Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“Sometimes I became people I had seen on television or read about in books, went places I’d barely heard of, did things that no one I knew had ever done, particularly things that girls were not supposed to do. In the world as I remade it, nothing was forbidden; everything was possible.”

Even as a girl, Allison sees storytelling as a means of not only countering negative stereotypes about her class but also creating space where she can imagine a gender identity that differs from those available in Greenville and to her family. In this sense, storytelling is a transgressive act that empowers Allison. Her awareness that who she imagines herself to be violates gender norms possibly was her first inkling that she was a lesbian woman.

“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.”

Allison uses retrospection to capture both her past worry about not having gender-role models of women with autonomy and her more contemporary understanding that fleeing from the models available to her as a girl and young woman didn’t free her because she internalized damaging gender norms during her early life. One purpose of Allison’s memoir is to help her explore the norms and to understand what parts of her family history are useful today.

“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.”

“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.”

“She showed me once that snapshot of herself at fifteen; white socks and A-line skirt, hair in a Kitty Wells cloud, schoolgirl blouse, Peter Pan collar, and the most hesitant smile. ‘Just a girl,’ Mama said, shrugging. ‘I was just a girl.’ ‘Pregnant,’ my aunt Dot told me, ‘carrying you then. That was taken just before she ran off with that silly boy.’”

Allison incorporates photographs of her mother at multiple ages to offer a more complex picture of Ruth and of Southern womanhood in general. These photos serve as a counterpoint to the story about Southern women as unchanging objects instead of agents in their own lives. Ruth and Dot’s two different photo descriptions reinforce Allison’s insistence that she can uncover multiple truths as she examines the lives of the women in her family.

“The tragedy of the men in my family was silence, a silence veiled by boasting and jokes. If you didn’t look close you might miss the sharp glint of pain in their eyes, the restless angry way they gave themselves up to fate.”

Allison uses storytelling mostly as testimony to the hardships and endurance of the Gibson women. Here, however, she talks about the damage that growing up as members of a stigmatized class of people did to men. After this passage, Allison shares a story that portrays one of her uncles as an emotional, vulnerable man who could only share his feelings at night in the confines of her mother’s house. By telling such a story, Allison counters the pressure to be silent about the ways that men violate gender norms.

“Let me tell you about what I have never been allowed to be. Beautiful and female. Sexed and sexual. I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats. Ask any white Southerner. They’ll take you back two generations, say, ‘Yeah, we had a plantation.’ The hell we did.”

Allison identifies the general perception of her and her family as “trash” and thereby describes an important part of the myths surrounding Southern identity, She reveals a truth about the source of the stigma surrounding white, working-class Southerners. Allison’s family, especially the women, are living proof that the idea of the South as a place of a noble and lost aristocracy is a lie. By highlighting the impact of this mythologizing on herself and the women of her family, Allison reveals the gendered aspects of that identity—namely, that working-class, white Southern women are devalued by their male peers and people outside the circle of their families and communities.

“The women of my family were measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt. My family? The women of my family? We are the ones in all those photos taken at mining disasters, floods, fires. We are the ones in the background with our mouths open, in print dresses or drawstring pants and collarless smocks, ugly and old and exhausted. Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species.”

Allison more fully articulates how American culture sees white, working-class, Southern women’s identity. Her references to archetypal photographs of such women show her awareness of how visual culture contributes to erasure of who these women really are. In contrast, Allison uses photographs in her work that offer a more respectful and loving portrait of what’s behind images like the ones she describes here. Photos are thus important symbols of—and interventions in—that identity.

“‘It never changes,’ she said in her gravelly voice. “Men and boys, they all the same. Talk about us like we dogs, bitches sprung full-grown on the world, like we were never girls, never little babies in our daddy’s arms. Turn us into jokes ’cause we get worn down and ugly. Never look at themselves. Never think about what they’re doing to girls they’ve loved, girls they wore out. Their girls.’”

Allison describes how her aunt comforted her one day when she was crying over boys calling her names. Dot’s analysis was a feminist one that paid attention to the role of gender oppression in the lives of working-class women. In writing the memoir, Allison is searching for ways to connect her past to her present. In this encounter and others, Dot served as a source of knowledge gained from life experience, and Allison’s ability later in life to bring the lens of gender to bear on her own life has its roots in conversations like these.

