Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that no one is as hard as my uncles had to pretend to be.
LET ME TELL YOU about what I have never been allowed to be. Beautiful and female. Sexed and sexual. I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats. Ask any white Southerner. They’ll take you back two generations, say, “Yeah, we had a plantation.” The hell we did.
I have no memories that can be bent so easily. I know where I come from, and it is not that part of the world. My family has a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness—the women of my family most of all.
The women of my family were measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt. My family? The women of my family? We are the ones in all those photos taken at mining disasters, floods, fires. We are the ones in the background with our mouths open, in print dresses or drawstring pants and collarless smocks, ugly and old and exhausted. Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species.
I remember standing on the porch with my aunt Maudy brushing out my hair; I was feeling loved and safe and happy. My aunt turned me around and smoothed my hair down, looked me in the eye, smiled, and shook her head. “Lucky you’re smart,” she said.
Brown-toothed, then toothless, my aunt Dot showed me what I could expect.
“You’re like me,” she announced when she saw my third-grade school picture. “Got that nothing-gonna-stop-you look about you, girl.”
I studied the picture. All I saw was another grinning girl in dark-framed glasses, missing a tooth.
“No, look.” She produced a picture I would find later among Mama’s treasures. In this one Aunt Dot was a smooth-skinned teenager with a wide jaw and a straightforward glare, sturdy and fearless at fifteen as she would be three decades later.
“I see,” I assured her, keeping my head down and away from her demanding eyes.
What I saw was a woman who had never been beautiful and never allowed herself to care. When she found me once, red-faced and tearful, brooding over rude boys who shouted insults and ran away, she told me to wipe my face and pay no attention.
“It never changes,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Men and boys, they all the same. Talk about us like we dogs, bitches sprung full-grown on the world, like we were never girls, never little babies in our daddy’s arms. Turn us into jokes ’cause we get worn down and ugly. Never look at themselves. Never think about what they’re doing to girls they’ve loved, girls they wore out. Their girls.”
“You ugly old woman,” my grandfather called my grandmother.
“You ugly old woman,” all my uncles called all my aunts.
“You ugly bitch,” my cousins called their sisters, and my sisters called me.
“You ugly thing!” I screamed back.
The pretty girls in my high school had good hair, curled or straightened to fit the fashion, had slender hips in tailored skirts, wore virgin pins on the right side or knew enough not to wear such tacky things at all. My cousins and I were never virgins, even when we were. Like the stories told about Janis Joplin in Port Arthur, Texas, there were stories about us in Greenville, South Carolina. The football players behind the bleachers, boys who went on to marry and do well.
“Hell, it wasn’t rape. She never said no. Maybe she said stop, but in that little bitty voice, so you know she wants you to love her, hell, love her for ten minutes or half an hour. Shit, who could love a girl like her?”
Who?
Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.
We were not beautiful. We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly.
“You know Dot’s husband left her,” Cousin Billie told me once. “Came back after a while, then left again. Way she talked you’d think she never noticed. Some days I don’t know whether to be proud of her or ashamed.”
I thought about stories I’d been told, about women whose men left them or stayed to laugh out the sides of their mouths when other men mentioned other women’s names. Behind my aunt Dot was a legion of female cousins and great-aunts, unknown and nameless—snuff-sucking, empty-faced creatures changing spindles at the textile plant, chewing gum while frying potatoes at the truck
ep exhausted, angry, and never loved enough.
The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them. I made myself proud of their pride, their determination, their stubbornness, but every night I prayed a man’s prayer: Lord, save me from them. Do not let me become them.
Let me tell you the mean story.
For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.
That’s the mean story. That’s the lie I told myself for years, and not until I began to fashion stories on the page did I sort it all out, see where the lie ended and a broken life remained. But that is not how I am supposed to tell it. I’m only supposed to tell one story at a time, one story. Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don’t do that. I never do.
Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.
Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
The man raped me. It’s the truth. It’s a fact.
I was five, and he was eight months married to my mother. That’s how I always began to talk about it—when I finally did begin to talk about it. I’d say, “It was rape, the rape of a child.” Then I’d march the words out—all the old tearing awful words.
For years, every time I said it, said “rape” and “child” in the same terrible sentence, I would feel the muscles of my back and neck pull as taut as the string of a kite straining against the wind. That wind would blow and I would resist, then suddenly feel myself loosed to fall or flee. I started saying those words to get to that release, that feeling of letting go, of setting loose both the hatred and the fear. The need to tell my story was terrible and persistent, and I needed to say it bluntly and cruelly, to use all those words, those old awful tearing words.
I need to be a woman who can talk about rape plainly, without being hesitant or self-conscious, or vulnerable to what people might be saying this year.
I need to say that my mama didn’t know what was going on, that I didn’t tell her, that when I finally did tell someone it was not her. I need to say that when I told, only my mama believed me, only my mama did anything at all, that thirty years later one of my aunts could still say to me that she didn’t really believe it, that he had been such a hardworking, good-looking man. Something else must have happened. Maybe it had been different.
How? I wanted to ask. How could it have been different for a five-year-old and a grown man? Instead I just looked at her, feeling finally strong enough to know she had chosen to believe what she needed more than what she knew.
Two or three things I know for sure, but none of them is why a man would rape a child, why a man would beat a child.
WHY? I AM A
SKED. Why do you bring that up? Must you talk about that? I asked myself the same questions until finally I began to understand. This was a wall in my life, I say, a wall I had to climb over every day. It was always there for me, deflecting my rage toward people who knew nothing about what had happened to me or why I should be angry at them.
It took me years to get past that rage, to say the words with grief and insistence but to let go of the anger, to refuse to use the anger against people who knew nothing of the rape. I had to learn how to say it, to say “rape,” say “child,” say “unending,” “awful,” and “relentless,” and say it the way I do— adamant, unafraid, unashamed, every time, all over again—to speak my words as a sacrament, a blessing, a prayer. Not a curse. Getting past the anger, getting to the release, I become someone else, and the story changes. I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her outrage, showing what I know: that evil is a man who imagines the damage he does is not damage, that evil is the act of pretending that some things do not happen or leave no mark if they do, that evil is not what remains when healing becomes possible.
All the things I can say about sexual abuse—about rape—none of them are reasons. The words do not explain. Explanations almost drove me crazy, other people’s explanations and my own. Explanations, justifications, and theories. I’ve got my own theory. My theory is that rape goes on happening all the time. My theory is that everything said about that act is assumed to say something about me, as if that thing I never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life. My theory is that talking about it makes a difference—being a woman who can stand up anywhere and say, I was five and the man was big.
So let me say it.
He beat us, my stepfather, that short, mean-eyed truck driver with his tight-muscled shoulders and uneasy smile. He was a man who wasn’t sure he liked women but was sure he didn’t like smart, smart-mouthed tomboys, stubborn little girls who tried to pretend they were not afraid of him. Two or three things I know, but this is the one I am not supposed to talk about, how it comes together—sex and violence, love and hatred. I’m not ever supposed to put together the two halves of my life—the man who walked across my childhood and the life I have made for myself. I am not supposed to talk about hating that man when I grew up to be a lesbian, a dyke, stubborn, competitive, and perversely lustful.
“People might get confused,” a woman once told me. She was a therapist and a socialist, but she worried about what people thought. “People might imagine that sexual abuse makes lesbians.”
“Oh, I doubt it.” I was too angry to be careful. “If it did, there would be so many more.”
Her cheeks flushed pink and hot. She had told me once that she thought I didn’t respect her—her oddly traditional life and commonplace desires, her husband of twelve years and female companion of five. Looking into her stern, uncompromising face brought back my aunts and their rueful certainty that nothing they did was ever quite right. Two or three things and none of them sure, that old voice whispered in my head while this woman looked at me out of eyes that had never squinted in regret.
“Tell me, though,” I added, and shifted my shoulders like Aunt Dot leaning into a joke, “if people really believed that rape made lesbians, and brutal fathers made dykes, wouldn’t they be more eager to do something about it? What’s that old Marxist strategy—sharpen the contradiction until even the proletariat sees where the future lies? We could whack them with contradictions, use their bad instincts against their worse. Scare them into changing what they haven’t even thought about before.”
She opened her mouth like a fish caught on a razor-sharp line. For the first time in all the time I had known her I saw her genuinely enraged. She didn’t think my suggestion was funny. But then, neither did I.
How does it come together, the sweaty power of violence, the sweet taste of desire held close? It rises in the simplest way, naturally and easily, when you’re so young you don’t know what’s coming, before you know why you’re not supposed to talk about it.
It came together for me when I was fifteen and that man came after me with a belt for perhaps the thousandth time and my little sister and I did not run. Instead we grabbed up butcher knives and backed him into a corner. And oh, the way that felt! For once we made him sweat with the threat of what we’d do if he touched us. And oh! the joy of it, the power to say, “No, you son of a bitch, this time, no!” His fear was sexual and marvelous—hateful and scary but wonderful, like orgasm, like waiting a whole lifetime and finally coming.
I know. I’m not supposed to talk about sex like that, not about weapons or hatred or violence, and never to put them in the context of sexual desire. Is it male? Is it mean? Did you get off on it? I’m not supposed to talk about how good anger can feel—righteous, justified, and completely satisfying. Even at seventeen, when I learned to shoot a rifle, I knew not to tell anyone what I saw and felt as I aimed that weapon. Every time I centered on the target it was his heart I saw, his squint-eyed, mean-hearted image.
I knew that the things I was not supposed to say were also the things I did not want to think about. I knew the first time I made love with a woman that I could cry but I must not say why. I cried because she smelled like him, the memory of him, sweaty and urgent, and she must not know it was not her touch that made me cry. Breathing her in prompted in me both desire and hatred, and of the two feelings what I dared not think about was the desire. Sex with her became a part of throwing him off me, making peace with the violence of my own desire.
I know. I’m not supposed to talk about how long it took me to wash him out of my body—how many targets I shot, how many women I slept with, how many times I sat up till dawn wondering if it would ever change, if I would ever change. If there would come a time in my life when desire did not resonate with fury.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open.
LET ME TELL YOU A STORY. Let me tell you the story that is in no part fiction, the story of the female body taught to hate itself.
It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.
Women.
Lord God, I used to follow these girls.
They would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, aching, they came into my bed like I could fix it. And every time I would try. I would do anything a woman wanted as long as she didn’t want too much of me. As long as I could hide behind her need, I could make her believe anything. I would tell her stories. I would bury her in them. I have buried more women than I am willing to admit. I have told more lies than I can stand.
I never thought about what I needed, how hurt and desperate I was, how mean and angry and dangerous. When I finally saw it, the grief I had been hiding even from myself, the world seemed to stop while I looked. For a year, then another, I kept myself safe, away from anyone, any feeling that might prompt that rage, that screaming need to hurt somebody back.
When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, “I can’t fix it, girl. I can’t fix anything. If you don’t ask me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I’ll try to give it to you.”
I remember the stories I was told as a girl, stories like soap operas, stories that went on for generations—how she loved him and left him and loved him still, how he hurt her and hurt her and never loved her at all, how that child they made told lies to get them to look at her, how no one knows the things don
e in that home, no one but her and she don’t tell.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told. Oh, I could tell you stories that would darken the sky and stop the blood. The stories I could tell no one would believe. I would have to pour blood on the floor to convince anyone that every word I say is true. And then? Whose blood would speak for me?
Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true. My stories are no parables, no Reader’s Digest Unforgettable Characters, no women’s movement polemics, no Queer Nation broadsides. I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three things I know for sure.
“How’d you know you were a lesbian?”
My sister Wanda was eighteen when she finally asked me that question. We were sitting on the steps of the feminist collective where I was living in Tallahassee, Florida. It was her matter-of-fact tone that surprised me, that and the direct way she put the question. From the moment she climbed off the bus with her hair tied back in braids, I had been talking to her about feminism, the women’s center, and the child-care center where I was a volunteer every Sunday afternoon. I wondered what had prompted the question—maybe one of our posters or the way my house-mates congregated around the pool table that dominated what was supposed to be our dining room. I wondered if I should give her the stock answer, right out of the radical women’s newsletters on my nightstand: that I became a lesbian because of my commitment to a women’s revolution.