Dorothy Allison
Pratt, Minnie Bruce
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Dorothy Allison BY MINNIE BRUCE PRATT On a cold rainy Boston afternoon in March, I was curled up on Dorothy Allison's bed, eating chocolate, gossiping, and talking books...
...Allison: Well, you know there is a white, Southern literary tradition that uses dialect...
...But the community of affinity for me was the queer community—that outlaw community...
...But I don't think that miracle would have had as much chance or possibility...
...Allison: They also have changed...
...Q: Any parallels for you in how African-American writers had to deal with dialect...
...I spent at least a decade of my life distancing myself— not so much from my mother and my mother's generation and poor white trash—but distancing myself from my sisters...
...I was just hungry, desperately hungry...
...Though we have an enormous advantage being queer in this culture because of where we see ourselves in relation to the power of this culture...
...And I would read anything...
...Who's that fat dyke standing at the counter...
...But that's not how the world perceives me...
...And he's fascinating...
...My sister could deal with her as this black woman who's like—there...
...I've got guilt down to my toenails...
...But I had to really fight for these speech patterns...
...So what was being told about black people I suspected that might not be true...
...When I registered what was happening, I had no way to handle it 'cause all I wanted to do was punch her...
...I was in awe of it...
...Where I grew up, I was taught that the language you put in that book—the speech of poor white folks—was worthless...
...On the surface what I told the world was that I was to teach history...
...It was the secret dream...
...If we were reading together, we would have been in real trouble...
...It gets real treacherous...
...My stepfather would not have tolerated that...
...It was her lifeline...
...One woman who had not been abused was trying to write about that experience...
...Besides James Baldwin, nothing ever hit me as hard as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye...
...And I was talking about him all the time because his birth coincided with my being very public in my work, and it was important to me to be very public about who I am in choosing to have a child...
...And I thought, when I read her, that this could also be true of somebody who is writing as an anti-racist...
...Lord, I understood completely every retrograde impulse every mother ever had...
...But at the same time, I came so close to dying so many times as a child, as a teenager, as an adult, simply because of the fact of my sexual desire in the face of who I was in the world...
...It wasn't just that I was a lesbian...
...But still—my sisters are two paychecks from the street...
...Because I didn't see any way to get there...
...And some of my aunts were doing it to each other...
...You've already written a lot about sex...
...It was a voice—the weird thing was that it was a voice that I heard in my head...
...I believe in life work...
...That we made jokes about our girlfriends...
...So I burned them...
...Q: Which is hard to imagine...
...It's hell for me dealing with my sisters...
...Trash fiction...
...It's in the back of my head, and it wakes me up in the night, and it's awful...
...They're still working class...
...She wanted to hear more from you about race...
...The community I saw myself in—at the edge of the world—hated me...
...The language of Bastard was so important to me...
...Because I knew where you had to liberate the language from...
...They could tell who I was as soon as I started talking...
...Because, you know, I went to college...
...Allison: I think of that line in the Bible about the beam in your eye...
...Q: I got an insight on arguments about the limits of the imagination from an acquaintance of mine, a woman who is a novelist and was in a women-writers' group...
...My sister could not handle it...
...They're living in Florida...
...And matter-of-fact about it...
...I was trying to establish the difference between me and them with every ounce of my being...
...The concept of how working-class people speak has altered beyond anybody's recognition in the last twenty years...
...What about those voices that say you can't write about these things because now you're a mother...
...you have a two-year-old...
...There's this huge big piece of their psyche that I cannot love and accept...
...And she was busy distancing herself from her sisters...
...We talk bad about each other...
...And, you know, the curious thing that has happened in Cave Dweller, the novel I'm working on—there's a man in it who is evil, who commits a terrible crime...
...But it was about a poor kid...
...If I step off that path, I haven't got a cord...
...And being called a genius...
...But there is a lag time in print...
...And that's not what we got as children in the South...
...Q: And now you and Alix are relatively new parents...
...Q: What are you writing, or not writing, because you are "queer...
...It's one thing to know that in theory about the working class...
