Two or Three Things I Know for Sure Read Online Free

turned him down. Wouldn’t think he’d wind up living in a one-room trailer in his sister’s backyard. Where’d they go, all them girlfriends and good times? What happened, you think, to that man everyone wanted to bed or marry?”
    I fingered the photo and remembered one night when I was a tiny girl sleeping on the couch with my head pillowed on Mama’s thigh. I had woken up to her whispering and shifting on that creaky old sofa, the taint of whiskey and tobacco smoke telling me that someone was there, and the hoarse sobs that followed confusing me, for I had never before heard my uncle cry.
    “What am I gonna do?” he had said then. “Ruth, I can’t stand this. I don’t want to live without her. I don’t think I can.”
    She had pulled his head into her neck, hugging him close and whispering. “You’ll be all right,” she said.
    “Yes,” he said. “I know, yes. But in the middle of the night, it feels like my heart is coming out of my chest.”
    She kissed his forehead, said only, “I worry about you.” He shook his head hard, making her flinch from his sudden movement.
    “You afraid of me?” he demanded, and she shook her head. But for a moment something burned in the cool night air.
    “I just worry,” she said again.
    “Don’t worry about me.” He ran his hands down his face as if he were not actually wiping away tears, then pushed himself up off the table. “Hell, I’m a man. I can handle it.”
    His voice was gravel rough. He was still a handsome man but at that moment he reminded me of a painting in the Sunday school lesson book, a picture of the murdered John the Baptist, his face drained of color and pulled thin with despair. For the rest of my life I would not see him without remembering the way he looked on that night—a man who had lost the woman he loved, and with her his belief in his own life.
     
     
    Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that no one is as hard as my uncles had to pretend to be.
     
     
     
     
     

    LET ME TELL YOU about what I have never been allowed to be. Beautiful and female. Sexed and sexual. I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats. Ask any white Southerner. They’ll take you back two generations, say, “Yeah, we had a plantation.” The hell we did.
    I have no memories that can be bent so easily. I know where I come from, and it is not that part of the world. My family has a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness—the women of my family most of all.

    The women of my family were measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt. My family? The women of my family? We are the ones in all those photos taken at mining disasters, floods, fires. We are the ones in the background with our mouths open, in print dresses or drawstring pants and collarless smocks, ugly and old and exhausted. Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species.
    I remember standing on the porch with my aunt Maudy brushing out my hair; I was feeling loved and safe and happy. My aunt turned me around and smoothed my hair down, looked me in the eye, smiled, and shook her head. “Lucky you’re smart,” she said.

    Brown-toothed, then toothless, my aunt Dot showed me what I could expect.
    “You’re like me,” she announced when she saw my third-grade school picture. “Got that nothing-gonna-stop-you look about you, girl.”
    I studied the picture. All I saw was another grinning girl in dark-framed glasses, missing a tooth.
    “No, look.” She produced a picture I would find later among Mama’s treasures. In this one Aunt Dot was a smooth-skinned teenager with a wide jaw and a straightforward glare, sturdy and fearless at fifteen as she would be three decades