Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-20

Pages 21-39

Pages 39-48

Pages 49-59

Pages 59-67

Pages 67-75

Pages 75-86

Pages 86-94

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Pages 1-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-20 Summary

Content Warning: These Summary and Analyses sections, particularly pages 39-48, contain references to rape, child sexual abuse, and representations of physical violence.

From an early age, Allison told herself stories to escape the reality of her life. In the stories she told about herself, Allison was a woman who had run away. Her mothers and aunts stayed put, bound to the South by children and their decisions to see a hard life or marriage out to the end. Allison’s Aunt “Dot” (Dorothy) was just such a woman. She claimed that “‘there’s only two or three things I know for sure’” (5), although what those might be changed from time to time. This is the source of the book’s title. A picture of Ruth Gibson in a sundress and sandals appears here.

Allison remembers how gorgeous Greenville, South Carolina was and how good it smelled. It was a terrible place, however, and she loved and hated it in equal measure. No one wanted to talk about family history because the family had so many secrets, a lesson Allison learned after the women in her family (especially her mother) refused to share many details that she needed for a family tree project. This silence was typical of the people they knew in Greenville. A photograph of Dorothy and the Gibson cousins as children appears here, as well as one of Allison’s grandmother with two relatives.

When Ruth died and Allison returned home, she initially tried to be the can-do person her mother would have been—but Wanda, Allison’s sister, put a stop to it. She forced Allison to rest and kept their stepfather away from her. A picture of Patsy (a female relative) appears here. Later, Allison realized that Wanda was trying to do what Ruth would have done.

After Ruth’s death, Allison and her sisters divided up what little Ruth owned. Allison received some inexpensive jewelry and a box of photos. A picture of two male twins as boys appears here. Allison once asked her mother who the people in the pictures were. Her mother named some of them, but others made her close her mouth, which clearly conveyed to Allison that they were associated with painful stories. Allison particularly recalls a picture of her mother as an adolescent. In this photo, Ruth is a beautiful15-year-old and is already pregnant with Allison, according to her Aunt Dot. Allison’s father abandoned Ruth and her baby.

Pages 1-20 Analysis

Using short, evocative pieces and family photographs, Allison introduces the memoir’s first major theme: White, Southern, Working-Class Women’s Identity. She uses stories about the women in the family, interspersed with family photos, to describe the reality of life for the Gibsons of Greenville and to establish an archetype that she has grappled with in determining her own identity.

Both the texts and photos in this section help Allison capture the lived reality of being a girl and a woman in Greenville during the 1940s and 50s. The black-and-white photos are a mix of styles. Some are posed, formal photos of Gibson girls and women dressed in their best attire, with groomed hair and smiles on their faces. Others, such as the picture of children by a swimming hole and the one of two boys embracing in front of a house, are informal. The artificial backgrounds and stiff collars in the formal photos highlight the degree to which these photos are a kind of storytelling designed to present the Gibsons as people who lead comfortable, happy lives. The informal photos, however, are more realistic. They capture the two sides of Greenville—that it was both “ripe” and “rotting.” The photo of the two boys embracing, for example, is playful, a picture of childhood innocence and joy—but in the background is a ramshackle house on an overgrown plot of land. As a storyteller, Allison notes that she could talk about growing up as “trash” or romanticize what life was like. In this section, the photos offer a somewhat more idyllic version of the story than she tells.

While the photos offer several visual perspectives on Allison’s past, the narrative directly address the “rotting” part of Greenville and the Gibson family—specifically, the abuse and poverty that Allison experienced. She mentions it immediately in that description of her family’s class position in the first paragraph. Her subsequent description of her story as one in which she’s a runaway “queen, a warrior maiden, a mother with a canvas suitcase, a daughter with broken bones” (4) slides from a fairy-tale narrative directly into a traumatic narrative: She’s the girl with the broken bones.

The events she describes in this section—the painful conversation around the Gibson family tree (it has lots of gaps), her mother’s funeral, and the careful maneuvering to keep Allison’s abuser (her stepfather) away—show that while the Gibsons are those smiling faces, they’re also part of a past that broke Allison. The last photo in this section and the text together capture this dynamic perfectly. The photo is of a smiling, beautiful, and stylishly dressed Ruth Gibson at age 15. Dot, however, tells Allison about the photo by pointing out that Ruth is already pregnant and on the verge of a disastrous and short relationship with Allison’s biological father. Allison is in that glam-shot photo—inside her mother. Although Allison is clear about the power of her own storytelling in this section, she points out the flipside too: that other narratives, especially those that trail working-class Southerners, can easily consume her identity.