...It was that all of my sexual fantasies were so perverse in every sense of the definition...
...I don't have a sense of a right way to do it...
...Literally...
...You go hunting for those people and align yourself with them and take the risk to find out who they really are...
...The past few years especially my life has changed...
...You go talk to my sisters...
...And I looked at him and thought, "Anything I would say would be dismissed out of hand...
...So I'm realizing this is now twice that I've done this...
...One was "mama...
...All the things I was being told about my family, I knew weren't true...
...I had never known that...
...Q: But you can't just condemn their bigotry out of hand in the sense of saying, "They're terrible people...
...My journals are full of that...
...The model for that was this kid, this middle-class white boy who was into poetry...
...Meanwhile, my mother was a social worker for the state, and my father was a glorified clerk working at the lumberyard...
...And that meant black civil-rights workers, white civil-rights workers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde in England, every woman ever burned at the stake anywhere...
...At the same time, I just wanted to sit down and cry...
...Allison: At least the middle class has the notion that they are supposed to be ashamed...
...You can't trust them—those politicians, those radicals, those agitators...
...It's something that I never knew...
...The next thing I know, I got six, seven chapters of this guy talking...
...And it still daunts me...
...I'm not as bad as Grace...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Dorothy Allison BY MINNIE BRUCE PRATT On a cold rainy Boston afternoon in March, I was curled up on Dorothy Allison's bed, eating chocolate, gossiping, and talking books with this charismatic author, who wrote the award-winning novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, and the short-story collection, Trash...
...He'd listen to the news, and when I was a kid and the civil-rights movement was all over the news, my stepfather would sit there and...
...And she read really terrible books like the Executioner Series...
...And one was "an't"—as in "I an't having any...
...Or weren't true in the way they were being told to me...
...You're respectable now...
...People get an education in that way that goes inside...
...But I haven't lived in this little girl's skin, and it didn't read right...
...And because it was a thing that I had to fight to do, and I had to keep kind of secret, it assumed enormous power...
...And the definitions, boy, they're just slippery...
...At the point when he comes back to bring something to the girl's mama, he was incidental, but he walked in and he took over...
...That was high enough for my family—becoming a teacher was as much as anyone in my family could imagine...
...It didn't matter that they were black—though it should have...
...I can't tell you how many white, middle-class boys I've met who would tell me about their love for the black female community...
...Allison: In essays, the writing is more on the surface...
...I'm aiming to get the most done.M Minnie Bruce Pratt is a poet and essayist...
...He really was that voice, the demagogue that distrusted the book, distrusted the intellect, distrusted education...
...One section came out of the manuscript completely because it didn't work...
...My little sister is as fragile as any ice hard woman can be...
...Then I discovered black writers...
...Allison: That was a part of it...
...I didn't know what to do or how to deal with it...
...Allison: No, I didn't think of myself as somebody who could be a writer...
...You know that part where she brings in a black maid but then she does this throw-away line where she says she can't possibly write what's in the mind of a black woman...
...That year took being able to write away from me...
...When I really started working on the writing of the language, I discovered that there is this conventional way to frame dialect on the page...
...Q: You were in your early twenties then...
...Good lord, I'm making a living as a writer...
...But I have a whole section of my filing cabinet full of these voices, and now I've got the question of why I am writing them...
...The copy editing was a struggle...
...They sure as shit will never talk to me about it...
...But I just read the review of Skin that Chrystos wrote for Sojourner...
...You can get on the surface...
...I didn't even have the sense to see what I was being—I'm damn lucky some people did some work to help me get an education...
...And one works in an electronics plant...
...We were in town for the annual Out/Write conference of lesbian and gay writers, and were snatching a few hours to renew a connection that had begun more than ten years ago, when Dorothy was one of the editors of the lesbian-feminist literary journal Conditions...
...So I would sneak off and hide...
...And it's another thing to run into it in the people you love...
...Q: When I was growing up—and I think this was true for you, too—there was just this tremendous fear of the intellect, the imagination, people who wrote...
