited with their stepfather in the parking lot of the hospital. The molestation continued until Dorothy was fifteen. At eight her mother left her stepfather, whom she thought to be abusive but not a sexual predator, only to return two weeks later, telling her daughter that she had no choice since she could not support the girls alone. When Dorothy was eleven she told her cousin that her stepfather had sexually abused her, and her mother Ruth, who was the only person in the family who believed her daughter, left again and again returned to her husband, eventually leaving Dorothy with her aunt. Allison could never understand why her mother would not leave her stepfather and later wrote about their perennial poverty: My stepfather worked as a route salesman, my mama as a waitress, laundry worker, cook, or fruit packer. I could never understand, since they both worked so hard and such long hours, how we never had enough money, but it was also true of my mamas brothers and sisters who worked hard in the mills or furnace industry (History 3). In her essay Shotgun Strategies, Allison addressed this question head on. She writes: I raged at her. I truly loved my mother, but I could not as a child understand why she did not take us out of there, go anywhere, live in any condition other than the one in which we were trapped. She adds, however, that she also understood her mother had no idea what was going on in our home: partly because she was telling lies to herself to stay sane, partly because we were lying to her to save her and ourselves, and partly because the world had lied to her and us about the meaning of what was happening (55). She adds, The world told us that we were being spanked, not beaten, and that violent contempt for girl children was ordinary, nothing to complain about. The world lied, and we lied, and lying becomes a habit (55). In the poignant story River of Names, Allison goes through a litany of cousins who lost their lives. One accidentally hanged himself in the barn. Another got pregnant and had to go to the Jesup County Girls Home. Cousins went to prison, to dead-end jobs, and to ruin (9, 16). However, the story that remained most in her mind was that of a favorite cousin who was sent to jail after a prank. She writes in History: One of my favorite cousins went to jail when I was eight years old, for breaking into pay phones with another boy. The other boy was returned to the custody of his parents. My cousin was sent to the boys facility at the county farm (8). When Dorothy and Ruth went to see the boy, carrying fried chicken and potato salad, they watched as her cousin kept his head down, his face hard with hatred only looking back at the guard when he turned away. Sons-a-bitches, he whispered (8). Allison remembered the utter disdain in the eyes of the guard, not just for the boy but for her mother and herself. Her cousin, who was fifteen, never went back to school after that experience, and he couldnt go into the army. His rage was palpable. The other boy was sent home to his father, a deacon who managed the local hardware store, but Allison and her family, she remembers, We were trash (8). When she was in the fourth grade in Greenville, a substitute teacher seemed a breath of fresh air to Dorothy and her classmates. She recalls in the lyrical Two or Three Things I Know for Sure that this young woman played folk songs and had the children make family trees. When Dorothy took the assignment home, her Aunt Dot gave Ruth a sly grin, Around here parentage is even more dangerous than politics, Allison wrote (10). When Dorothy asked, Wheres our family Bible? Aunt Dot guffawed, Our what? noting their new teacher was definitely not from around here. Dorothy was perplexed and questioned her mother, We dont have a family Bible? (10). Later when Dorothy tested higher than anyone in her school on the standardized exams, her teachers wanted to retest her, only to find that she tested even higher. When awards were bestowed, a boy who scored less than she received equal accoladesthe narrative just didnt fit the stereotype of white trash in Greenville. Allison was thirteen when the family hit rock bottom; and with the sheriff and bill collectors knocking at the door, they absconded with all their possessions in the middle of the night like runaway slaves, driving south, to Orlando, Florida, to start a new life. Allison remembers: I was only thirteen. I wanted us to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. . . . Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. Allison muses, What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless (History 4). By the time Allison was fourteen, she and her sisters had discovered ways to discourage their stepfathers sexual advances and physical abuse, often disguised as discipline and always a play for power and domination. Also during this time, he was referred to a psychotherapist for anger management by his new employer, and he was prescribed drugs that made him less violent, if somewhat sullen. While her two younger sisters were growing up and following in the family pattern of dropping out of school, Allison who found refuge in books, threw herself into her school work, though the label of white trash followed them to Orlando, where she later wrote again about the hope of starting over, Moving to Florida did not fix our lives (History 4). During this time, Ruth had been diagnosed with cancer and had suffered through a hysterectomy. Dorothy, who remembered these years as being filled with anger, both at the world and at her mother, set her sights on one goalto leave as quickly as she could; and school offered her that chance. She recalls taking every scholarship exam she could find and winning a National Merit Scholarship to attend Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), where she graduated in 1971 with a BA in Anthropology. After graduation, she moved to Tallahassee so that she could earn the funds to go off to graduate school, becoming while working there editor of the feminist publication Amazing Grace and attending a few graduate classes in Anthropology. But the real revolutionary moment for her during these years was coming out as a lesbian and discovering who she was beyond the label white trash. To facilitate both, she became involved with the Womens Collective in Tallahassee and immersed herself in feminist theorythese two events changed her life. In 1973, she had volunteered in the Womens Center and edited their Newsletter, and the following year in 1974 she helped to found Herstore, a feminist bookstore, all while working a day job at the Social Security Administration in Tallahassee. However, living in the Womens Collective and coming out as a gay woman were defining and empowering parts of her life at this timeand would dramatically alter her vision of herself and what she was destined to do. Feminism, Activism, and Understanding They Allison wrote in her essay A Question of Class: They, those people over there, those people who are not us . . . . They are different. We, I thought. Me. . . . Me and my family, we had always been they (13). Until 1974, Allison had destroyed everything she had written. When she discovered the Womens Center in Tallahassee and began attending Womens Consciousness raising sessions, her life and vision of herself began slowly to change. She writes in Shotgun Strategies that at age twenty-three she went to her first consciousness-raising