Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 36 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “He’s bad,” Mama said, her eyes still looking out the window. “He’s just bad all the way through. He steals from his mama. He’s stolen from me. Don’t dare leave your pocketbook around him, or any of your stuff that he could sell. He even took Deedee’s green stamp books one time and traded them off for some useless thing.” Her eyes drifted back to my face, the stunned brown of the pupils shining like mossy rocks under water. “I remember when we were just kids and he was always stealing candy to give away. Thought people would like him if he gave them stuff, I suppose. Now he’s always saying how he’s been robbed, and he’s got a story to account for everything he does. Beats his girlfriends up ‘cause they cheat on him. Can’t keep a job ‘cause people tell lies about him. Steals ‘cause the world’s been so cruel to him. So much nonsense. He’s just bad, that’s all, just bad. Steals from his mama and sisters, steals from his own.” I dropped my head. I remembered Grey telling me how he learned to break locks from Tommy Lee, that Tommy Lee was the slickest piece of goods in Greenville. “Boy knows how to take care of himself for sure. Never owes nobody nothing.” Grey’s face had flushed with respect and envy when he said it, and I had felt a little of the same—wishing I too knew how to take care of myself and could break locks or start cars without a key or palm stuff off a counter so smoothly that no one would know I had done it. But to steal from your mama! My face felt stiff with shame and anger. I wasn’t like that. I would never steal from Mama. Mama’s hand touched my chin, trailed along my cheek, and stroked my hair. “You’re my pride. Do you know? You and your sister are all I really have, all I ever will have. You think I could let you grow up to be like that?” I shook my head. The tears started again, and with them hiccups. Mama went and got a cool washcloth to wet my face. “Don’t cry, honey. It’ll be all right. We’ll take care of it, it’ll be all right.” She put the Tootsie Rolls in a paper bag and gave me a handful of pennies to carry. She kept talking while she brushed my hair and then hers, called Reese in and told her to stay on the porch, turned the heat down on the beans that were cooking on the stove, and walked me out to the car. She told me about when she and Aunt Raylene were girls, how they had worked for this man out past Old Henderson Road, picking strawberries for pennies every day for weeks, going through the rows and pulling loose the red ripe ones for him to sell in his stand by the side of the road.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow. Bryan agreed to support the law. Immediately the trial became a contest between the Bible and science. Bryan was a disaster on the stand and Darrow emerged from the trial as the champion of rational thought. The press gleefully denounced the fundamentalists as hopeless anachronisms, who could take no part in the modern world. This had an effect that is instructive to us today. When fundamentalist movements are attacked they usually become more extreme. Before Dayton, the conservatives were wary of evolution, but very few had espoused ‘creation science’, which maintained that the first chapter of Genesis was factually true in every detail. After Scopes, however, they became more vehemently literal in their interpretation of scripture, and creation science became the flagship of their movement. Before Scopes, fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left; after Scopes, they swung to the far right of the political spectrum, where they have remained. After the Holocaust, orthodox Jews felt impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and misnagdic yeshivoth in the new Jewish state of Israel and the United States as an act of piety to the six million. 51 Torah study was now a lifelong, full-time pursuit. Men would continue at the yeshivah after they married and, supported financially by their wives, had minimal contact with the outside world. 52 These ultra-orthodox Jews, known as the Haredim (the ‘trembling ones’), 53 observed the commandments more rigorously than ever before, 54 finding new ways of being punctilious about diet and purification. 55 Before the Holocaust, excessive stringency had been discouraged as divisive. But now the Haredim were creating a Bible-based counter-culture in diametrical opposition to the rationalized efficiency that had helped to slaughter six million Jews. Yeshivah study had nothing in common with the pragmatism of modernity: many of the laws studied, such as the laws of temple service, could no longer be implemented. The repetition of the Hebrew words that God had spoken on Sinai was a form of communion with the divine. Exploring the minutiae of the law was a way of symbolically entering the mind of God. Becoming familiar with the halakha of the great rabbis was a way of appropriating the tradition that had so nearly been destroyed.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle. 12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah, 13 keep the Sabbath, 14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them. 15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.’ 16 Like the Essenes, the members of the Jesus group seem to have had an ambiguous relationship with the temple. Jesus was said to have predicted that Herod’s magnificent shrine would soon be laid waste. ‘You see these great buildings?’ he asked his disciples. ‘Not a single stone will be left on another; everything will be destroyed.’ 