...We would sit and turn on the TV set, and he would just scream about what was happening...
...Not the spoken word or the story, but books, words written down, the cultural realm...
...Because the hesitation is just strong enough that—considering how little time I have these days that I'm free to write—it doesn't happen...
...And you know, you write five books to write one book...
...Allison: Going to be a teenager any day now...
...And it was clear to me—crystal clear—by the time I was a teenager that I had more in common with black people who were in the civil-rights movement than I did with my stepfather...
...But there were a few—one that I remember was Not as a Stranger, which is not a great book...
...I can remember both my mother and me trying to sneak away to read when I was a girl, and being really messed with because my stepfather didn't want anybody doing anything except doing what he wanted them to be doing at any one moment—whether that was bringing him a glass of tea, or going outside and playing when you got your head buried in a book...
...My mother did it by marrying my stepfather...
...Allison: Yes...
...Now, that's there...
...I sure wasn't one...
...You know, that's the reason that I value community organizing—in the sense of not just organizing a quickie demonstration downtown, but the rape-crisis center or the homeless shelter...
...Allison: Well, yeah...
...Q: That's what my father would do, too...
...That said, "This is the voice of humanity speaking...
...And that's fascinating to me...
...That we talked personally...
...And the look on her face was this kind of deep disgust...
...Allison: One of the things that I did write for myself, that I am going to do something with, is my discovering the fragility of the infant body...
...I first met Dorothy in New York City, on the weekend of a massive anti-nuclear demonstration, but we had recognized each other, even there, from another terrain, that of our native South...
...Well, it means something different to say "black, black hair" than to say "black hair...
...The place where that touches me is that we started joint adoption a couple of times, and for various reasons ran out of money and couldn't finish the process...
...Q: I could tell from reading the book how much you love that voice...
...But one of the problems I ran into with a lot of that writing was that it always read to me as there was an undercurrent of contempt in how the language was expressed on the page...
...Allison: No, no, no...
...I kept trying to figure out if it was the education that I had gotten that gave me the perception of contempt, or if it was the way the words were put onto the page...
...Yet those divisions can still feel sharp, even within our own families...
...But by the time I had constructed the situation, and I had seven chapters of these two little girls, I realized how constructed it was, and I began to ask myself, "Why are you doing this...
...Because of the specific damage I took in, I never knew what a child was like...
...You can lose it real easy...
...Because I didn't want to echo the way they're spelled in traditional dialect fiction...
...Q: It's a lifetime of work...
...His whole purpose in the book is to go through that change, and to show how it happens...
...But I wasn't writing clown stories...
...Because I know I write five to ten years behind myself...
...And this stuff is like doggin' the back of my neck and I've got to do something with it...
...Because, you know, those forces that make those decisions are inherently conservative...
...I wasn't taught to love that voice, either...
...Q: And I thought, "Oh, a style that can do this is a huge achievement...
...And I think what's really necessary is the crucible...
...I felt myself on the edge of the world, and I was clinging to everyone else I saw on the edge with me...
...I didn't do anything worth shit that entire year except raise that baby...
...Or people feel they can't afford to...
...Mostly, that was black women—Toni Morrison, Alice Walker...
...They watch television...
...And was getting published...
...I had this conviction it would be real simple and real clear and real easy, and I stepped into shit like you ain't never seen...
...To me, it was also sexual transgressors because I knew myself queer...
...And the same thing is happening to me with this new book...
...The fact that you grew up in poverty, your mama being a waitress, and so there feels like there's this big gap between us...
...The white Southerner hates with a passion everybody different from them—there's no way around it...
...But when I picked this baby up, I looked at him...
...And I understand it as a reality...
...Mysteries, adventure books, some kind of escape...
...Not just something that they've read in the book or picked up in the latest newspaper...
...It's about a person with a name who they talked to and saw as another human being like themselves...
...You'd never admit in public that you were going to do this...
...We forget about television, we forget about the mall...
...knew myself queer...
...How did you get from that place to here...
...Allison: That's scary...