groupan extraordinarily important event, she adds (51). All the talk, the work, the activism that she threw herself into with a gusto hard to fathom and a talent untapped became the driving force of her life. The feminist discussions clarified, emboldened and sharpened her, and the work made her feel reborn and a true revolutionary. She writes in History: I was a determined person, living in a lesbian collectiveall of us young and white and seriousstudying each new book that purported to address feminist issues, driven by what I saw as a need to revolutionize the world (9). At the same time, she was living her life freely and openly as a lesbian and the headiness of that freedom was exhilarating. She writes of this time, I believed I was making the personal political revolution with my life every moment, whether I was scrubbing the floor of the childcare center, setting up a new budget for the womens lecture series at the university, editing the local feminist magazine, or starting a womens bookstore (9) Always, however in the back of her mind was the doubt and the feeling of being a frauda secret fear that someday I would be found out for who I really was, found out and thrown out (9). The stories that she had written as a child, the alternative narratives and fantasies of the events she had lived, they all seemed frivolous when so much work needed to be done (9). Then in a single week she had two speaking engagements that changed everything, one at an Episcopalian Sunday school class and the other at a juvenile detention center. The juxtaposition of those two events and the chasm that separated the two audiences brought her an epiphany. She writes in History that she understood, suddenly, everything that had happened to my cousins and me, understood it from a wholly new and agonizing perspective, one that made clear how brutal I had been to both my family and myself. . . . [who] had been robbed and dismissed (9-10). Allison saw that she had learned as a child that what could not be changed had to go unspoken . . . and those who cannot change their own lives were made to feel their shame. Why, she asks herself, had I always believed us contemptible by nature (10). When she looked at the women around her in the collective and wondered who could possibly understand what she was feeling, she found no working class women among them, and she began to suspect that we shared no common language to speak those bitter truths (10). At this moment Allison felt her outrage directed no longer toward her family but toward a class system that had relegated them all to other. She was beginning to understand the myth, the stereotype of white trash for what it was that had cast her and her family into a position of self-hatred, self-loathing, and wish-fulfillment of the worst kind: I had run away from my family, refused to go home to visit, she writes in History, and tried in every way to make myself a new person. It wasnt herself that needed to be made anewit was a social system of hatred and disdain that had colored the way she and others viewed themselves (10). She sat down to express the feelings engendered through this epiphany in poetry, which eventually became the touching prose piece River of Names (Trash). She writes: I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie (History 10). She also knew that she would have to write the story that would haunt me until I understood how to tell it. It would be years in the making, but eventually Bastard Out of Carolina would be a way to claim my familys pride and tragedy, and the embattled sexuality I had fashioned on a base of violence and abuse (11). At that point, she determined to go home to her mother and sisters, and what she found there was not only that it is possible for one to go home again, but while she had not made peace with herself, her family had actually made a kind of peace with her. They accepted her lesbianism in a matter of fact waythis was Dorothy. And while her and her familys understanding each other wasnt necessarily an easy process nor a quick one, that understanding did come; . . . it took time, she writes, and lots of listening to each other to rediscover my sense of family, and my love for them (History 11). No longer did she feel fiction frivolous, and most important she had the good fortune in the summer of 1975, to attend the Sagaris Feminist Institute, where she encountered one of the most profound influences on her writing life: Bertha Harris. Tucked away in the mountains of New England, near Plainfield, Vermont, was a remarkable feminist institute, a think tank for feminist theory, exploring a myriad of topics and also offering a range of classes, including that summer an extraordinary writing class with Bertha Harris. Other influential female writers were at Sagaris like Rita Mae Brown, Charlotte Bunch, and Mary Daly, but it was Harris, as Allison wrote, who took my breath away (Bertha Harris, A Memoir 201). Allison recalls that when Bertha Harris talked about literature, it was like listening to Billy Graham talk about God (203). Harris was a force to be reckoned with, fast-talking, a powerful presence. When she said that literature was not made by good girls, Allison knew this was what she needed to hear. Harris told her that great literary artists are fascists and they were bad-assed, aggressive, insistent. This was a message that came to Dorothy Allison at precisely the right moment in time. Harris made these young feminists read Shulamith Firestone so we would know it is not drink and drugs that are the curse of the revolution, it is romantic love. Harris wanted them to understand that such myths continued the status quo in which women are both victimized and victimize each other (Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty 85). What Bertha Harris meant by revolution was neither overturning governments nor restructuring social systems; no, revolution was writing, making art. These were the most profound and far-reaching actions we could undertake, Allison wrote. Harris helped Allison to understand that what mattered was the act of self-discovery, self-revelation and such revelation could occur only through writing fiction. Allison remembers that when she chose a name for her fictional family in Bastard Out of Carolina, she used Boatwright, drawing from Bogart and Boatwright in Harriss most ambitious novel Lover. Allison recalls that she would never have written either of her novels without the revelations that followed those classes with Bertha Harris, who told her students to write in order to make sense of the world (Sex Writing 90-91). Other writers who would inspire Allison were Toni Morrison who taught her how to write about incest, Flannery OConnor who taught her the southern speech rhythms of poor whites, Zora Neale Hurston who read for Allison as working class rather than black (Conversations 28-29), Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, and James Baldwin among others. In 1976, Allison moved to Washington, DC, to become editor of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, and then in 1979 she moved to New York City, to begin working on her MA in urban anthropology at the New School for Social Research at NYU and to serve as the Director of Communications and Director of the Information Center at Poet & Writers Inc. While in New York she worked as an editor and columnist for the NY Native (1981-85) and in Brooklyn she edited