49 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy AllisonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
When Allison was 16, she stopped her stepfather from beating her in front of friends. He supposedly gave her 16 licks, a tradition in some cultures whereby one gets as many licks as years on one’s birthday. However, he was hurting and humiliating her in front of her friends, so she stood up to him and told him that he could never break her or hit her again. This was a story she told herself then and continues to tell herself even when she isn’t sure that it’s true. The story empowers her, and her mother and aunts have the exact same kinds of stories.
These stories involve trauma. They could be testaments to what makes Allison and the Gibson women broken. Instead, these stories make them strong. The stories have two edges, though. A traumatic story says to the world that one is somehow a victim—but living to tell the story and own one’s experiences says that one is powerful. Knowing the latter is essential, so Allison refuses to let anyone—even feminists—co-opt her stories. They aren’t allegories; they belong to her and are about real, individual people. What she knows is that she can’t make her stories mean something beyond the meanings she ascribes to them. A photo of Allison and several women at a protest follows.
The stories that Allison refuses to tell are those that cast her, her female family members, and all poor people as broken by the circumstances of their lives. Allison won’t let such stories drown out her voice and experience. Her stories are varied, and in them, she gets to have some joy, desire, and passion, even if her audience doesn’t want to hear it. She knows now that her stories keep her alive and allow her to use her voice to make change.
Allison recounts seducing a shy butch (a person with a gender expression that is traditionally masculine). This woman had a fraught relationship with her stepfather, and her intimidating demeanor scared off all Allison’s girlfriends. During their lovemaking, Allison asked the woman—the daughter of a money launderer for a crime family—what she was carrying in the large case in her car. Wanting to appear tough, the young woman claimed that she was carrying whiskey and cigarettes. Afterward, she confessed to Allison that she sold health shakes door to door—an unglamourous occupation that didn’t fit with her tough presentation.
In this short piece, Allison directly addresses the uses and dangers of storytelling as testimony to trauma. She explores the rhetorical situation (the context of communication, which may include audience, purpose, genre, and message, for example). One of Allison’s anxieties as a writer is losing power over how audiences receive the message she’s sending with her stories. She fears being misunderstood because she sees myths about white, Southern, working-class women as part of the rhetorical context into which she’s writing as a memoirist.
Allison defends against this danger in several ways. First, she consistently claims that she has no interest in creating and publishing a memoir with an agenda—illuminating the lives of people like the Gibsons for audiences who see them as Others. Second, she writes herself into the memoir as a complex, ever-shifting persona who endorses and rejects parts of that culture and expresses her ambivalence about that culture. She notes at the beginning of the section, for example, that “somewhere inside of me there is a child always eleven years old” (71) but notes that it coexists with a “teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to do, the woman who learned to love without giving into fear” (71). Her assertion of all the identities that developed past the moment of abuse empowers her refusal to be pinned down to just one story about what it means to grow up in the South.
Allison directly attacks one of the central elements of myths about white, working-class people—that they’re passive and tragic recipients of an economic order that denies them the benefit of white privilege and makes them permanent victims. She attacks this myth by emphasizing joy and pleasure as signs of agency (power over one’s own actions). Her description of all the things that people assume are absent from Allison’s family and culture—“laughing,” “enjoy[ing] sex,” “being able to love or trust again,” and being able to be something more than “flesh”—are part of a story that is a “lie.”
Allison’s account of making love to a woman who passed herself off as a seller of illegal liquor and cigarettes is playful and illustrates the importance of sex, love, and play in Allison’s life; in addition, the story shows the danger of telling false stories about oneself. The girlfriend can give and get complete pleasure only when she tells the truth about herself. If the stories that audiences want and expect to hear are only about trauma, Allison is essentially saying here that she’s having none of it.
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