...The whole California notion of karma I kind of translate that into a Southern Baptist, dirt perspective...
...But my mind, the top of my head where I write, absolutely believes that I only write anything of use when I write out of passionate need, inhabiting the skin...
...Q: Plenty in the middle class aren't ashamed a bit...
...To say that I can't imagine their experience, that's saying they are completely alien to me and I can never imagine what could have happened to them...
...You and I have talked about it...
...This process of inordinate discovery...
...But there is a real truth in the fact that some of us—I think particularly those of us who were growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and watching the civil-rights movement—looked at that and saw something that spoke to our desire for justice...
...There was a piece I didn't put in Skin that I really thought about but it seemed to me that it was so separate from the rest of the book that I didn't want to just tack it in, because they'd say she's just throwing this in to talk about race...
...And I didn't know how to own those stories in the world...
...Which at that point in my life seemed to be where I was going...
...When I started reading, I went after biographies and autobiographies because I was looking for how people survived...
...If I live enough and can write as much as I want to, I might get some of my life work finished...
...I'm a white Southerner...
...But, it is true, sometimes I think about stepping off, and it's a tricky dance...
...When one of my sisters was at my house, and a black woman friend of mine was also there for a party, my sister could not deal with her...
...And Christ, you know what you find—Erskine Caldwell...
...You don't even know, when you start, what you are doing...
...I actually liked some of it a lot...
...You listen to other people too much, and your voice gets messed up...
...But I came out of that, became a feminist, and found what was essentially a feminist writing voice...
...We're thirty years after the civil-rights movement, in this terrible backlash...
...I didn't know any children...
...Clearly...
...I knew myself an outlaw...
...I could have wrapped him around, I could have bent my body over him and never let anybody near him the rest of his life...
...Her most recent book is S/HE, published by Firebrand Books...
...The speech, the rhythms of my family, the kind of language that I grew up with resounded for me in the books written by those women...
...Q: I started writing about my children after I lost custody of my boys because I began to live as a lesbian, and was told by the state that I could either be a sexual person or a mother but not both...
...Only that year and only because this was when they were integrating...
...What about the inner voice that says, "You can't write about this, you can't write about that, you can't do this, you can't do that...
...Q: What would you and your mother sneak off and read...
...Q: I know that issues of race and class have been a huge part of your life...
...And every ounce of it is justified...
...Q: One of the most helpful things that I read about this is Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, where she talks about how "American" fiction, meaning U.S...
...But in the secret dream, I wanted to write...
...You know, they talk like Grace Under FireAnd I think the same thing has happened to black speech in this country...
...Anyway, I was devastated that the people I loved were hateful...
...That I was familiar with...
...There's your family, and then there is the community in which you see yourself as a child...
...And I could very likely be turned down for adoption of my son because of some of the sex writing that I've done...
...They are simply uneducated...
...I go to these gigs, and they fly me in and send me to a hotel—and I get to the hotel and they do not want to check me in...
...I was learning something I needed desperately in order to get through this Hfe...
...Allison: "Liars," you know...
...You ain't aware of the beam in your eye until the beam is pulled out...
...I had to argue for my spelling for two words in particular...
...I thought myself damned...
...I thought myself damned.9 Q: I've been thinking about the language in Bastard Out of Carolina...
...But it's clear to me that this is what I have to do...
...As much as I would really Uke to be doing this, it ain't going to happen until I'm fully inhabiting those characters and they are real to me...
...Don't just talk about stuff...
...I think I have life work to do...
...And who, in the course of the novel, realizes it and changes...
...I've found this in the sexual community...
...In it, Bone gets sent to the Juvenile Detention Center for trying to kill Daddy Glen, and spends a month there with another little girl who had attempted to murder her mother...
...So I'm not legally safe as Junior's co-mama...
...I thought myself evil...
...And, all of a sudden, I saw myself do that...
...All my notions of myself physically are about my risk-taking, being stubbornly strong and strong to the bones, strong from birth, strong at the beginning...
...And one of the things that hit me was that I had to construct a situation in which they would be in the same place in South Carolina in the 1960s...
...Nothing I say is big enough...
...It didn't read to me black...
...Now, the language rhythms of the people I am writing about come entirely from gospel music, country music, and the church...
...I wondered what you thought about her comments...
...Allison: Very plain-voice stuff about sex...
...I was doing it because I was a white working-class writer, writing a novel set just prior to the civil-rights movement in the South...
...I mean, they can barely tolerate me as a queer...
...I burned everything I had ever written...
...The women who were abuse survivors were critiquing her work in a constructive way, saying, "Wait a minute, this is not accurate...
...God, it was hope...
...The few things that I did try to write were so far from where I wanted them to be that I was deeply humiliated...
...She begins by saying that she was surprised to find so little about race in Skin...
...To our desire for hope...
...In novels, you have to inhabit the people...
...But as I got to be a teenager, it was like masturbation...
...It was absolutely all about class...
...To be a teacher...
...Not just because I was poor and hopeless and raped and violated, and masturbating to being raped and violated...
...Here you are, in the fullness of your work...
...I may still perceive myself as close to being on the street in some ways—but mostly other people no longer perceive me like that...
...No question...
...And one of the pieces in life work is learning to love what was not loved...
...So I can't do that...
...Q: The writing teachers stopped you...
...Do real work...
...There are places that I describe, for instance, the uncle as having "black, black hair...
...You know I feel like every time I ever even try to approach the subject of race in this country, that I am just not big enough...
...Allison: You know June Arnold's Sister Gin...
...But the way it is generally written down is as if it is in the back pages of men's magazines with the letters cut off and a whole lot of extra letters thrown on...
...When I read your novel, I realized how my ear had had its hearing distorted...
...It takes me that long to understand things that I've seen in order to move them into fiction...
...And I find all the time these sources of disdain in me that I have to re-look at...
...But the language, my language, was formed by the time I was eight...
...It would have happened...
...But when I look at the textile-mill owners where you grew up, and the lumber-mill owners where I grew up, our gap doesn't seem so big...
...And there were some problems in what she had written...
...Because all the things I was being told about myself, I knew weren't true...
...And even then, I suspect there is another beam you ain't seen yet...
...In my imagination there was this real clear link between where I belonged, who I belonged with, and that whole nation of the invisible, the dead, and the damned...
...Q: Do you feel when you are writing a novel, rather than an essay, that something different happens for you in dealing with race...
...That happened in Bastard...
...I went to college with the secret dream...
...But I had the most arrogant stupidity and ignorance...
...I have published only one thing about him...
...But not the fact that she and I were really close friends...
...I knew myself an outlaw...
...Allison: If you read Toni Morrison, you read Alice Walker, it is a dialect that is written with love and respect...
...And that's when I started writing...
...I have a lot more resources than I used to have, so I feel a little different...
...I found that offensive...
...Q: The myth about class in relation to the writer's life is that, "Oh, you're secure now, because you're published and visible...
...Beautiful, precious, love, and tender...
...My political convictions would persuade me that I should be doing this...
...The time in which we decided to have him, conceived him, birthed him, and the whole first year of his life, that was my life...
...The only thing I knew at fifteen was that I had a suspicion that what I was being told might not be true...
...Because that kind of hate and contempt comes out of being hated and held in contempt...
...It could have happened...
...Just like I grew up being taught that African-American language was worthless...
...You can see there is an economic, historical context...
...Allison: Or the absence...
...Q: For me, dealing with race and racism in my writing has been, partly, overcoming the voice I was trained to hear and speak in...
...We're going to give her a room...
...And she excused herself with that cliched line: "Well, it didn't happen to me so I can't possibly imagine it...
...That's my sister Barbara's line...
...In fact, I go to these colleges and if the check don't clear real fast, we're in real trouble...
...And I'm still pretty close...
...Her most recent book is Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (Firebrand Books...
...Because it's what I believe is the use of fiction...
...We could barely pay the bills, and yet everybody was trying to keep the illusion of gentility...