Conditions Magazine (1982-86). It was also during this time, while she was working through her ideas about class and stereotyping, absorbed in editing, and mulling over and writing the story that would become Bastard Out of Carolina, that a singular and deeply affecting event took placethe 1982 Barnard College Symposium on Sexuality. Allison had been invited as one of the symposium speakers, and to her dismay conservative feminists picketed her and other speakers as purveyors of pornography. She told Blanche McCrary Boyd in a 1993 interview for The Nation: I was picketed and leafleted and pilloried by Women Against Pornography as a proponent of childhood sexual abuse. Because I was writing about it (Conversations 19). Allison was astounded and amazed, as well as feeling betrayed by a feminist movement that had liberated her. But in a wonderful creative rage, she finished a collection of poems that became her own personal backtalk to these misinformed conservative feminists: The Women Who Hate Me (1983). The women who hate her, she writes, . . . do not know me. The women who, not knowing me, hate me mark my life, rise in my dreams and shake their loose hair . . . Who do you think you are? . . . the women who hate me cut me as men cant. Men dont count. I can handle men. Never expected better of any man anyway. But the women, shallow-cheeked young girls . . . What do they know of my fear? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRAVADO. The women who hate me dont know cant imagine life-saving, precious bravado. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Their measured careful words echo earlier coarser stuff say What do you think youre doing? Who do you think you are? Whitetrash no-count bastard . . . Allison recalled in a 1995 interview with Susanne Dietzel, at the Newcomb College Center at Tulane University, that these conservative feminists ruined lives. They called the workplaces of the women who appeared on the conference program, called the Barnard College trustees and administrators, tried to get the speakers fired, and mostly did their best to destroy lives. It turned into a nightmare, Allison shared. I know people who lost their lives because of that conference. A lot of people lost their jobs. Plenty of people had nervous breakdowns, left town, disappeared. I wrote poems (Conversations 47). The Women Who Hate Me collection was also her first opportunity to poetically articulate her understanding of they and the damage of othering and stereotyping. Like Silas House who took the appellation hillbilly and embraced it, Allison declares in Dumpling Child that she is A southern dumpling child biscuit eater, tea sipper okra slicer, gravy dipper, I fry my potatoes with onions stew my greens with pork And ride my lover high up (lines 1-6) Thus she assumes ownership of her otherness, both in terms of class and gender. In the poem Upcountry, she writes of the abuse she and her sister suffered, the wish that she could have protected her sister, and the love she has for her family, while at the same time embracing all of them as they: The summer you were seven and I was nine, I knew it all the light in your eyes the darkness in mine little sister, did I tell you then what I never said after how much I loved you how certain I was it wouldnt help? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When the uncles came to visit pickups parked aslant the yard bottles that rocked from board to rim shotguns point-down beside the gears a leather holster or canvas sling I watched the neighbors squint their eyes no-count, low down, disgusting. (lines 1-8, 19-25) The lines pickups parked aslant and shotguns point-down beside the gears conjure an image of her uncles not fitting in, their otherness bringing disdain and fear from neighbors who see them all as no count, low down, disgusting. The poets very bastardness, which is societys label not her own, is a metaphor for the othering that society feels compelled to afflict upon her and her family to assert their inferiority while establishing its own superiority. Allison writes in History Is a Weapon that she has tried to understand the politics of they, why human beings fear and stigmatize the different while secretly dreading that they might be one of the different themselves. Allison notes that class, race, sexuality, genderand all the other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each otherneed to be excavated from the inside (History 11). When she deconstructs the horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice, she sees clearlyas does Silas House in Southernmost, also dealing with these issues and what it means to be othered and stereotypedthat it is fear at the root of social othering and prejudice: It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others (11). The power of the myth is palpable, and its reach deeply destructive. In Mlanie Grus The Internal Other: Dorothy Allisons White Trash, the tragic outcome of stereotyping is laid squarely at the face of fear. Gru posits: The need to maintain domination leads to artificial definitions, so that social categorization appears as a subject process, requiring the invention of social norms that will allow the perpetuation of the dominant groups superiority. Social norms are thus performative, established and perpetuated through repetition (8). The concept of white trash then is less socio-economic than it is imaginary to ward off the fear of alteritythat is, being oneself the other (8). Class stratification then depends upon ones oppression of another. Such othering, Gru asserts, is a form of economically motivated racism. For the White race, white trash subverts the assumed superiority of the white race, the term names people whose very existence seems to threaten the symbolic and social order (10); moreover, Gru says . . . its most troubling aspect is its dimension of sameness. . . . white trash is at the same time the One and the Other, the dominant and the inferior, displacing the frontiers of class and associating notions that should be kept distinct. The unthinkable subject is the object of fantasy, rejected (10). Allison illustrates this racial component of othering in the charged scene in Bastard Out of Carolina, where Bones albino friend Shannon Pearl and she argue about a racial slur Shannon heaps onto some Black country singers. When Bone protests, Shannon hurls white trash epithets at Bone, and Bone responds in kind, with both girls kicking dirt on one another, blurring the racial and the class othering. My daddy dont handle niggers. She threw wildflowers at me and stamped her foot. . . . You crazy. You just plain crazy. My voice was shaking. The way Shannon said nigger tore at me, the tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline sneering trash. . . . What do you think you are? You and your mama and your whole family. Everybody knows youre all a bunch of drunks and thieves and bastards. . . . I kicked red dirt up onto her gingham skirt. . . . I was crazy angry and I tripped, falling onto the red dirt . . . . Youre ugly. I swallowed my tears and made myself speak very quietly. . . . Shannons lips started to tremble. . . . You monster . . . . (170-71) Both children are sullied in the dirt of race and class and the meanness of ugly stereotypes that spare few and bring out the worst in the human animal, revealing we a monster. Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Compassion, and Cavedweller (1998): From Anger to Redemption In the poem We All Nourish Truth with Our Tongues (The Women Who Hate Me), Allison writes about the power of story and language in banishing the lies that harass and destroy us: In the dirt country where I was born the words that named me were so terrible no one would speak them . . . I learned there is only one language and it either speaks truly or lies. But sometimes it must go on a long time before the whole truth comes out and until that moment all words are lies. Still I tell you there is only one language. What I am saying is the words are growing in my mouth. All the names of god will be spoken, all the hidden secret things made known. We will root in dirt our mothers watered sing songs, tell stories echoed in their mouths. (2.1-3,16-28) As Allison tried to make sense of what had happened to her as a child and how to come to terms with a beloved mother and her own family, she writes in Shotgun Strategies that at a certain point in her life, she promised herself to break the habit of lying, to try to make truth everyday in my life, but it is not simple (55). Coming to terms with what had happened to her was also tied irrevocably to the condition of being made other, and it was absolutely tied to survival. She makes this premise clear in History Is a Weapon when she writes: I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys (11). She adds that the key to survival is understanding why these things happen: To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the condition of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary (11). And key to this understanding, she came to see, is the power of the story to speak the truth and all the hidden secret things made known (We All Nourish Truth l26). In the Afterword of the Bastard Out of Carolina Penguin edition, Allison writes: That was what my book was abouttelling a story that made sense of what did not make sense, and telling it plainly enough that anyone who wanted to could point to it and say thats my story (314). However, telling such a story would not be easy. Patriarchal society has created a mythology of rape and child abuse and such myths are so strong they subvert sociological data and personal accounts (317), she wrote. She understood, at the same time, that literature could offer a counter narrativeanother story to the one we think we know (319). She asks the questions, Why would anyone beat a child? Why would anyone rape a child? She wagered, indeed hoped, that her story would make the reader angry. To accomplish this desire, the voice of Bastard Out of Carolina would have to be a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice (319). What she found after the book was published to critical accolades and best seller status was that, instead of fueling compassion, libraries and schools banned it. The same would happen to the Angelica Houston film (1996), which Allison had admired for its honesty and truth telling. What banning books [and films] does, she responds in the Afterword, is continue the denial, extend that damage, and block any way for us to come together and address the reality of violence within our families and communities (319). But if fear were the foundation for creating they or other, she also knew she had accomplished just what she needed with the writing of this book: I do not want to be the person who acts always out of fear or denial or old shame and other assumptions. I want to be my best selfthe one who set out to tell a story that might make a difference in the lives of people who read it. Unafraid, stubborn, resilient, and capable of enormous compassionsomeone like Bone. (320) Bastard Out of Carolina, first published in 1986 as a short story in New Yorks Village Voice Literary Supplement, opens like any good bildungsroman or coming of age story, with the birth of the heroine Ruth Anne Boatwright (Bone), certified a bastard by the state of South Carolina (3). Her mother Anney Boatwright spends the following years trying to get the state to address that harsh label. Year after year, Anney marches to the courthouse and demands another birth certificate with the offending label removed, and each year she is systematically ignored. Then one day as she waitresses at the White Horse Caf an announcement on the radio sounds an alarm that the courthouse has burned to the ground along with all the official records of the good citizens of Greenville. The laughter at that moment is audible across the town, at least among a certain class of citizens. Anneys goal, beyond expunging from public record the label of bastard for her child, is to find a husband and father, first for Bone, and then after the unexpected death of first husband Lyle, for little sister Reece. Daddy Glen, a man from the right side of the tracks but the wrong side of the heart, is unfortunately the one she chooses. As a husband and stepfather, Glen Waddell is both incompetent and controlling, brutish and infantile at the same time, another child requiring all of Anneys mothering, a man rejected by his own wealthy father as a loser. Granny says of him one day, That boys got something wrong with him. . . . Hes always looking at me out the sides of his eyes like some old junkyard dog waiting to steal a bone (37). And indeed he does. On the night when Anney gives birth to his own son, Glen rapes six-year-old Bone in the front seat of his Pontiac as they await Anneys labor. Her son is born dead, Anney can have no more children, and their lives descend to the horror of Daddy Glens abuse and Anneys ignorance about the extent of that abuse. The bright spots in Bones life are her wild Boatwright uncles. In their exuberance and unharnessed energy, these miscreants of mischief were the bane of her aunts and sometimes the law. Earle, Beau, and Nevil had calloused hands and untamed lives, but for Bone they were all she wanted to be: Earle and Nevil raked their calloused fingers through my black hair and played at catching my shirttail as I ran past them, but their hands never hurt me and their pride in me was as bright as the coals on the cigarettes they always held loosely between their fingers (23). Bone adored her uncles, despite their waywardness. She followed them around and stole things from them that they didnt really care aboutold tools, pieces of chain, and broken engine parts (23). Yet at the same time, she loved to sit among her aunts and listen to their woeful tales about these boy-men, who often made their womens lives miserable with their faithlessness and abuse. I liked being one of the women with my aunts, Bone muses, liked feeling a part of something nasty and strong and separate from my big rough boy-cousins and the whole world of spitting, growling, and overbearing males (91). Glens ineptness and inability to keep a job, necessitate the familys constantly being on the move, despite Anneys work as a waitress. When Glen learns that Anney has accepted money from her brother Earl to put food on the table, he erupts with angerbut his anger is directed not at Anney but at Bone, whose bruised and broken body finally lands her in the hospital. When the doctor calls out Anney on the abuse, she has a forced moment of recognition, taking the children and leaving Glen, only later to return. Glen is beaten senseless by the Boatwright uncles when they find out what he has done. It is a lesson, however, that doesnt take. Bones response is to conjure