17 At his trial, it was claimed that he had vowed to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. But like the Essenes, Jesus’s followers continued to pray in the temple and in this respect were in tune with other strands of Late Second Temple piety . In other ways, however, Christianity was highly eccentric and controversial. There was no general expectation that the messiah would die and rise again. Indeed, the manner of Jesus’s death was a source of embarrassment. How could a man who had died like a common criminal have been God’s Anointed? Many regarded the messianic claims for Jesus as scandalous. 18 The movement also lacked the moral rigour of some of the other sects: it claimed that sinners, prostitutes and those who collected the Roman taxes would enter the kingdom ahead of the priests. 19 Christian missionaries preached the gospel or ‘good news’ of Jesus’s imminent return in marginal and religiously dubious regions of Palestine, such as Samaria and Gaza. They also established congregations in the diaspora – in Damascus, Phoenicia, Cilicia and Antioch 20 – where they made an important breakthrough. Even though the missionaries preached in the first instance to their fellow Jews, they found that they were also attracting gentiles, especially among the God-fearers. 21 In the diaspora, Jews welcomed these pagan sympathizers, and the huge outer court of Herod’s new temple had been deliberately designed to accommodate crowds of gentiles who liked to participate in the Jewish festivals. The pagan worshippers had not become monotheists. They continued to worship other gods and participate in the local cults, and most Jews did not object to this, since God had only demanded exclusive worship of Israel. But if a gentile converted to Judaism, he had to be circumcised, observe the whole Torah and eschew idol worship.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Mama would be sleepy-eyed and soft all over, the pink in her face fresh and delicate. “They sure like to do it a lot,” Reese told Alma disgustedly. But Alma just laughed. “Everybody does, girl, everybody does.” She swatted lightly at the seat of Reese’s jeans and hugged me to her side. “Don’t make no mistake about that. Love is just about the best thing we’ve got that don’t cost money or make you sick to your stomach. You’ll see. Wait till you get a little bigger. You’ll see.” Reese grimaced and wiggled uncomfortably. “Mushy stuff,” she yelled as she ran off. “All that mushy stuff. I an’t gonna have none of it.” Aunt Alma laughed carelessly. I pulled away from her and went after Reese. It was mushy. Mama and Daddy Glen always hugging and rubbing on each other, but it was powerful too. Sex. Was that what Daddy Glen had been doing to me in the parking lot? Was it what I had started doing to myself whenever I was alone in the afternoons? I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone set the dry stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire. Daddy Glen didn’t do too well at RC Cola. He kept getting transferred to different routes or having to pay for breakage, and no matter how hard he and Mama worked, there never seemed to be enough money to pay the bills. He kept telling Mama that sooner or later his brother would pay him for all the work he’d done, but even after the offices of James Waddell, D.D.S., were open and busy, James never mentioned it. “Maybe you better ask James for that money he was gonna give you,” Mama finally suggested the day Daddy Glen came home to say he’d been laid off. “I can’t do that.” Glen’s face seemed to squeeze in on itself as he ran his hands down from his hairline to his neck, wiping sweat off the shadowy stubble on his cheeks and then resting his chin on his fingertips as if he were praying. “Oh, Lord God, no, I can’t do that. I’d rather starve.” His eyes looked shrunken and his chin stuck out. He looked everywhere but over at Mama where she sat. Instinctively I put down the glass I’d been rinsing and stepped out of the kitchen into the hall where he couldn’t see me without turning around. “Glen, honey.” Mama leaned forward. “I know it’s hard, but James is your brother, and baby, we’re just about broke. We’re not gonna have the rent if you don’t get it from him.” “Anney, you don’t understand.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I remembered Aunt Alma putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.” At least I wasn’t as ugly as Cousin Mary-May, I had told Reese, and been immediately ashamed. Mary-May was the most famous ugly woman in Greenville County, with a wide, flat face, a bent nose, tiny eyes, almost no hair, and just three teeth left in her mouth. Still, she was good-natured and always volunteered to be the witch in the Salvation Army’s Halloween Horror House. Her face hadn’t made her soul ugly. If I kept worrying about not being a beauty, I’d probably ruin myself. Mama was always saying people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity. With all the hatefulness I was trying to hide, it was a wonder I wasn’t uglier than a toad in mud season. The singing started. I leaned forward on the balls of my feet and hugged my knees, humming. Revivals are funny. People get pretty enthusiastic, but they sometimes forget just which hymn it is they’re singing. I grinned at the sound of mumbled unintelligible song, watching the men near the road punch each other lightly and curse in a friendly fashion. You bastard. You son of a bitch. The preacher said something I didn’t understand. There was a moment of silence, and then a pure tenor voice rose up into the night sky. The spit soured in my mouth. They had a real singer in there, a real gospel choir. Swing low, sweet chariot…coming for to carry me home…swing low, sweet chariot…coming for to carry me home. The night seemed to wrap all around me like a blanket. My insides felt as if they had melted, and I could taste the wind in my mouth. The sweet gospel music poured through me in a piercing young boy’s voice, and made all my nastiness, all my jealousy and hatred, swell in my heart. I remembered Aunt Ruth’s fingers fluttering birdlike in front of her face, Uncle Earle’s flushed cheeks and lank black hair as they’d cried together on the porch, Mama’s pinched, worried face and Daddy Glen’s cold, angry eyes. The world was too big for me, the music too strong. I knew, I knew I was the most disgusting person on earth. I didn’t deserve to live another day. I started hiccuping and crying. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] I didn’t daydream about fire anymore. Now I imagined people watching while Daddy Glen beat me, though only when it was not happening. When he beat me, I screamed and kicked and cried like the baby I was: But sometimes when I was safe and alone, I would imagine the ones who watched. Someone had to watch—some girl I admired who barely knew I existed, some girl from church or down the street, or one of my cousins, or even somebody I had seen on television. Sometimes a whole group of them would be trapped into watching. They couldn’t help or get away. They had to watch. In my imagination I was proud and defiant. I’d stare back at him with my teeth set, making no sound at all, no shameful scream, no begging. Those who watched admired me and hated him. I pictured it that way and put my hands between my legs. It was scary, but it was thrilling too. Those who watched me, loved me. It was as if I was being beaten for them. I was wonderful in their eyes. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] My fantasies got more violent and more complicated as Daddy Glen continued to beat me with the same two or three belts he’d set aside for me. Oiled, smooth and supple as the gristle under chicken fat, those belts hung behind the door of his closet where I could see them and smell them when I helped Mama put away his clothes. I would reach up and touch the leather, feel it warm under my palms. There was no magic in it, no mystery. Sometimes I would make myself go in that closet and wrap my fingers around those belts as if they were something animal that could be tamed. I was ashamed of myself for the things I thought about when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for masturbating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first place. I lived in a world of shame. I hid my bruises as if they were evidence of crimes I had committed. I knew I was a sick disgusting person. I couldn’t stop my stepfather from beating me, but I was the one who masturbated. I did that, and how could I explain to anyone that I hated being beaten but still masturbated to the story I told myself about it? Yet it was only in my fantasies with people watching me that I was able to defy Daddy Glen. Only there that I had any pride. I loved those fantasies, even though I was sure they were a terrible thing. They had to be; they were self-centered and they made me have shuddering orgasms. In them, I was very special. I was triumphant, important. I was not ashamed. There was no heroism possible in the real beatings. There was just being beaten until I was covered with snot and misery.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smell no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway. It’s the price of babies.” “Oh, it an’t that.” Mama pulled me up onto her lap and started the arduous process of brushing out my hair. “All us Boatwrights go dark as we get older. It’s just the way it goes. Blond goes red or brown, and darker and darker. An’t none of us stays a blond once we’re grown.” “ ‘Cept you, honey,” Aunt Alma grinned. “Yeah, but I got Clairol, don’t I?” Mama laughed and hugged me. “What you think, Alma? Should I cut this mop or not? She can’t keep it neat to save her life, hates me pulling on it when I try to brush it out.” “Hell yes, cut it. I’ll get the bowl. We’ll trim it right down to her neck.” “Noooo!” I howled, and wrapped my hands around my head. “I want my hair. I want my hair.” “But you won’t let us do nothing with it, honey.” “No! No! No! It’s my hair and I want it. I want it long and tangled and just the way it is.” Aunt Alma reached over and took the hairpin out of my mouth. “Lord, look at her,” she said. “Stubborn as the day is long.” “Uh-huh.” Mama put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed. She didn’t sound angry. I raised my head to look at her. Her brown eyes were enormous close up, with little flecks of light in the pupils. I could almost see myself between the flashes of gold. “Well, what you expect, huh?” I looked back at Aunt Alma. Her eyes were the same warm brown, deep and shining with the same gold lights, and I realized suddenly that she had the same cheekbones as Mama, the same mouth. “She’s just like you.” My mouth wasn’t like that, or my face either. Worse, my black eyes had no gold. I didn’t look like anybody at all. “You, you mean,” said Mama. She and Aunt Alma nodded together above me, grinning at each other in complete agreement. I loosened my hands from around my skull slowly, letting Mama start brushing out my hair. Reese put her pudgy little fingers in her mouth and stared at me solemnly. “B-Bone,” she stammered. “Yes,” Aunt Alma agreed, hefting Reese up in her arms. “Our stubborn Bone is just like her mama, Reesecup. Just like her aunts, just like a Boatwright, and just like you.” “But I don’t look like nobody,” I wailed. Aunt Alma laughed. “Why, you look like our Bone, girl.” “I don’t look like Mama. I don’t look like you. I don’t look like nobody.