I have made Mattie Lee so heroic if my own mother had not hidden her death from me, if my uncle had not spoken so brutally? Maybe. Still, what I wrote felt right on the page, and from this distance that seems the primary fact. I did a lot of things because it felt right on the page, or sounded right when read out loud in an empty room. I did not finish that story in Tallahassee. I did not finish that story till Brooklyn, fully fifteen years after my grandmother’s death. Even then, I think I finished it because I fell in love with that teenage girl, her mouth full of white and her eyes full of fire. It worked well enough that it was another of the stories my mama would never talk to me about. “Now that’s mean,” my mama said about one of the stories I sent her. She smiled and gave a little shudder when she said it. That is what I intended, I told her. I want it mean. I did not say that I also wanted the story to be about love and compassion. For that sometimes I had to dig deeper, into the muscle of character. Still, I think you can tell that I loved my impossible grandmother with my whole heart, her black brows and wide face, her bulldog glare and frank inclination to tell me things my mother never intended me to learn. I knew she worked her children the way her mother had worked her, putting them out to pick strawberries for neighboring farmers and pocketing the money to buy snuff. I knew she was quick to slap and full of desperation, but I knew also that in the context of how she had been raised and what she had survived, she was almost gentle, almost sweet-tempered. But not quite. I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures—that is who you will find in my stories—and little girls who were not me. What are these stories about? Shame and outrage, pride and stubbornness, and the vital necessity of a sense of humor. I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated. I wrote to celebrate. I wrote to take a little revenge, and sometimes to make clear that revenge was not what I was doing. Always, I tried not to use the flat metallic language of politics and preaching, but sometimes I knew no other way to frame what I had to say.
I wrote to give back to others who had given to me—sometimes reflexively. I would write particular stories in response to those I read. I began to write about incest only after reading Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. That book felt like a slap on the back from my mother’s hand, as if a trusted, powerful voice were telling me, You know something about incest—something you fear, but had best start figuring out. I began to figure things out in story.
I wrote “Mama” to talk about how deeply intertwined love and resentment can be in a family in which violence and sexual abuse are the norm. “River of Names” was an attempt to stop being ashamed of running away from the lives my cousins were living—and, bluntly, it was a slap in the face of all the women I knew who seemed unable to imagine lives different from their own.
Some stories I wrote in apology, but I cannot say the writing was ever simple or straightforward. Even as I tried to apologize on the page I was aiming at an audience who I imagined recoiling at the facts and people I portrayed. I published “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” before I told my mother I would be unable to have children, though that is the subject of the story. Only much later did I begin to think about what it would have felt like for her to read that story, my heartbroken mother who wanted nothing so much as the grandchildren I could not give her.
Some stories were about trying to figure things out, to understand what had happened and why. “Mama,” “Gospel Song,” “Lupus,” “A Lesbian Appetite,” and “I’m