Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [2]
The story becomes the thing needed.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.
LET ME TELL YOU A STORY. If I could convince myself, I can convince you. But you were not there when I began. You were not the one I was convincing. When I began there were just nightmares and need and stubborn determination.
When I began there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story.
But where am I in the stories I tell? Not the storyteller but the woman in the story, the woman who believes in story. What is the truth about her? She was one of them, one of those legendary women who ran away. A witch queen, a warrior maiden, a mother with a canvas suitcase, a daughter with broken bones. Women run away because they must. I ran because if I had not, I would have died. No one told me that you take your world with you, that running becomes a habit, that the secret to running is to know why you run and where you are going—and to leave behind the reason you run.
My mama did not run away. My aunt Dot and aunt Grace and cousin Billie with her near dozen children—they did not run. They learned resilience and determination and the cost of hard compromises. None of them ever intended to lose their lives or their children’s lives, to be trapped by those hard compromises and ground down until they no longer knew who they were, what they had first intended. But it happened. It happened over and over again.
Aunt Dot was the one who said it. She said, “Lord, girl, there’s only two or three things I know for sure.” She put her head back, grinned, and made a small impatient noise. Her eyes glittered as bright as sun reflecting off the scales of a cottonmouth’s back. She spat once and shrugged. “Only two or three things. That’s right,” she said. “Of course it’s never the same things, and I’m never as sure as I’d like to be.”
Where I was born—Greenville, South Carolina—smelled like nowhere else I’ve ever been. Cut wet grass, split green apples, baby shit and beer bottles, cheap makeup and motor oil. Everything was ripe, everything was rotting. Hound dogs butted my calves. People shouted in the distance; crickets boomed in my ears. That country was beautiful, I swear to you, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Beautiful and terrible. It is the country of my dreams and the country of my nightmares: a pure pink and blue sky, red dirt, white clay, and all that endless green—willows and dogwood and firs going on for miles.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
IN GREENVILLE, halfway through the fourth grade, we got a substitute teacher right out of college and full of ideas. First she brought in a record player and got us to sing along to folk songs—“Cum by yah, my lord, cum by yah!”—until another teacher complained of the noise. Next she tried to get us to do news reports, each of us presenting something we had learned from the news the night before. Another time, it might have worked, but the nightly news was full of Birmingham and Little Rock, burning buses and freedom marchers. Our reports degenerated into shouting matches and mortal insults, voices raised in more than song. More complaints, and this time the principal came around.
Our teacher fell back on what seemed an utterly safe choice. We were to make our family trees, interviewing relatives and doing posters to show the class.
“You can check family Bibles for the names of previous generations, and if you’ve got pictures, you could glue them on the posters.” She blew hard on a strand of hair that had fallen over her right eye. Teaching was clearly not what she had expected. “Or you can make drawings or even cut pictures out of magazines to represent people—anything you