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] She waited another year before going back, that time taking my aunt Ruth with her and leaving me with Granny. “I was there,” Aunt Ruth promised them, “and it was really my fault. In so much excitement I just got confused, what with Anney here looking like she was dead to the world and everybody shouting and running around. You know, there was a three-car accident brought in just minutes after us.” Aunt Ruth gave the clerk a very sincere direct look, awkwardly trying to keep her eyes wide and friendly. “You know how these things can happen.” “Oh, I do,” he said, enjoying it all immensely. The form he brought out was no different from the others. The look he gave my mama and my aunt was pure righteous justification. “What’d you expect?” he seemed to be saying. His face was set and almost gentle, but his eyes laughed at them. My aunt came close to swinging her purse at his head, but Mama caught her arm. That time she took the certificate copy with her. “Might as well have something for my two dollars,” she said. At seventeen, she was a lot older than she had been at sixteen. The next year she went alone, and the year after. That same year she met Lyle Parsons and started thinking more about marrying him than dragging down to the courthouse again. Uncle Earle teased her that if she lived with Lyle for seven years, she could get the same result without paying a courthouse lawyer. “The law never done us no good. Might as well get on without it.” [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Mama quit working as a waitress soon after marrying Lyle Parsons, though she wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “We’re gonna need things,” she told him, but he wouldn’t listen. Lyle was one of the sweetest boys the Parsonses ever produced, a soft-eyed, soft-spoken, too-pretty boy tired of being his mama’s baby. Totally serious about providing well for his family and proving himself a man, he got Mama pregnant almost immediately and didn’t want her to go out to work at all. But pumping gas and changing tires in his cousin’s Texaco station, he made barely enough to pay the rent. Mama tried working part-time in a grocery store but gave it up when she got so pregnant she couldn’t lift boxes. It was easier to sit a stool on the line at the Stevens factory until Reese was born, but Lyle didn’t like that at all. “How’s that baby gonna grow my long legs if you always sitting bent over?” he complained. He wanted to borrow money or take a second job, anything to keep his pretty new wife out of the mill. “Honey girl,” he called her, “sweet thing.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Only the ripe ones, he kept telling us, but it was so hot and the dust was so thick, sometimes we’d pull up the ones that weren’t quite ripe, you know—green ones, or half-green anyway. We’d hide them under the ripe ones when we set them up for him. People would buy a box and then get home to find those half-ripe ones, call him up to complain. He’d get so mad, but we were just kids, and his yelling didn’t bother us so long as he kept paying us for the work.” “What’d he pay you?” Mama waved her hand as if that didn’t matter. “Not enough, you know, not enough. Strawberry picking is terrible work, hurts your back, your eyes. You get that juice all over you, get those little prickers in your hands. An’t enough money in it even for children, even if you eat as many as you can. After a while you don’t want any anyway.” She laughed. “Though Raylene sure could eat a lot. Faster than you could see, she’d swallow handfuls of berries. Only proof she’d been eating them was her red red tongue.” She stopped the car in front of the Woolworth’s, cut the engine, and sat for a moment, her hands resting on the wheel. I looked out at the big display windows, where stacks of plastic picnic baskets, little tin office waste cans, and sleeveless cotton sundresses on hangers were squeezed behind ratty stuffed animals and tricycles with multicolored plastic streamers on the handlebars. The thought of going back in there with Mama made me feel sick to my stomach and almost angry at her. Why couldn’t she just let me promise never to do it again? Her hand on my shoulder made me jump. “Your granny found out what we’d been doing, ‘cause we got lazy, you know, and started putting more and more green ones in the bottom of the boxes. Grandpa laughed about it, but your granny didn’t laugh. She came over there one afternoon and turned half a dozen boxes upside down. Collected a bucket of green strawberries and paid the man for them. Took us home, sat us at the kitchen table, and made us eat every one of them. Raylene and I puked strawberries all night long.” “You must have hated her!” Mama was quiet, and I got scared. I didn’t want her to think I hated her. I didn’t even want to be angry at her. I clamped my teeth tight and tried not to start crying again.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  If Granny didn’t care, Mama did. Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her. No-good, lazy, shiftless. She’d work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to a bent and awkward smile—anything to deny what Greenville County wanted to name her. Now a soft-talking black-eyed man had done it for them—set a mark on her and hers. It was all she could do to pull herself up eight days after I was born and go back to work waiting tables with a tight mouth and swollen eyes. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Mama waited a year. Four days before my first birthday and a month past her sixteenth, she wrapped me in a blanket and took me to the courthouse. The clerk was polite but bored. He had her fill out a form and pay a two-dollar fee. Mama filled it out in a fine schoolgirl’s hand. She hadn’t been to school in three years, but she wrote letters for everyone in the family and was proud of her graceful, slightly canted script. “What happened to the other one?” the clerk asked. Mama didn’t look up from my head on her arm. “It got torn across the bottom.” The clerk looked at her more closely, turned a glance on me. “Is that right?” He went to the back and was gone a long time. Mama stood, quiet but stubborn, at the counter. When he came back, he passed her the paper and stayed to watch her face. It was the same, identical to the other one. Across the bottom in oversized red-inked block letters it read, “ILLEGITIMATE.” Mama drew breath like an old woman with pleurisy, and flushed pink from her neck to her hairline. “I don’t want it like this,” she blurted. “Well, little lady,” he said in a long, slow drawl. Behind him she could see some of the women clerks standing in a doorway, their faces almost as flushed as her own but their eyes bright with an entirely different emotion. “This is how it’s got to be. The facts have been established.” He drew the word out even longer and louder so that it hung in the air between them like a neon reflection of my mama’s blush—established. The women in the doorway shook their heads and pursed their lips. One mouthed to the other, “Some people.” Mama made her back straighten, bundled me closer to her neck, and turned suddenly for the hall door. “You forgetting your certificate,” the man called after her, but she didn’t stop. Her hands on my body clamped so tight I let out a high, thin wail. Mama just held on and let me scream.