alternative stories in her mind, and her imagination wins respect from her Boatwright cousins, whom she has the singular ability to frighten out of their wits: My stories were full of boys and girls gruesomely raped and murdered, babies cooked in pots of boiling beans, vampires and soldiers [and] . . . gangs of women [that] rode in on motorcycles and set fire to peoples houses (119). Aunt Alma fears Bone is growing mean-hearted (119), but her stories and her visits to the library become her safe place and a respite from Daddy Glens brutishness. Katrina Irving writes about Bones storytelling in her essay Writing It Down So That It Would Be RealNarrative Strategies in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina. Irving notes that Bones sense of self diminishes in accordance both with her marginalized identity and her status as other, which the patriarchy that Daddy Glen represents enforces. Irving further posits that when Glen demands of Bone Im your daddy. I say what you do and Bone refuses to acquiesce in that fiction, her storytelling becomes an attempt to forge some control over her overwhelmingly disempowered life (100). Irving explains that Bones sexuality is produced by a patriarchal system that needs marginal subjects in order to demarcate and suture its own boundaries. Bones identity is created through her positioning by a system of civil and political institutions, including the legal apparatus, the welfare state, the church, and the nuclear family with its oedipal mandate. At the same time, Bones simultaneous rejection of this positioning is equally crucial to her identity formation. (97) Kathlene McDonald further clarifies these ideas about class, gender and identity formation in her essay Talking Back: Resistance to Stereotypes in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina. While McDonald explores how Allison constructs a white-trash subject that defies stereotypes by refusing the one-dimensionality of traditional cultural stereotypes (18), she goes on to posit the specific influence of gender and class on Bones identity: Understanding constructions of gender or sexual identity, [Allison] argues, necessitates understanding class and racial backgrounds. Likewise, the power of Allisons book lies not only in its resistance to the myths, lies, and stereotypes about white trash. In offering a more complex portrayal of white-trash experiences [and in a sense having Bone embrace aspects of her otherness], Bastard also provides a better understanding of the effects of class on identity that is not limited to or by gender and sexual identity. (23) Bones coup de grce comes when she is thirteen and staying with Aunt Alma after one of Wades indiscretions but also to protect herself from Glen. Bone has made a choicenot to go back to live with Anney and Glen, while Anney still is struggling with the idea of leaving Glen. One afternoon, Glen comes to ask Bone to return home so Anney will come back. Bone refuses, and Glen protests, It ant right her leaving me because of you. It ant right (283). As the confrontation escalates, Glen calls Bone a goddam little bastard! And with that, Bone says, Mamas never gonna go back to you. I wont let her. I hate you. Glen grabs Bones blouse, hurls a barrage of epithets at her as he shouts, Youve always wanted it. . . . Ill give you what you really want . . . Ill teach you (283). As he rants, he pounds her head against the floor. His sexual assault of Bone is interrupted as Anney walks in, and astoundingly Glen pleads with her, Its not what you think (286). In some sense, it isnt, as rape is singularly about power. When Anney runs to Bone and helps her to the car to take her to the hospital, Glen follows holding onto the car and banging his head on the door until bloody. His cries, Kill me, Anney. Kill me (290). And to Bones horror, her mother embraces Glen. Rachel Walersteins insightful essay Recomposing the Self: Joyful Shame in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina offers insight into how Bone can reclaim her sense of self and establish an identity that transcends the abuse and shame that comes with the social, class, and sexual othering, culminated in this brutal rape by her stepfather. Walerstein notes that shame is not just an emotion that comes from nowhere, but is rather an effective response to the sense others have about ones selfspecifically Bones struggles with the shame of being a bastard, as well as sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of her stepfather (2). It is both her friend Shannon Pearl and her Aunt Raylene, Walerstein posits, who reveal to Bone what it means to live joyfully with ones shame (2). While Bones friendship with the albino Shannon Pearl is certainly problematic and imperfect, Bones love of gospel music is facilitated through Shannon and her family, and Bone experiences joy, the antidote to shame. Likewise, Shannons very obliviousness to the disdain and judgement of society is a state of mind that Bone is not unaware of, even as Shannon Pearl is consumed in the flames of her barbeque celebration on the day the two girls have a tentative reconciliation. Bones Aunt Raylene, however, provides a gender model and a sensibility that will counter the shame that Bone has endured the whole of her life. Walerstein writes: Raylenes presence in the latter half of the novel illustrates how Bone proceeds to transform her shame, not only into interest and joy for herself, but into the joy of connecting with another (11). The simple pleasure that Bone receives from helping her aunt collect trash from the river to sell engenders a sense of pride and joy. It is this lovely irony of collecting trash that somehow meliorates Bones lowly sense of self, at the same time the label white trash has cut her to the quick. Thus Allison turns the tables on the very concept of shame and joythe idea that ones shame can become her joy. As Raylene drives Bone back from the hospital she shares the story of losing a lover, a woman whom Raylene had asked years ago to choose between her child and their love. Raylene tells her niece, Bone, no woman can stand to choose between her baby and her love, between her child and her husband. . . . We do terrible things to the ones we love [and] . . . we cant explain it. Raylene goes on to tell her niece, I know your mama loves you . . . and she ant never gonna forgive herself for what shes done to you, what she allowed to happen (300-301). While Bones emotional wounds are still raw, Raylenes sharing her story is something that Bone will remember. At the end of the novel Anney brings Bone a final copy of her birth certificate, and while it says father unknown, the term bastard has been purged. Indeed, Bone needs no acknowledged father; she can be who she was meant to beshe can create herself. As for reconciliation with the mother, that is the task of Allisons next novel Cavedweller. Dorothy Allisons award winning story Compassion, selected for Best Short Stories of 2003 and Best Short Stories of the South (2003), portrays her own real-life coming to terms with her mother, but it is cast in the genre of fiction rather than memoir, as Allison has made clear in the Afterword of Bastard that she prefers the power of a well-told narrative (314). Compassion is a stream of consciousness tale that portrays the passing of a mother of three daughtersthe narrator, Jo, and Arlene, whose troubled lives stem from a dysfunctional home dominated and