Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Content Warning: This Themes section includes references to the sexual assault of children and abuse.

Allison explicitly frames her work as a response to negative representations of white, working-class Southerners, especially women. American fiction as celebrated as To Kill a Mockingbird has written white, working-class Southerners into American culture as passive, ugly people who are stuck in the past. Allison’s rich representation of the women in her family offers an alternative vision. The first part of her memoir does much of the work of framing Two or Three Things I Know for Sure as a working-class, feminist critique of Southern myths.

An important part of the memoir’s rhetorical context is the representation of white, Southern womanhood. Within American literature, the notion of the pure, white, delicate Southern woman is central to the myth of the plantation South. In fact, the protection of white women’s purity was a pretext for the use of violence in maintaining the racial and economic order of the South, even after the Civil War.

In contrast to this “moonlight and magnolias” South, the South as it appears in the memoir is a grim one where people like Allison’s mother, sister, and aunt aren’t protected just because they’re white women. They do all they can to survive the grind of poverty and oppression based on gender and class, and they do it in the face of a society that assumes they deserve oppression. In the memoir’s first piece, Allison acknowledges that she knew even as a child that people saw her and her family as little more than “trash”. Allison’s sense that she and her people were seen as less-than is not just something she realizes in retrospect. As a girl, she knew this, which shows how powerful a role it played in forming her identity.

Allison adds that with her storytelling, she can “[m]ake it pretty or sad, laughable of haunting. Dress it up with legend and aura and romance” (2). “Dressing it up” is a form of the romanticization that created this mythical South, so Allison almost immediately moves to reject these myths. She notes in passing Greenville’s beauty but then reveals a series of harsh truths about what this South meant for her. The truths Allison tells are difficult ones that relate to sexual abuse, abandonment, and traumas that people survived but didn’t overcome.

Allison intervenes most powerfully with images of the mythical South through her perspective on the heroism of sheer endurance in the lives of the Southern women in her family. Ruth, for example, endured abandonment and rescued her children from abuse for a time. Southern literature by writers like William Faulkner cements Southern endurance into our notions of what it is to be white, poor, and Southern. Part of the trap of making Southerners heroic because of their endurance, however, is that it casts them as passive recipients of American history, frozen in time, rather than people capable of change.

In contrast, Allison’s accounts of the women in her family show that endurance isn’t enough, not even for the women of the previous generation. The photographs she includes of the women in her family contrast with the conventional story about adult Southern women as unfeeling workhorses and producers of babies. The images of Allison’s mother and aunts show them as young, vulnerable girls who played with friends, adorned themselves for school photos, and had a life before the time of the dour images that appear in the middle of the memoir.

Additionally, Allison shows that women in her family, especially Dot, were fully capable of examining the implications of class and gender for their experiences as women. Dot’s discussion of how important it was for Allison to reject people who ridiculed her because she wasn’t conventionally attractive is a keen analysis of beauty and ugliness as weapons rooted in controlling women and misogyny. This feminist critique derives from Dot’s lived experience.

Allison’s ability to become a feminist, to some extent, has roots in such moments in her upbringing. Nevertheless, she had to unlearn some of what she encountered. Allison’s frank discussion of how a culture of silence further traumatized her after surviving sexual abuse is a case in point. She describes, for example, aunts who still questioned her story of abuse—and how her stepfather was a guest at her mother’s funeral despite the entire family’s being aware that he raped Allison and at least one of her sisters.

One of the most empowering things Allison demonstrates in the memoir is that such silence must be destroyed. Her insistence on telling the story is a forceful rejection of the expectation that Southern women silently and politely endure abuse by staying put. As a young woman, Allison chose exploration instead of staying put. She embraced her identity as a lesbian woman after falling in love with a woman. She ranged geographically far from the part of the South she knew, spending time in Tallahassee, Florida, and ultimately landing in California. Her willingness to move and be changed tells a different story about the South—one that acknowledges that the South, and its women in particular, are part of history and have the agency to make something different of their lives. Allison chooses to do so through the power of storytelling.