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  For me, none of these issues were purely intellectual. I had spent years trying to be carefully frank about the difference between my life and the fiction I created. I knew how important it was for me personally to tell the truth about my childhood and my family, even all the ways I had messed up and caused myself further damage in sorting out the impact of violence and self-hatred. I knew too how important it was that we have a sense of what people’s lives were genuinely like—all of us who got caught in the gears of family violence. The mythology of rape and child abuse had done me so much damage. People from families like mine—southern working poor with high rates of illegitimacy and all too many relatives who have spent time in jail—we are the people who are seen as the class who does not care for their children, for whom rape and abuse and violence are the norm. That such assumptions are false, that the rich are just as likely to abuse their children as the poor, and that southerners do not have a monopoly on either violence or illegitimacy are realities that are difficult to get people to recognize. The myths are so strong they subvert sociological data and personal accounts. I remember reading Gone with the Wind when I was eleven years old and recognizing with painful clarity that those dirty white-trash Slatterys from whom Scarlett O’Hara’s mother caught the fever that killed her were exactly the figures that my family were supposed to represent. That was a fiction, but I am always running headlong into people for whom that family is part of how they see people like me and those I love. I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence. No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables. Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  After a while I cried myself back to sleep. I dreamed I was a baby again, five or younger, leaning against Mama’s hip, her hands on my shoulders. She was talking, her voice above me like a whisper between stars. Everything was dim and safe. Everything was warm and quiet. She held me and I felt loved. She held me and I knew who I was. When I put my hand down between my legs, it was not a sin. It was like her murmur, like music, like a prayer in the dark. It was meant to be, and it was a good thing. I woke up with my face wet from tears I did not know I had cried, my hands still holding on between my legs. “Mama,” I whispered, but she had gone to work. I was alone in the quiet bedroom. It had been a long time since I had woken up like this, with that sweet good feeling between my legs, almost hurting me, but comforting too. I brought my hands up and looked at them, spread the fingers and looked at the light reflected through the dingy shades. I rolled over and slowly loosened the muscles of my back and legs, keeping my hands in front of my face. The light shifted as the shades swung in the breeze. I thought about fire, purifying, raging, sweeping through Greenville and clearing the earth. I dropped my hands and closed my eyes. “Fire,” I whispered. “Burn it all.” I rolled over, putting both my hands under me. I clamped my teeth and rocked, seeing the blaze in my head, haystacks burning and nowhere to run, people falling behind and the flames coming on, my own body pinned down and the fire roaring closer. “Yes,” I said. Yes. I rocked and rocked, and orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] When I woke up it was afternoon, and the apartment was still and warm. I got up carefully. There was cold coffee on the stove, and biscuits in a towel-wrapped dish. I drank some coffee and chewed on a biscuit with a slice of cheese. A note in Mama’s handwriting was on the table. “Don’t go anywhere,” it read. “I’ll be home by dark and we’ll talk.” My throat closed up. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t know what I would say. I dressed myself quickly in jeans and a warm cotton shirt. When I left, I locked the door behind me. Once I was on the street, I thought about Reese coming home to an empty apartment and calling Mama at work. They’d be upset. Angrily I started walking. I didn’t care anymore who got mad at me, what happened. Maybe I’d get killed out on the highway.