Дороти Эллисон - Bastard Out of Carolina

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison

(2011)

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA

DOROTHY ALLISON

Copyright © Dorothy Al ison, 1992

For Mama

Ruth Gibson Al ison

1935-1990

People pay for what they do, and stil more, for what they have al owed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

—JAMES BALDWIN

1

I’ve been cal ed Bone al my life, but my name’s Ruth Anne. I was named for and by my oldest aunt—Aunt Ruth. My mama didn’t have much to say about it, since strictly speaking, she wasn’t there. Mama and a earful of my aunts and uncles had been going out to the airport to meet one of the cousins who was on his way back from playing soldier. Aunt Alma, Aunt Ruth, and her husband, Travis, were squeezed into the front, and Mama was stretched out in back, sound asleep. Mama hadn’t adjusted to pregnant life very happily, and by the time she was eight months gone, she had a lot of trouble sleeping. She said that when she lay on her back it felt like I was crushing her, when she lay on her side it felt like I was climbing up her backbone, and there was no rest on her stomach at al . Her only comfort was the backseat of Uncle Travis’s Chevy, which was jacked up so high that it easily cradled little kids or pregnant women.

Moments after lying back into that seat, Mama had fal en into her first deep sleep in eight months. She slept so hard, even the accident didn’t wake her up.

My aunt Alma insists to this day that what happened was in no way Uncle Travis’s fault, but I know that the first time I ever saw Uncle Travis sober was when I was seventeen and they had just removed half his stomach along with his liver. I cannot imagine that he hadn’t been drinking. There’s no question in my mind but that they had al been drinking, except Mama, who never could drink, and certainly not when she was pregnant.

No, Mama was just asleep and everyone else was drunk. And what they did was plow headlong into a slow-moving car. The front of Uncle Travis’s Chevy accordioned; the back flew up; the aunts and Uncle Travis were squeezed so tight they just bounced a little; and Mama, stil asleep with her hands curled under her chin, flew right over their heads, through the windshield, and over the car they hit. Going through the glass, she cut the top of her head, and when she hit the ground she bruised her backside, but other than that she wasn’t hurt at al . Of course, she didn’t wake up for three days, not til after Granny and Aunt Ruth had signed al the papers and picked out my name.

I am Ruth for my aunt Ruth, and Anne for my mama. I got the nickname Bone shortly after Mama brought me home from the hospital and Uncle Earle announced that I was “no bigger than a knucklebone” and Aunt Ruth’s youngest girl, Deedee, pul ed the blanket back to see “the bone.” It’s lucky I’m not Mattie Raylene like Granny wanted. But Mama had always promised to name her first daughter after her oldest sister, and Aunt Ruth thought Mama’s child should just natural y carry Mama’s name since they had come so close to losing her.

Other than the name, they got just about everything else wrong. Neither Aunt Ruth nor Granny could write very clearly, and they hadn’t bothered to discuss how Anne would be spel ed, so it wound up spel ed three different ways on the form—Ann, Anne, and Anna. As for the name of the father, Granny refused to speak it after she had run him out of town for messing with her daughter, and Aunt Ruth had never been sure of his last name anyway. They tried to get away with just scribbling something down, but if the hospital didn’t mind how a baby’s middle name was spel ed, they were definite about having a father’s last name. So Granny gave one and Ruth gave another, the clerk got mad, and there I was—certified a bastard by the state of South Carolina.

Mama always said it would never have happened if she’d been awake. “After al ,” she told my aunt Alma, “they don’t ask for a marriage license before they put you up on the table.” She was convinced that she could have bluffed her way through it, said she was married firmly enough that no one would have questioned her.

“It’s only when you bring it to their attention that they write it down.”

Granny said it didn’t matter anyhow. Who cared what was written down? Did people read courthouse records? Did they ask to see your birth certificate before they sat themselves on your porch? Everybody who mattered knew, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about anybody else. She teased Mama about the damn sil y paper with the red stamp on the bottom.

“What was it? You intended to frame that thing? You wanted something on your wal to prove you done it right?” Granny could be mean where her pride was involved. “The child is proof enough. An’t no stamp on her nobody can see.”

If Granny didn’t care, Mama did. Mama hated to be cal ed trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tal and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her. No-good, lazy, shiftless. She’d work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to a bent and awkward smile—anything to deny what Greenvil e County wanted to name her. Now a soft-talking black-eyed man had done it for them—

set a mark on her and hers. It was al she could do to pul herself up eight days after I was born and go back to work waiting tables with a tight mouth and swol en eyes.

Mama waited a year. Four days before my first birthday and a month past her sixteenth, she wrapped me in a blanket and took me to the courthouse. The clerk was polite but bored. He had her fil out a form and pay a two-dol ar fee. Mama fil ed it out in a fine schoolgirl’s hand. She hadn’t been to school in three years, but she wrote letters for everyone in the family and was proud of her graceful, slightly canted script.

“What happened to the other one?” the clerk asked.

Mama didn’t look up from my head on her arm. “It got torn across the bottom.”

The clerk looked at her more closely, turned a glance on me. “Is that right?”

He went to the back and was gone a long time. Mama stood, quiet but stubborn, at the counter. When he came back, he passed her the paper and stayed to watch her face.

It was the same, identical to the other one. Across the bottom in oversized red-inked block letters it read, “il egitimate.”

Mama drew breath like an old woman with pleurisy, and flushed pink from her neck to her hairline. “I don’t want it like this,” she blurted.

“Wel , little lady,” he said in a long, slow drawl. Behind him she could see some of the women clerks standing in a doorway, their faces almost as flushed as her own but their eyes bright with an entirely different emotion. “This is how it’s got to be. The facts have been established.” He drew the word out even longer and louder so that it hung in the air between them like a neon reflection of my mama’s blush—established.

The women in the doorway shook their heads and pursed their lips. One mouthed to the other, “Some people.”

Mama made her back straighten, bundled me closer to her neck, and turned suddenly for the hal door. “You forgetting your certificate,” the man cal ed after her, but she didn’t stop. Her hands on my body clamped so tight I let out a high, thin wail. Mama just held on and let me scream.

She waited another year before going back, that time taking my aunt Ruth with her and leaving me with Granny. “I was there,” Aunt Ruth promised them, “and it was real y my fault. In so much excitement I just got confused, what with Anney here looking like she was dead to the world and everybody shouting and running around. You know, there was a three-car accident brought in just minutes after us.” Aunt Ruth gave the clerk a very sincere direct look, awkwardly trying to keep her eyes wide and friendly.