“The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them. I made myself proud of their pride, their determination, their stubbornness, but every night I prayed a man’s prayer: Lord, save me from them. Do not let me become them [….] For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.”

As a girl, one of Allison’s main fears was that she’d become a downtrodden and defeated woman like the other Gibson women. As she examines what she made of her life in her teens and twenties, she realizes that leaving the South wasn’t enough to prevent her from becoming like the Gibson women. Her hatred of her body—one result of multigenerational trauma—came with her even after she left the South and is one of several beliefs she must reject to heal from her trauma.

“Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”

Even as an adult, Allison continues to struggle with what she experienced as a working-class girl in the South. Her use of the phrase “buttoned collar” connects her to the pictures of her mother in buttoned-up collars, while the contrast between this orderly dress and the terrifying experience in her head represents what it means to be working-class and feel like an imposter once one moves into spaces where people aren’t working-class.

“I had to learn how to say it […] to speak my words as a sacrament, a blessing, a prayer. Not a curse. Getting past the anger, getting to the release, I become someone else, and the story changes.”

Allison views her storytelling as a powerful tool for shaping her identity as a survivor of abuse. Hence, she uses words associated with the sacred. Her description of how storytelling and language allowed her to heal helps develop the theme of storytelling as testimony.

“My theory is that rape goes on happening all the time. My theory is that everything said about that act is assumed to say something about me, as if that thing I never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life. My theory is that talking about it makes a difference—being a woman who can stand up anywhere and say, I was five and the man was big.”

Allison often expresses fear that her storytelling about her life will be co-opted by people who lack a nuanced understanding of why she’s telling these stories. Her straightforward statement about rape highlights it as a common part of women’s (and some men’s) experience that needs to be spoken about more often for the sake of survivors as well as more truthful representation of gender. The detail at the end, which is concrete and bound in her body, brings the more abstract description of rape back to the violent, physical reality of her own story and thus reiterates that this story is her own testimony about what she survived.

“And oh! the joy of it, the power to say, ‘No, you son of a bitch, this time, no!’ His fear was sexual and marvelous—hateful and scary but wonderful, like orgasm, like waiting a whole lifetime and finally coming. I know. I’m not supposed to talk about sex like that, not about weapons or hatred or violence, and never to put them in the context of sexual desire.”

Part of Allison’s work is to critique establishment feminism for its failure to offer more complicated notions of women’s experience of violence (both as perpetrators and as survivors). Here, Allison paints a picture of a young woman who uses violence and finds it deeply satisfying and effective in responding to violence. Feminists who read this may be uncomfortable with such an account if they adhere to a gender binary in which women are nurturing and men are violent—or if they reject the proposition that retaliatory violence instead of legal remedies is an appropriate response to violence against women. Additionally, Allison’s use of sexualized language highlights another dangerous reality for establishment feminism: that power and dominance (in the context of consensual sex) can be a part of women’s experience.

“It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.”

Allison’s memoir paints a picture of the experience of coming of age as a lesbian woman in a moment when everything in your family and culture tells you that something is wrong with you because of who you are. This passage captures both her early awareness of her identity and her sense of alienation because of the lack of role models.

“I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true. My stories are no parables, no Reader’s Digest Unforgettable Characters, no women’s movement polemics, no Queer Nation broadsides. I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three things I know for sure.”

Reader’s Digest is a magazine that includes light-hearted, short pieces that usually aim to avoid controversial or heavy topics; the publication is aimed squarely at people who live in comfortable circumstances. Queer Nation is a civil rights group founded in the 1990s to counter discrimination against gay people; it sometimes outed people as queer without those people’s consent. In this passage, Allison makes the case against her story’s being co-opted for any political purpose. She refuses to restrain her representation of the difficult parts of growing up working-class because it may offend people who think that respectability will lead to greater social and political power for working-class people and those with queer identities. Allison’s insistence on telling uncomfortable and personal truths shows that she values her autonomy as a storyteller above all else.