disrupted by their abusive stepfather Jack. The narrative moves about in time, as memory takes the dying mother and her daughters back to both propitious and everyday moments that hold glimpses of why their lives are laced with painful memories. From the opening linesPearly blisters spread down her chin to her throat . . . Herpes (189)Allison portrays the coming of death in all its unpleasantness as well as its potential for compassion. The intensity of the storys undertones suggests to the reader that there were poignant, painful, and horrific happenings in this home. Though Jack never beat the mother, he regularly directed his abuse at her daughters, and in this way he controlled the family dynamic: [E]very time the son of a bitch hit us, he was hitting her. He beat us like we were dogs. He treated her like her ass was gold. And she always talked about leaving him, you know. She never did, did she?, Jo complains (192). Jack, about whom we hear more than we see in the story which is told through the three daughters perceptions, professes in his mantraI did the best I could with those girls (206)a sentiment which belies his status as the precious patriarch never fully able to see or accept the reality of his destructive actions in this family. The daughters get along only tolerably well, but there is a connection that is nonetheless deep among them and their mother. There is also the unfinished business of their mothers never having left Jack which troubles each daughter in a different way. The mothers own unanswered mantraWhat happens after death?echoes as long as she has consciousness, but what is clearly on her mind as she faces death is whether the two older daughtersthe narrator and Johate her, because she obviously was unable to protect them from their stepfather: I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other. . . . Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him (213). The stream-of-consciousness vignettes are touching and telling about each of the sistersthe narrators lesbian relationships, Jos passion for animals and sense of justice, and Arlenes suicide attempts. However, it is in the final scene, as the mother lets go of her life and perhaps her guilt, that we see her girls gathered around her, Arlene softly singing, and the suggestion of redemption: Mamas whole attention remained fixed on the song until the pupil of the right eye finally filled up with blood and blacked out. Even then, we held on. We held Mamas stilled shape between us. We held her until she set us free. (219) Dorothy Allisons second novel Cavedweller (1998) has not received as much critical attention as Bastard Out of Carolina, and yet it is both a powerful story of redemption, as well as a re-visioning of the myth of white trash by portraying what Karen Gaffney calls a story of resistance that breaks the vicious cycle of self-hatred, blame, and stereotypes (45). The book accomplishes this, according to Gaffney, by exposing the intersectionality of class, race and stereotype, first by deconstructing the myth of racial conflict between blacks and poor whites (through the friendship of protagonist Delia Byrd and her Black friend Rosemary), and second by exposing the prejudice against poor whites as deserving of their economic status, thereby normalizing class stratification and alleviating responsibility from middle- and upper-class whites (45, 46). Gaffney focuses on what Allison calls excavating stereotypes by exposing the faulty facades of class assumptions in characters like Nadine Reitower, who basks in her supposed social superiority over protagonist Delia and her three daughtersthat is, until her husband dies of a heart attack and leaves the family struggling as well at the economic margins of social class. Gaffney writes, [Nadine] experiences a literal and figurative breakdown, revealing her position at the intersection of multiple [class] categories, and her own new class status (47). Nadines has spent a lifetime attempting to starve herself into her slender House and Garden, middle class body image, until her bones [go] lacy and fine and fractured in thin, spidery lines that confines her to a wheelchair (Cavedweller 285-86). However, Nadine is not the only character who finds herself at the intersection of class, race, and gender stereotypes; indeed, each of the characters who participate in Delia Byrds story of coming to terms with her supposed failures as a mother is, in some sense, at this intersection. Gaffney writes, building from the work of Kimberle Crenshaws Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color: It is only when we are able to see how these multiple categories influence and intersect with each other that we can begin to excavate the myth of white trash (49). Referencing the youngest of Delias daughters, Cissy, the one daughter who is literally an outsider, born and raised in California, a universe apart from the insular inhabitants of Cayro, Georgia, where Delia has returned home, Gaffney explores the process for deconstructing the myth of white trash: Cissy experiences four phases of this process: acceptance and internalization of the stereotype of white trash, skepticism about the stereotype, resistance within the stereotype, and finally, abandonment of the stereotype completely with a new perspective that acknowledges intersectionality (49). Delia Byrd has come to a cross-roads in her life, a choice that she is determined to follow through with after the death of her estranged husband and rock-star icon Randall, the lead singer of the Rock band Mud Dog, a name Allison chose that references dirt, and thus trash. Fourteen years prior, Delia had left Cayro and her abusive husband Clint Windsor and two small daughters to follow Randall and make music as well as a third daughter, Cissy. When Randall is killed in a motorbike accident, Delia determines to turn her life around and take Cissy back to Georgia to reconnect with her family and make amends, if she can, with her two daughters by Clint, Amanda and Dede. Cissy blames her mother for her father Randalls death and resists her mothers plan. You killed him, Cissy shouts in anger. I hate you (3). She has no intention of leaving LA and going to some god-forsaken dust-bin in Georgias hickland, the backside of nowhere, the ass-end of the universe (29). But go she does, carrying with her enough anger to start her own war and little desire to connect with her Georgia half-sisters, or they with her. When Delia and Cissy arrive in Cayro after the long drive across country, they stop to eat at the local caf, where Delia is recognized: I know you, shouts the cook; You that bitch ran off and left her babies (39). Delia knows that the task before her will be formidable when she arrives at her grandfather Byrds ramshackle house with her intransigent teenage daughter. As she leaves Cissy to emulate the cold faade of her grandfather Byrd, Delia tries to see her girls who live with their religiously constricted Windsor grandmotherAmanda having given herself over to fundamentalist religion and Dede straining at the bit to get away from it. When all avenues fail, Delia determines to talk to Clint, whom she finds dying of cancer and much changed from the hard and controlling husband who had abused and driven her away when she wouldnt conform to his wants and violent temper. The two form a truceDelia will care for Clint since he waits to die at home, and the girls will come and stay