Today my
eleventh graders discussed the scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of
Carolina when a stepfather rapes its twelve-year-old narrator, the mother
arriving in time to witness the unthinkable abuse held secret for so long and
raging at him before, shockingly, comforting him, choosing him, if only to stop
the abject beating of his own bloody face. Student anger is always steepest for
the mother, betraying her daughter in the hour of her greatest need in the very
moment Anney can finally understand and see her daughter fully.
How does Anney
get so bent that she chooses that man over her daughter? Can daddy issues
really account for Glen’s disturbed sexual anger? What will it take for Bone,
our young narrator, to heal from the years of abuse and the secrecy that
curdles them into self-loathing and shame and bitter wrath, and now, this
crushing day of annihilation and abandonment?
In discussing
chapters preceding this one, I don’t foreshadow Anney’s devastating choice of
husband over daughter. Instead, I highlight the ferocity of her protectiveness
towards her children out in the world, and I also point to the tenderness
towards what is so hurt and insecure in her husband. And today, when students
express revulsion for Anney and also wonder if she will regret this moment, I
return them to the many signals of deep regret even in the moment it’s
happening; and, most provocatively, I take them back to one of the dedications
of the book, For Mama, a dedication to a book written within two years of
Dorothy Allison’s mother’s death.
Will Bone ever
be able to love her mother after this? Is healing possible?
This book,
though it ends soon after and Bone stays so hurt, broken, and sour, is its own
answer. It is brave and raw and honest, and it finds its way to this moment. To
tell so baldly of all the fierce mothering that comes to such betrayal may seem
a way to justify a continued and hardened anger. But it may well be the way
back to love. There is so much generosity in this book—for the rambunctious
uncles, the hard and wise Boatwright aunts, even for Glen, who is made so small
by his cruel family, for Anney in all her fighting spirit and confused
tenderness, and most of all, for Bone, the narrator herself, the child and author’s
child within, blistering in rage and shame, who wants to protect her mother and
who leans in to her family’s defiant spirit but also her own creative searching
and sporadically tended brokenness. One aunt teaches her witness and honesty.
Another teaches her empathy and generosity of spirit. And her mother tries and
tries and tries to be a good mother, this woman barely older than Bone when
she’s conceived, tries, and in this chapter, deeply fails—but even then, trying,
tragically and urgently. Bone will find a way to love her mother again and,
above all, love herself, two things that I believe are knit together, and she
will do so largely through the empathetic powers of writing, where she can understand,
recognize, and see and find the dignity and devotion amid the horrors and
betrayals.
Last week, a
student finished the book early; and she is such a sensitive kid, I saw her open
face, looking small. She said it was the hardest book she’s ever read, but she’s
glad she read it. I told her, I’ve taught this book so many times and every
time it shreds me: it takes so much emotional energy to be in that space with good
young people day after day. Then why do you do it? she asked.
This book does
something for a class that no other book I’ve taught has been able to do. The
vulnerability it takes to be in conversation together, but also the generosity
of spirit and minutely honest portrayal of pain, shame, and confusion, teach
lessons in the power of speaking in healing, the power of witness in healing,
the power of community in healing, lessons in our power of understanding that
makes monsters into men and evil into humanity however broken; and that
humanity in its pain and its expansive power is what allows hurt people to come
again to love, and to forgive a self, and to welcome and be good to others. In
reading this book together, the humanity possible and the humanity demanded is
large.
When we read The
Bastard Out of Carolina, those of us who see themselves in Bone have a
sister and are not so alone, and can externalize the poisons. And when we read
it, those who feel compassion for Bone learn how to understand her meanness and
love her anyway. And when we read it together, as a group of people suddenly soul-to-soul
with the sensitive and yearning hearts of others, exposed to each other because
we know what they have just read, give grace to what they might be thinking
about or feeling or remembering; and when I talk them through the many jagged
ways we love and are loved and need to be seen and fight our way from darkness,
we learn the importance of opening our hearts, of witnessing, of asking, of
making space for pain—our own and our neighbors’—and of growing the welcome of
love.
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