...And I'm a Southerner...
...I can really clearly remember when I moved to Tallahassee, Florida, and became a feminist activist...
...Q: You thought of yourself as someone who could be a writer...
...Q: You would read together...
...I don't think I could have written it if Junior hadn't been born...
...His basic message was that poor people were dirt and hopeless...
...The other little girl was black, and Bone was white...
...Dorothy Allison: My mother believed in books, as peculiar as that was...
...I had to fight for how I spell certain things...
...There's always somebody worse than us...
...Now, I'm not going to publish nothing that doesn't come out of that place...
...But when I wrote in that voice, it was a dead voice...
...And even in my notebooks where I write out my life, I find myself hesitant to write very much about him...
...There was no connection...
...Allison: Oh, lord...
...She's letting those babies run naked because she's too lazy to put anything on them...
...Q: You must have written something about him...
...You just are trying to find a way to make what appears on a page be what you hear in your head...
...Now, I know Southerners do this with a passion...
...Be involved in something that requires you to work with people on a day-to-day basis...
...Now, the place that the dance is on razors is about my son...
...And we know—that gets real sick, real fast...
...Working with people completely different from you, in a way that forces you to deal with real people...
...I haven't made that jump yet...
...Allison: But there's another community—your community of affinity...
...I have notebooks that people should really worry about hitting the light of day...
...It was resistance...
...One, when you're a really bright kid, you are kind of encouraged in a peculiar way to think of yourself as going to school and becoming something...
...But I'm trying to love and accept them...
...The people who were writing and being published...
...So I had this in my head, this community of affinity is how I think of it...
...And he took over my book...
...But it didn't work...
...And that's a big difference...
...You cannot get a hold of the idea of it sometimes...
...I learned that every word out of my mouth damned me...
...Some of the women in the group had been sexually abused...
...But I didn't write about it...
...My family members hung on to the concept of themselves as middle class, and also to the memory that, 100 years before, they'd been owning class—hanging on to that old status with their fingernails...
...So all of my imagination was about being an outlaw...
...Q: But how did you get from somebody who read to somebody who wrote it down...
...Because I grew up with the temptation of identifying with being middle class, and being taught not to identify with the working class or the "others"—the outlaw community you identified with...
...some had not...
...They have still got a drawl, but it's not a South Carolina drawl...
...But when I went to college, and found the people who were writing, that stopped the dream cold...
...And loved all those people on the edge with me...
...Work with people...
...Q: I wonder nowadays where that impetus is going to come from—to find allies, to find new community...
...But stepping into other people's skin, you will make mistakes...
...I'm a white Southern writer...
...Allison: No...
...The thing I heard over and over again from him—so that I heard it in my dreams—was, "You can't believe that...
...Well, there is a lot of stuff you can get in theory...
...I was in such pain and fury that I had to write about it no matter what...
...It's a notion which is, in part, a product of the way I was raised, and in part a product of damage...
...So I wanted to write...
...So I'm bringing this in because it's important to me...
...Q: That was your queer community...
...Those dark nights when you went to sleep feeling hopeless about yourself—now I can sometimes pull out all the letters that I have gotten from the people who've read Bastard...
...In other words, the shape of the work will be different if written by a white person with an anti-racist consciousness about African-American people, even if she is not writing directly about them...
...Those class lines can be so confusing...
...Especially when I got the shit kicked out of me...
...Now, so many years later, I'm thinking that the line between most of us was so arbitrary, so imposed from above, so thin...
...When I was young and I was studying Marxist and socialist theory, I began to see we have so many false images of what it means to be poor or working class in this country...
...Q: You are writing him, but in a different way...
...So what is going on...
...And my friend said, "But that places another person outside the bounds of humanity...
...It's real different...
...Allison: We need to say one thing if we're going to talk about white writers writing out of black voices, out of political conviction...
...In other ways in my life, my eye had been distorted in its looking...
...It's barely intelligible and has an aura of stupid about it...
...She was not "Audre Lorde...
...I think it's a miracle I'm here anyway...