“Sex was the country I had been dragged into as an unwilling girl—sex, and the madness of the body [….] But love—love was another country.”

As a girl, Allison internalized overt and implied messages about women and girls’ lack of worth. In Allison’s life, these messages and her trauma led her to see her body as a hated thing and sex as just one more means of dominating girls and women. Another reason that Allison avoided sex and the body was that she was already aware that the desire she felt didn’t fit into the expectations of the people around her. These relationships happened in the context of inequality between men and women. Love was Allison’s name for intimacy that she hadn’t experienced yet in her life.

“I looked up and saw Pat’s eyes looking back at me—unafraid, dispassionate, curious. She had no way of knowing that without warning or preparation I had just become my mother’s daughter, my sisters’ counterpart.”

Allison experienced a rite of passage when she finally felt love for someone else—Pat, a close friend who was unaware of Allison’s feelings for her. Allison was of two minds during this moment: She identified with the oppressed Gibson women who were vulnerable to men because they loved the men in their lives, but she had a sense of alienation and loneliness because she was emotionally unable to share her feelings with her friend.

“[T]hat astonishingly perfected female body taking over the class and showing us what a woman could do. I watched the sensei watching her and understood […] that the passion is his glance was […] love that yearned as much for the spirit as the body.”

Seeing the sensei’s wife embody women’s power helped Allison heal from her trauma and deprogram herself regarding the internalized misogyny that makes women and girls see themselves as unworthy. The body of the sensei’s wife thus symbolizes Allison’s ability to love herself and other women as she matured.

“I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will we make together? I'm all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.”

In this quote, Allison integrates what she learned in karate class about loving women and herself. Her ability to name herself as a lesbian woman and a person who deserved someone who was her equal in strength marked a shift in her identity.

“Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always 11 years old [….] But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving into fear. The stories other people would tell about my life, my mother's life, my sisters’, uncles’, cousins’, and lost girlfriends’—those are the stories that could destroy me, erase me, mock and deny me.”

One reason Allison that spends so much time asserting that her stories belong to her is that she’s writing in a rhetorical context in which working-class people, especially women, are erased or mythologized in ways that obscure the complexity of that identity. In a rhetorical context, the same threat exists for people with queer identities or people who have lived through trauma. Allison thus makes the case for storytelling by people who have lived through these experiences or who have these identities as being the most authoritative sources of testimony.

“[A]ll of them have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken, the story of us never laughing out loud, never learning to enjoy sex, never being able to love or trust to love again, the story in which all that survives is the flesh. That is not my story.”

Elements of myths about white, working-class, Southern women and trauma survivors are that they live outside of history, that they’re mere bodies with no power (agency) regarding the course of their lives, and that trauma freezes survivors in place, preventing them from having a life after the traumatic event. Allison’s words here and the memoir as a whole are motivated by a need to show that these myths are powerful but inaccurate representations of these identities.

“‘Shaklee! Shaklee products. Oh God! I sell cleaning supplies door to door.’ I bit her shoulder, didn’t laugh. I rocked her on my leg until she relaxed and laughed herself. I rocked her until she could forgive me for asking. Then she took hold of me and rolled me over and showed me that she wanted me as much as I wanted her.”

Allison shares the story of passionate sex with a lover who pretended to be something she wasn’t. This scene illustrates the point Allison makes in the previous section—that she has moved through her trauma to be a woman who experiences pleasure and recognizes the importance of laughter and humor in her life. Allison’s partner couldn’t relax and enjoy that experience until she admitted who she truly was, reinforcing the point that the story we tell about ourselves must be authentic.

“‘When your mama was a girl,’ I told her, ‘she was so beautiful people said the sun shone brighter when she walked out in the day. They said the moon took him glitter when she went out in the night.’”

The final parts of the memoir show Allison increasingly concerned about what her storytelling can do for the girls and women who come after her. Here, her audience is her niece, a young girl who was already internalizing negative messages about her class and gender. Although storytelling can serve as testimony to difficult experiences, it needn’t always be in the realistic mode to do that work. The story Allison chooses to tell the girl is one about resilience and beauty. Allison uses figurative language and fairy-tale conventions in an effort to change the way the girl sees herself and her mother.