Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison continues attacking myths about white, Southern, working-class women and women in general. In her interactions with Anne and her niece, the three debunked myths that they’d internalized about what it meant to be a part of that culture.

Anne internalized the notion that she lacked intelligence as a girl and that she was unworthy of love and respect because she was a teenage mother. Allison internalized myths that something was wrong with being bookish and showing no interest in learning how to present as traditionally feminine, as her mother and sisters understood it. When Anne and Allison told each other about the damage these myths did to them both, they undid the power of some of those stories in terms of how they negatively impacted each woman’s identity.

With those myths out of the way, Anne and Allison shared things that were true and profound: that they were both survivors of abuse—and that surviving the abuse required making hard choices like staying out the way so that someone else became the target that night. When Allison noticed her niece reacting with anxiety to this teary, emotional exchange between the two sisters, she responded by bringing the girl into the circle of what the two women were doing by talking to each other. She offered the girl a counter-story, a narrative that pushed back against what Allison didn’t want to pass on to her—namely, the myth that being born poor and in the South condemned a woman to being broken. Allison engaged the girl through “the act of storytelling connecting to the life that might be possible” (84). She wanted her niece to reject the programming she was receiving from the culture that she was worthless.

Allison’s story named the girl and her mother as beautiful and connected through that beauty rather than being drab, oppressed girls and women who existed to be used. The birth story has fairy-tale elements in it, an effort on Allison’s part to counter the story the girl likely heard about her birth—that it was a source of shame to her mother. Allison’s truth at the end of this section is rooted in the idea that her storytelling isn’t so much for the benefit of an audience that sees white, Southern, working-class women as the Other. Her book is about making space for such women and girls to see each other as “beautiful to each other” (86).