Read Bastard out of Carolina for Free Online
Authors: Dorothy Allison
weren’t any pictures of my real daddy, and Mama wouldn’t talk to me about him—no more than she would about the rest of the family. It was Granny who told me what a pissant he was; told me he lived up near Blackburn with a wife and six children who didn’t even know I existed; said he sold insurance to colored people out in the county and had never been in jail a day in his life. “A sorry excuse for a man,” she called him, making me feel kind of wretched until Aunt Alma swore he hadn’t been that bad, just pissed everybody off when he wouldn’t come back and ask Granny’s forgiveness after she ran him off.
“Eight days after you were born,” Aunt Alma told me, “he came around while Granny was over at the mill to settle some trouble with one of the boys. Anney wasn’t sure she wanted to see him at all, but Raylene and I persuaded her to let him see you while she stayed in the back bedroom. That boy was scared shitless, holding you in hands stained dark green where he’d been painting his daddy’s flatbed truck. You just looked at him with your black Indian eyes like he wasn’t nothing but a servant, lifting you up for some air or something. Then you let loose and pissed a pailful all down his sleeves, the front of his shirt, and right down his pants halfway to his knees! You peed all over the son of a bitch!”
Aunt Alma hugged me up onto her lap. Her grin was so wide it made her nose seem small. She looked like she’d been waiting to tell me this story since I was born, waiting to praise and thank me for this thing I didn’t even know I had done.
“It’s like you were putting out your mama’s opinion, speaking up for her there on his lap. And that boy seemed to know just what it meant, with your baby piss stinking up his clothes for all to smell. He passed you right over to me like you were gonna go on to drown him if he didn’t hurry. Took off without speaking to your mama and never came back again. When we heard he’d married another little girl was already carrying his baby, Earle joked that the boy was just too fertile for his own good, that he couldn’t plow a woman without making children, and maybe it’s true. With the six he’s got legal, and you, and the others people say he’s got scattered from Spartanburg to Greer, he’s been a kind of one-man population movement. You got family you an’t ever gonna know is your own—all of you with that dark dark hair he had himself.” She grinned at me, reaching out to push my midnight-black hair back off my face.
“Oh, Bone!” she laughed. “Maybe you should plan on marrying yourself a blond just to be safe. Huh?”
Granny wouldn’t talk much about my real daddy except to curse his name, but she told me just about everything else. She would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew to be true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, ballads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everybody seemed legendary.
“My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never really made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat
“Eight days after you were born,” Aunt Alma told me, “he came around while Granny was over at the mill to settle some trouble with one of the boys. Anney wasn’t sure she wanted to see him at all, but Raylene and I persuaded her to let him see you while she stayed in the back bedroom. That boy was scared shitless, holding you in hands stained dark green where he’d been painting his daddy’s flatbed truck. You just looked at him with your black Indian eyes like he wasn’t nothing but a servant, lifting you up for some air or something. Then you let loose and pissed a pailful all down his sleeves, the front of his shirt, and right down his pants halfway to his knees! You peed all over the son of a bitch!”
Aunt Alma hugged me up onto her lap. Her grin was so wide it made her nose seem small. She looked like she’d been waiting to tell me this story since I was born, waiting to praise and thank me for this thing I didn’t even know I had done.
“It’s like you were putting out your mama’s opinion, speaking up for her there on his lap. And that boy seemed to know just what it meant, with your baby piss stinking up his clothes for all to smell. He passed you right over to me like you were gonna go on to drown him if he didn’t hurry. Took off without speaking to your mama and never came back again. When we heard he’d married another little girl was already carrying his baby, Earle joked that the boy was just too fertile for his own good, that he couldn’t plow a woman without making children, and maybe it’s true. With the six he’s got legal, and you, and the others people say he’s got scattered from Spartanburg to Greer, he’s been a kind of one-man population movement. You got family you an’t ever gonna know is your own—all of you with that dark dark hair he had himself.” She grinned at me, reaching out to push my midnight-black hair back off my face.
“Oh, Bone!” she laughed. “Maybe you should plan on marrying yourself a blond just to be safe. Huh?”
Granny wouldn’t talk much about my real daddy except to curse his name, but she told me just about everything else. She would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew to be true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, ballads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everybody seemed legendary.
“My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never really made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat