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By Root 889 0

just as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read—sometimes most important what I should not try to write. I began in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser, aching to break the world open with what I had to say on the page. There were specific feelings I wanted the stories to create, realizations I wanted people to experience. Sometimes it was grief I wanted to provoke, sometimes anger, almost always a spur to action, to change. I wanted the world to be different in my lifetime, and I truly believed that stories were one way to help that happen. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be effective, and these are not always the same thing. Sometimes I was trying to write a poem, but the thing would not pare down enough to anything less than narrative. Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote to stop my own rage. Mostly I was angry, and drunk on words, the sound of words more than the way they looked on the page. It is quite literally the case that I wrote out loud, reading the stories out loud over and over until they were closer to what I wanted.

“If I die tomorrow, I want to have gotten this down.”

That is how many of these stories started. Once in a while, I had read someone else’s story and put it down in rage, beginning my own to refuse the one that had so confounded me. Going back into these stories, I remember those moments even when I no longer remember the actual stories I was refuting. Taylor Caldwell stories, I called them in an early journal—stories in which poor southern characters were framed as if they were brain-damaged, or morally insufficient, or just damn stupid.

“We are not stupid. We do pretty well with what we have.” I’d set out to put that on the page—but often I would go south. By that I mean I would not wind up where I intended. I started “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee” to work out in my own mind what it must have been like to have been my grandmother—and her mother, my great-grandma about whom I knew almost nothing, except that her children hated her and that she had lived a long time. How’d that work? I wondered, and made up a fictional Mattie Lee, a pretend Shirley. I gave the children names that actually figured in my grandmother’s conversations—names of cousins, second cousins, and lost uncles. I worked it out as if it were a movie, or the kind of story people in my family simply would not tell. Contrary to the myth of southern families passing stories along on the porch, people in my family kept secrets and only hinted at what might have happened. Some days I think the way to make a storyteller is to refuse to tell her what happened—as my mama and aunts did with me. I had to make up my great-grandmother, and I did it in a story that was originally to be about her daughter—a story I started when I was still in college, and my mother told me my grandmother had died—but three months after the funeral was past, and long past any hope I might have had of going to Greenville, attending the funeral or learning anything about how she had died.

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

“Oh.” I just stood there.

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

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

Maybe that was the story I should have written, but it was not. By the time I got back to my big complicated household, I was working on the story of what Grandma Mattie Lee might have been like as a girl. What if? And I was in it, watching Shirley beat on the steps with that broom handle. Would