together in his house until they come of age. When Delia tries to explain to the girls that they will remain with her as she cares for Clint, at least until they are eighteen, all three are steely-eyed: Amanda kept her eyes trained on Delias. I dont love you, she said. I care nothing about you. . . . Youre nothing to me. Delia flushed, but her gaze never wavered. And you are everything to me. Everything. . . . The three of you are all I want in the world. If you dont love me, Im not surprised. If you hate me, I can take that too. But youre mine, all of you. Youre everything I am. And whatever else happens. I am going to take care of you. (119-120) The three daughters have little in common and much to despair about each other and about Delia. Still, Delia persists while assuming the back-breaking work of caring for a man that she had once hated who now is dying; at the same time, she is trying to make amends to three bitter and angry daughters. To help her through this difficult period comes Rosemary, her best friend from Los Angeles, who had helped her through other troubled times. Rosemary is like a breath of fresh air in the house, and as an African American she too is an outsider, but she and Delia have a tie that transcends race and stereotype. Allison uses their relationship to confound assumptions about white trash racism. Rosemary attempts to bring some sense to this senseless social experiment of Delias with her three teenage daughters. One afternoon as Cissy storms about her situation and about Delia, Rosemary has a come-to-Jesus conversation with the angry teen: You think Delia doesnt know what she threw away? . . . You think all she amounts to is what you need her to be? Rosemarys voice was hoarse. Diamonds and dirt, legends and rude boys, poets that are no poets at all, babies that never get born or get lost through no fault of our own. Life sweeps you away like a piss river. (173) All of the characters whom Delia has loved or makes amends with come to a point in the story where they have some epiphany about how we stereotype, dismiss, control, and abuse each other; and each experiences the need to see and understand that stereotype excavated from the inside, as Allison says (History 11). This excavation is both enlightening and holds the possibility for redemption. Even as hardened and abusive as Clint once was, the experience of terminal illness brings him also to such an epiphany. As Cissy, the only one who has any genuine empathy for him, reads and cares for Clint, she listens to his stories about Delia, almost an obsession here at the end as he comes to terms with driving Delia away. His illness allows him to proceed with stunning clarity to excavate the masculine stereotype that demands submissiveness and control of women: I got to where I expected a woman to make herself over for me. All the women I had ever known, I could feel that center place turning to me, waiting and wanting. I couldnt believe Delia wasnt like that. I got it wrong. He tells Cissy as he laments the chauvinist code that influenced him and kept him from seeing who Delia really was: Maybe I was afraid Delia would see the soft spot in me, see how it turned for her. I was the one who bent myself on Delia. But Delia was just herself, . . . Beautiful and fine and herself (180). And Clint comes to this final realization, Damn truth is I ruined myself trying to break the woman I loved. Just broke myself [instead] (181). Though each of Delias daughters comes to a similar understanding of their mother, it is Cissys experience spelunking, a birthday gift from her friend Noland, that is most significantand that gives us the meaning of the books title and the controlling image for the novel. As Cissy descends into a world of darkness, she ironically comes to see with greater clarity. In some sense, the metaphor is similar to Wordsworths distinction between the light of common day that we experience in the everyday world around us, often a world of shadows where it is difficult to discern truth, and the true enlightenment of the visionary gleam that augers real understanding. This Platonic image runs throughout the book, and certainly Platos Allegory of the Cave is significant, since the heart of both Allison novels centers on understanding what is essentially not understandable in this world of shadows. Ironically, Cissys injured eyethe result of an accident with her father Randall and an injury that rendered her sight flawedis an advantage underground and in the dark. When she descends into the cave with Noland, she experiences for the first time a clarity of vision she has not known before. Nolan snapped the light on then. Grief flooded Cissy in a scalding sweep. Both of them flinched, and Cissy covered her face. The light was too big, too hot, and too painful. The dark was gone, the great beautiful healing blackness (244). It is Cissys poor vision and her status as an outsider or other, both in terms of geography and gender, that allow her to see and connect with her querulous granddaddy Byrd, that help her to understand the regret and failed chauvinism of Clint, and eventually that allow her to come to terms with Delia and her sisters. Cissy is a cavedweller who finds that the darkness is the best place for her to see the light. She thinks to herself, Down here, I know who I am, what I can do. Oh, this is the hillbilly hiding place (307). Cissy has traveled from anger and obstinacy to acceptance and understanding, from hating the stares at herself and her mother that shouted white trash to embracing the dirt and trash, the flotsam of earth that she had once tried obsessively to wash away quite literally from her body. Things underground altered, she muses about her cavedwelling, underwent a terrestrial change. Without sunlight or heat to dry it out, the rocks grew phosphorescent and took on the gleaming imprint of handfalls or fingerprints (307-08). Now the dark mud on her jeans [that] crusted and flaked from her hips and thighs were familiar and welcomed (308). She was stronger than rock, more determined than the tides of sand and grit that moved along the underground creeks (308). Cissys friendship with her two gay friends, Mim and Jean, flourishes in her cavedwelling adventures, and as she embraces the mud and dirt, earths debris and trash, she finds a way to transcend the hurtful labels that the community has attached to her family and that she had attached to herself. Cissy dreams about the flowstone in the cave, the slowly moving rock beneath the dirt. . . . Flowstone was like herdirt pressed hard, unvalued and ignored (324). However, she knew who she was and where she belonged, the worth of her bones and the cadence of her heart (324). Cavedwellers, like the flowstone, are ignored but nonetheless follow the essence of their best selves, or what they believe to be their best selves. For Delia this is music, for Nolan it is his one-sided love for Dede, for Amanda it is the fog of religion. It may be some essence of self that leads one to make mistakes or commit a tragic faux pas, such as Delias abandoning her children, but even the most tragic mistakes can be absolved, as Delias agreement with Clint reveals. Cavedwelling is the comfort one finds in the unbearable lightness of her being, the comfort of remaining true to ones self. At the novels end, after her girls have left the nest that Delia has worked so hard to make for them, as her grandson Gabe raises his arms