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  My neck ached, my teeth, my lower spine and ass. All of me was ugly, pasty, and numb—nothing like Uncle James’s girls in their white nylon crinolines and blue satin hair ribbons. They were the kind of little girls people really wanted. No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful. I could see why Daddy Glen was hateful to me. At dinner when Mama had gone back to the bedroom to get her sweater, he had made a point of telling me that I didn’t have anything to be so proud of. “You think you’re so special,” he’d jeered. “Act like you piss rose water and honey. Think you’re too good to be straightened out. Your mama has spoiled you. She don’t know what a lazy, stubborn girl you are, but I do. I know you. I know you, and I an’t gonna have you turning out like your useless cousins, not growing up under my roof.” “Hateful man,” I whispered. “I don’t care if his daddy does treat him bad. I don’t care why he’s so mean. He’s hateful.” I rolled over and pushed my face underwater. I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen’s eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid. But at the bottom, at the darkest point, my anger would come and I would know that he had no idea who I was, that he never saw me as the girl who worked hard for Aunt Raylene, who got good grades no matter how often I changed schools, who ran errands for Mama and took good care of Reese. I was not dirty, not stupid, and if I was poor, whose fault was that? I would get so angry at Daddy Glen I would grind my teeth. I would dream of cutting his heart out, his evil raging pit-black heart. In the dream it felt good to hate him. But the horrible thing was how I felt when I was awake and wasn’t burning with anger. The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe . It must have been like what he felt when he stood around his daddy’s house, his head hanging down. Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “There an’t no other way to do it,” she said quietly. “I hate it. You hate it. You might hate me for it. I don’t know, and I can’t say what might happen now. But I just don’t know no other way to do it. We’re gonna go in there and give the man back his candy, pay for what you ate, and that will be all there is to it. It will be over, and you’ll be glad it’s settled. We won’t ever have to mention it again.” Mama opened the door briskly, and I followed her numbly. There was a flush on her cheeks as she walked me back to the candy counter, waited for the salesgirl to come over, and stood me right in front of her. “My daughter has something to tell you,” she said, and gave me a little push. But I couldn’t speak. I held out the bag and the pennies, and started to cry again, this time sobbing loud. The girl looked confused, but Mama wouldn’t say anything else, just gave me another little push. I thought I’d strangle on my tongue when the manager walked over to us. “What’s this?” he said in a booming voice. “What’s this? You got something for us, little girl?” He was a big man with a wide face and a swollen belly poking out from under a buttoned-up vest. He stooped down so that his face was right in front of me, so close I could smell the sharp alcohol scent of after-shave. “You do, don’tcha, honey?” He looked like he was swallowing an urge to laugh at us. I was suddenly so angry at him my stomach seemed to curl up inside me. I shoved the bag at him, the pennies. “I stole it. I’m sorry. I stole it.” Mama’s hand squeezed my shoulder, and I heard the breath come out of her in a sigh. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying hard not to get as mad at her as I was at that man. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I see.” I looked up at him again. He was rummaging in the bag, counting the Tootsie Rolls and nodding. “It’s a good thing, ma’am,” he said, still talking loudly, “that you caught this when you did.” He nodded at me. “You’re a fortunate little girl, truly fortunate. Your mama loves you. She doesn’t want you to grow up to be a thief.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I didn’t want to be tall. I wanted to be beautiful. When I was alone, I would look down at my obstinate body, long legs, no hips, and only the slightest swell where Deedee and Temple had big round breasts. I had nothing to be proud of, and I hated Aunt Raylene’s jokes that we were all peasant stock, descendants of women who used to deliver babies in the fields and stagger up to work just after. Gawky, strong, ugly—why couldn’t I be pretty? I wanted to be more like the girls in storybooks, princesses with pale skin and tender hearts. I hated my short fingers, wide face, bony knees, hated being nothing like the pretty girls with their delicate features and slender, trembling frames. I was stubborn-faced, unremarkable, straight up and down, and as dark as walnut bark. This body, like my aunts’ bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away. I had read these things in books and passed right over it. The ones who died like that, worked to death or carried off by senseless accidents, they were almost never the heroines. Aunt Alma had given me a big paperback edition of Gone with the Wind, with tinted pictures from the movie, and told me I’d love it. I had at first, but one evening I looked up from Vivien Leigh’s pink cheeks to see Mama coming in from work with her hair darkened from sweat and her uniform stained. A sharp flash went through me. Emma Slattery, I thought. That’s who I’d be, that’s who we were. Not Scarlett with her baking-powder cheeks. I was part of the trash down in the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death. I shook with fear and indignation. “What the hell is that girl doing in the bathroom so long?” Daddy Glen was irritable as only a man who’d been drinking the night before can be. I turned the lock against him and tried not to listen when he yelled through the door. “Bone, you get out of there and come help me with these potatoes.” I washed my face and went out to Mama, still in her waitress uniform and flat white shoes. She smiled and passed me a pot. “Cut the eyes out but leave the skins on. We’ll make mashed potatoes like your daddy likes them.” From the living room came Daddy Glen’s grunt and then the sound of the side door opening and closing. Mama put her hands on my shoulders and hugged me close. “I want you to go over to Alma’s after school for a few days. I’ll pick you and Reese up when I get off. I want you to keep those kids for Alma so she can get some time to spend with Ruth.” Mama paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  In those pictures, Uncle Earle looks scary, like a thief or a murderer, the kind of gaunt, poorly shaven face sketched on a post office wall. In that washed-out gray print, he looks like a figure from a horror show, an animated corpse. Granny, my mama, uncles, aunts, cousins—all of us look dead on the black-and-white page. “We look worse than other people ever seem to look,” I once complained to Aunt Alma. “Oh, piss,” she said. “Watery ink and gray paper makes everybody look a little crazy.” I think she was annoyed that I didn’t take more pride in her scrapbook, but it seemed to me nobody looked quite like my family. Worse than crazy; we looked moon-eyed, rigid, openmouthed, and stupid. Even our wedding announcement pictures were bad. Aunt Alma insisted it had nothing to do with us, that Boatwrights weren’t badlooking seen head on. “We just make bad pictures,” she said. “The difference is money. It takes a lot of money to make someone look alive on newsprint,” she told me, “to keep some piece of the soul behind the eyes.” I’m in Aunt Alma’s book now. As soon as I saw the picture of me on the front page of the News, I knew it would wind up in her scrapbook, and I hated it. In it, I was leaning against Raylene’s shoulder, my face all pale and long, my chin sticking out too far, my eyes sunk into shadows. I was a Boatwright there for sure, as ugly as anything. I was a freshly gutted fish, my mouth gaping open above my bandaged shoulder and arm, my neck still streaked dark with blood. Like a Boatwright all right—it wasn’t all my blood. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Coming back to myself at Greenville General, I kept my teeth clamped together, not even screaming when the doctor rotated my arm in the bruised shoulder socket, put a cast on my wrist, washed out the cuts, and then wrapped the whole tight to my midriff. Mama had been there, had carried me in from the car and made the doctor look at me right away. The nurse took me out of her arms, and Mama stepped back, her bloody knuckles still outstretched, touching my cheek lightly. I looked into the nurse’s face and then looked back for Mama, but she was gone. Before she could give her name or mine, she had disappeared. “Come on, honey.” The soft-voiced nurse ran her fingers through my hair, then stroked lightly all over my head. I looked for her nametag but saw none. “Don’t jump, now. You’ll hurt yourself.” Her fingers smelled of alcohol and talcum powder. She seemed kind. I wondered if she had children.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Aunt Ruth had only two daughters and six boys, most of them married with boys of their own. All of them were so alike that I never could keep track of anyone but Butch, and I rarely saw him anymore since he had gone to live with Ruth’s oldest girl, Mollie, in Oklahoma. The younger boys turned up occasionally to wrestle Reese and me, give us candy, or tell us stories. The older ones had the sunken eyes and planed faces of men, and they never gave us anything except nasty looks. I couldn’t have said which of the older ones was Tommy Lee, though I’d heard people talk about him enough—about what a hardass he was, about his girlfriends and his dirty mouth, his stints in the county jail and the fights he got into. “He’s bad,” Mama said, her eyes still looking out the window. “He’s just bad all the way through. He steals from his mama. He’s stolen from me. Don’t dare leave your pocketbook around him, or any of your stuff that he could sell. He even took Deedee’s green stamp books one time and traded them off for some useless thing.” Her eyes drifted back to my face, the stunned brown of the pupils shining like mossy rocks under water. “I remember when we were just kids and he was always stealing candy to give away. Thought people would like him if he gave them stuff, I suppose. Now he’s always saying how he’s been robbed, and he’s got a story to account for everything he does. Beats his girlfriends up ‘cause they cheat on him. Can’t keep a job ‘cause people tell lies about him. Steals ‘cause the world’s been so cruel to him. So much nonsense. He’s just bad, that’s all, just bad. Steals from his mama and sisters, steals from his own.” I dropped my head. I remembered Grey telling me how he learned to break locks from Tommy Lee, that Tommy Lee was the slickest piece of goods in Greenville. “Boy knows how to take care of himself for sure. Never owes nobody nothing.” Grey’s face had flushed with respect and envy when he said it, and I had felt a little of the same—wishing I too knew how to take care of myself and could break locks or start cars without a key or palm stuff off a counter so smoothly that no one would know I had done it. But to steal from your mama! My face felt stiff with shame and anger. I wasn’t like that. I would never steal from Mama. Mama’s hand touched my chin, trailed along my cheek, and stroked my hair. “You’re my pride. Do you know? You and your sister are all I really have, all I ever will have. You think I could let you grow up to be like that?” I shook my head. The tears started again, and with them hiccups.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I was a bowl of hatred, boiling black and thick behind my eyes. I had been so proud of not crying that last time, so sure it was important. Why had it mattered? Whether I screamed or fought or held still, nothing changed. I curled up tighter still and thought about that, the way he beat me, the way I felt jammed against him and struggling, the smell of him and the feel of his sex against my belly. He had been pinning me against his thigh when he beat me. Had he come? Had he been beating me until he came in his trousers? The thought made me gag. I pushed my wrists harder and harder against my own sex until I was hurting myself. I could remember his smell, the sound of his breath above me, the hot sweat falling off his face onto my skin, the way he had grunted and shaken me. No, it did not matter whether I had screamed or not. It had all been the way he wanted it. It had