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at all sure I really wanted to live with this stuff inside me. But holding on to them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live—and clinging to that decision. For me those stories were not distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of my life, and they were necessary in ways I could barely understand.
    Still I took those stories and wrote them again. I made some of them funny. I made some of them poems. I made the women beautiful, wounded but courageous, while the men disappeared into the background. I put hope in the children and passion in the landscape while my neck ached and tightened, and I wanted nothing so much as a glass of whiskey or a woman’s anger to distract me. None of it was worth the pain it caused me. None of it made my people or me more understandable. None it told the truth, and every lie I wrote proved to me I wasn’t worth my mother’s grief at what she thought was my wasted life, or my sister’s cold fear of what I might tell other people about them.
    I put it all away. I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it. I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself. I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me. I worked on a feminist journal. I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head. I watched other women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage we all did to each other. I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing committees and pragmatic coalition fronts. I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
    That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it. Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head. The bitterness with which I had been born, that had been nurtured in me, could not be eased with a lover or a fight or any number of late-night meetings and clumsily written manifestos. It may never be eased. The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished.
    But a night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again. All those stories were rising up my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God just once—to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense. I got up and wrote a story all the way through. It was one of the stories from the yellow pages, one of the ones I had rewritten, but it was different again. It wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine. It was not biography and yet not lies, and it resonated to the pulse of my sisters’ fear and my desperate shame, and it ended with all the questions and decisions still waiting—most of all the decision to live.
    It was a rough beginning—my own shout of