toward her, Delia turns to look at her friend Rosemary, who laughs and says, We should write some new songs. Delia, who has so intrepidly followed her heart, says, Yes, its time for some new songs (434). Dorothy Allison has taken the concept of they and the stereotypes of other that underpin rigid concepts of class, race, and gender, in order to excavate them in her prose and poetry, to expose the lies that they create to facilitate exclusion, prejudice, hatefulness, and harm. Her work is fearless, and her storytelling gives us recipes for survival, as in some respect it has for Allison herself. In The Women Who Love Me, she expresses her hope that those who have plowed through such self-revelation and discovery will stand fast in their knowledge: They bank the ground I stand on every time they stand against the wind refuse to deny themselves, their people, bend but do not fall, hold to time and steady struggle, the reach of daylight the hope of women who love each other, women who truly love each other. (lines 20-28) Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. NY: Penguin, 1993. _____________. Bertha Harris, A Memoir. Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994. 201-07. _____________. Compassion. Trash. NY: Plume, 2002. 189-219. _____________. Deciding to Live. Trash. 1-8. _____________. History Is a Weapon: A Question of Class. Online _____________. A Question of Class. Skin. 9-36. _____________. River of Names. Trash. 9-19. _____________. Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty. Skin. 83-91. _____________. Shotgun Strategies. Skin. 51-56. _____________. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. NY: Penguin, 1995. _____________. The Women Who Hate Me. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1991. Claxton, Mae Miller, ed. Conversations with Dorothy Allison. Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Gaffney, Karen. Excavated from the Inside: White Trash and Dorothy Allisons Cavedweller. Modern Language Studies 32 (Spring 2002): 43-57. Gru, Mlanie. The Internal Other: Dorothy Allisons White Trash. Otherness: Essays and Studies 4.2: 1-21. Irving, Katrina. Writing It Down So That It Would Be Real: Narrative Strategies in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina. College Literature 25 (Spring 1998): 94-107. McDonald, Kathleen. Talking Trash, Talking Back: Resistance to Stereotypes in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina. Womens Studies Quarterly 26 (Spring Summer 1998: 15-25. Reynolds, David. White Trash in Your Face: The Literary Descent of Dorothy Allison. Appalachian Journal 20 (Summer 1993): 356-366. Walerstein, Rachel. Recomposing the Self: Joyful Shame in Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 49 (December 2016): 169-183.      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Segoe UIA$BCambria Math"1hGGn'&&Q0JQHP  $P4g2!xx8Ms Sylvia ShurbuttSylvia Shurbutt Oh+'0?  0 < H T`hpxSylvia ShurbuttNormalSylvia Shurbutt2Microsoft Office Word@@'1<-@@&Gt>VT$m% *  !1.@"Calibri---  2 0 1  2 0    0''  2 `0    0''@Elephant--- 2 uk0 The Power of the Story and Writing for Ones Life:                2 u 0    2 0 Do  2 0 rothy Allison     2 N0   52 T0 and Excavating Stereotypes         2 0   @Elephant--- 2 i\0 By Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, ϳԹUniversity Center for Appalachian Studies and Commun             2 0 ities  2 0   @Garamond---  2 0    k2 @0 I want to break the heart of the world . . . and then heal it.    2 0   /2 0 Dorothy Allison, Albert  2 90 Gallatin   2 b0   2 d 0 Lecture, NYU    2 0   @Elephant--- 2 ` 0 Bildungsroman     2 0 :  2 0   2 0 From  2  0 Greenville    2 u0 To   2 0   2  0 Tallahassee    2 0   2  0 and Beyond    2 W0   @Garamond--- #2 #`0 Dorothy Allison   2 #0 explain 2 #0 ed  2 #0   2 # 0 in a  2 #%0   2 #)0 1974  2 #I0   42 #M0 essay why she had become a    &2 #0 writer and a story  %2 #r0 teller. I make    j2 >`?0 fiction, construct it, intend it to have an impact, an effect,   2 >0   2 >0 she said 2 > 0 , to quite l )2 >]0 iterally change the   R2 Y`/0 world that lied to my mother, my sisters and me      U2 Y10 . The fiction I make comes out of my life and my        A2 t`$0 beliefs, but it is not autobiography  2 tI0 .  2 tM0   a2 tT90 What I have taught myself to do is to craft truth out of    2 `0 st 2 k 0 orytelling ( (2 0 Shotgun Strategies  2 60   2 =0   2 C0 55).  2 h 0 Storytelling  2 0 ,  2 0   (2 0 for Dorothy Allison    2 :0 ,  2 >0   )2 C0 has not been merely   2 0 a   2 ` 0 vocation,   2 0 an avocation,  2 0 an  2 0 art, or  2 /0 a  2 :0 pastime   2 k0  ^2 {70 it has been an act of survival, a necessity to understa 2 0 nd    2 `0 the  2 y0 awful   2  0 complexity,   2 0 the  %2 0 fearful symmetry  2 z 0  of life  2 0   O2 -0 as Blake framed it, and to make sense out of     @Garamond------ %2 `0 acts of everyday  2  0 cruelty. In  (2 0 Deciding to Live,  ---  2 0  --- X2 30 Allison wrote this: For me those stories were not       \2 `60 distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of m    S2 00 y life, and they were necessary in ways I could       22 `0 barely understand (5). Wh A2 $0 en she is composing a story, Allison    2 0   82 0 says, she is writing for [her  2 0 self 2 0 ],   G2 1`(0 trying to shape [her] life outside [her]  2 1Y0   d2 1`;0 terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a    2 L`0 tangible  2 L0   2 LT0 way. Books have always been the soul of her world: I was a child she says, who        )2 g`0 believed in books ( p2 gC0 4). Stories, particularly those she conjured in her imagination as   2 g|0    2 g0 a child, were    2 `0 attempt   2 0 s /2 0 , in the darkest of days  2 00   A2 6$0 and the depths of shame, to find a r  52 &0 eality she could offer as a    2 `0 counterbalance 2  0 , a fantasy,  2   0 or simply   2 F0   j2 K?0 an imaginative way to seize a narrative that might destroy her      2 `0 and  .2 }0 turn it into something   2  0 palatable 2 K0 .  2 Y 0 She closes  &2 0 Deciding to Live    2 0   :2 0 by saying, I write stories. I    52 `0 write fiction. I put on the  @2 #0 page a third look at what Ive seen   2 0  72  0 the condensed and reinvented   +2 `0 experience of a cross  2 0 - 2  0 eyed, working   2 >0 - m2 CA0 class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has      2 `Z0 made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me an    2  0 d mine (7).   2 0     2 .`0  0 ,2 .0 Dorothy Allison was bo    ;2 .% 0 rn in Greenville, South Carolina    2 .0   2 .0 in 1949 2 .0 . S 2 .2 0 he writes   2 .j0   2 .m0 in   2 .|0  2 . 0 History Is a   2 I`0 Weapon  2 I0   2 I0   2 I 0 that she was   2 I0   y2 II0 the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a        2 d`0 girl who   2 d0   82 d0 had left the seventh grade the  2 dO0   "2 dR0 year before, wo  P2 d.0 rked as a waitress, and was just a month past      /2 `0 fifteen when she had me    2 0    2 0 (  2 0 1  2 0 - 2 0 2).   2 -0 H  2 9 0 er mother   2 u0 ,  2 y0   (2 }0 Ruth Gibson Allison    2 0 , littl 52 0 e more than a child herself    2 `0 when   2 0   %2 0 Dorothy was born,    2 0   /2 0 was from a family on the     2 0   (2 0 long and the wrong   42 0 end of White Horse Road in    "System6R0nNܪnN߮--  00//..YS Sp ՜.+,0 hp  ϳԹUniversity  Title  !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~Root Entry Fp/Į 1Table|*WordDocument.SummaryInformation(,@DocumentSummaryInformation8CompObjr  F Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q