...She don't even change their diapers...
...If I had been black, as well as all the rest of the stuff my family was, I don't think I'd be here...
...Anything...
...It comes from different places...
...I have pried my way into the semblance of the middle class...
...Also I'd noticed that in a lot of Southern speech, one of the big things is alliteration repetition...
...But as Audre used to say, you know, when she was out on the street corner, who was she...
...My sisters—one of them is now the assistant manager of a collection agency...
...Unlike the middle class...
...And that was about refusing the class I was born to...
...There is a young woman in this book and her father was a rock performer, a rock-and-roll musician who died...
...And partly it's been working with the limits of my form...
...And he don't have nothing to do with this book...
...Allison: It's trying to consciously step into the head of someone so different from you, just trying to feel their skin...
...It's a way of making someone nonhuman...
...fiction, written by white people, has always been shaped by the presence of African-American people...
...You will overstep, you will misunderstand...
...You have to love the voice...
...Allison: I think she's right...
...But until you've taken it inside...
...You know, a tributary that I swim in, trying to claim a sense of working-class pride, is this knowledge of being an incredibly tough woman, and coming from a line of tough women...
...We didn't do anything together...
...Allison: Oh, honey, that's fractured...
...Q: I've never considered myself working class, but now I'm beginning to reevaluate where I came from...
...It's the only time, because I write everything...
...And I learned how to cover, and I learned a different way of speaking...
...Allison: It's about rhythms almost more than anything else...
...Allison: You know, I really tried desperately to run from my family...
...For me, this section became a way to really look at what it was really like to be black in Greenville at that time in history...
...Allison: I researched it...
...I've found it in the gender community...
...What does your form allow you to do...
...But one of her father's best friends was a keyboard player, a black man who turns out, in fact, to be a black gay man...
...One real thing about the working class in the South is that they are not ashamed of being racist...
...This is how you do it...
...Q: Well, by their presence, because she says even when black folks are not in the work, ideas about them have shaped things that are there...
...And then I began to recognize a pattern...
...But I was finally hearing this language spoken with its real lyrical imaginative force...
...But it was about incest, about that terror, and it was about suicide...
...She was a black woman standing on the street corner, subject to all the racism in the world...
...And that's why one of the things I'm re-thinking is class...
...If you come from the South, if you're working-class, and especially if you look like me—let's get real, I am not pretty—you get a sense of humor or you die...
...Allison: Oh, own the language...
...It's like mayonnaise on glass...
...We all do that distancing...
...Knowing, seeing that, I wrote about it a lot...
...She was a secret reader...
...Allison: I am imagining me in a different way...
...Now, it will help me in another book some day...
...Dorothy was born and raised in South Carolina, and I in Alabama...
...It's the reason they gave me support for going to college...
...Something you can build your life on...
...It's one of the things that I am infinitely grateful to him for...
...Q: But it was after reading Toni Morrison and other African-American writers that you were able to come back to it...
...Allison: I can now...
...And that I had to absolutely refuse, because the people whose voices I am using are very smart people...
...The only thing I ever found that gave me a lifeline was to cling to this notion that telling the truth is the path that keeps you alive...
...I had really dark, horrible stories in my head...
...So you become a clown...
...It read to me working class...
...And I went looking particularly for working-class novels...
...I was ready to go proselytize for feminism in the black community...
...Lillian Smith talks about the voice of the demagogue versus the voice of the poet, and how people in the South have to struggle with the voice of the demagogue that dominates the public space...
...God, have you seen her children...
...At that time, I never considered what my children might think about what I wrote...
...It was about going home to visit my family and getting hit again and again with how deeply and inherently racist they were...
...And when I read Bastard, it was the first time in my life that I read a book that accepted the language of poor and working-class white people, that said that speech was beautiful, lyrical, eloquent...
...When I found Zora Neale Hurston, it was like getting kicked in the butt...
...Q: But brilliant...
...Allison: Well, my mother read mysteries...
...And when I think about that, I get panicked...
Vol. 59 • July 1995 • No. 7