nothing to do with me or anything I had done. It was an animal thing, just him using me. I rolled over and bit the pillow. I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. After a while I cried myself back to sleep. I dreamed I was a baby again, five or younger, leaning against Mama’s hip, her hands on my shoulders. She was talking, her voice above me like a whisper between stars. Everything was dim and safe. Everything was warm and quiet. She held me and I felt loved. She held me and I knew who I was. When I put my hand down between my legs, it was not a sin. It was like her murmur, like music, like a prayer in the dark. It was meant to be, and it was a good thing. I woke up with my face wet from tears I did not know I had cried, my hands still holding on between my legs. “Mama,” I whispered, but she had gone to work. I was alone in the quiet bedroom. It had been a long time since I had woken up like this, with that sweet good feeling between my legs, almost hurting me, but comforting too. I brought my hands up and looked at them, spread the fingers and looked at the light reflected through the dingy shades. I rolled over and slowly loosened the muscles of my back and legs, keeping my hands in front of my face. The light shifted as the shades swung in the breeze. I thought about fire, purifying, raging, sweeping through Greenville and clearing the earth. I dropped my hands and closed my eyes. “Fire,” I whispered. “Burn it all.” I rolled over, putting both my hands under me.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He never said “Don’t tell your mama.” He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me and still made me stand, unmoving and desperate, while he rubbed against me and ground his face into my neck. I could not tell Mama. I would not have known how to explain why I stood there and let him touch me. It wasn’t sex, not like a man and woman pushing their naked bodies into each other, but then, it was something like sex, something powerful and frightening that he wanted badly and I did not understand at all. Worse, when Daddy Glen held me that way, it was the only time his hands were gentle, and when he let me go, I would rock on uncertain feet. Daddy Glen smelled of sweat and Coca-Cola, of after-shave and cigarettes, but mostly of something I could not name—something acid, bitter, and sharp. Fear. It might have been fear. But I could not have said if it was his fear or mine. I could not say anything. I only knew that there was something I was doing wrong, something terrible. He said, “You drive me crazy,” in a strange distracted voice, and I shuddered but believed him. I became even more afraid of Daddy Glen, the palms that slapped, the fingers that dug in and bruised, the knuckles he would sometimes press directly under my eyes, the hands that shook and gripped and lifted me up until his eyes would stare into mine. My own hands were so small, my fingers thin and weak. I wished they were bigger, wider, stronger. I wished I was a boy so I could run faster, stay away more, or even hit him back. Grey gave me a rubber ball, hard rubber, black and small enough to hide in my hand. I cupped it in my palms so no one would see. I worked that ball with passion, rolled it between my fingers with determination, squeezed it stubbornly, clenching each finger against my thumbs. One day my hands would be as strong as Daddy Glen’s were. No matter the size, I told myself, one day my hands would be a match for his. Some days I thought I was working that ball so that I could grow to be more like him; other days I knew that wasn’t why.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I loosened my jacket. When I spoke my voice was as flat and careless as hers. “Mama always said Earle lived from woman to woman. Told Daddy Glen that Earle had become a cradle robber, that there was nothing solid left in his life but whiskey and family.” I paused, surprised to hear myself mention Daddy Glen. It felt suddenly hot on the porch. “Well, I told him he should get himself a widow next time, some fat old girl to iron his shirts and wash his back. But Earle likes them young, likes them openmouthed and gawky. He’s like all men, I suppose, loves a grateful woman, specially one that he don’t have to do nothing to impress. And the girls he finds—my Lord, it about hurts my heart, these little strays he brings around. All Earle has to do is speak gently to them and they fall all over him. They’re just like fruit in the sun, heavy and ripe for someone to pick.” I squirmed a little on my stool. “Uncle Earle told me he’s sure there an’t no woman ever regretted giving herself to him.” “Christ Lord, you love him just like one of them, don’t you?” Aunt Raylene frowned at me. “You don’t think it’s cruel the way he takes up with these children? He’s never divorced a one of them, never stays with any of them more than a few months. God knows how many babies he’s planted.” “None.” I bit my lip. “You know that, do you?” “He told me he took care not to make children anymore, said he didn’t think he had no business making any more babies than he had already.” “Well, isn’t he thoughtful!” Aunt Raylene ground out the stub of her cigarette on the side of one of the flats. She walked over near me and picked up one of the glass window frames leaning against the wall. Carrying it back, she set it down so that it covered two of her flats. Two more windows completed the task, leaving the mix to heat in the sun. She didn’t look at me, and her lips were set in a thin straight line. I knew that meant she was mad at me. “He only marries them ‘cause they want it so bad.” My eyes stung, as if the tears I had refused to shed on the long walk out were burning me now. My hands balled up into fists. “He loves them,” I yelled. “He loves them more than they deserve.” “Bone.” Aunt Raylene turned to me and shook her head. “Girl, you are seriously confused about love. Seriously.”