On Writing

Whose Story Is It, Anyhow?

Lord knows, I’ve tried to create leading characters that were male and white, just like me. I’m all for equal opportunity, but it just didn’t work. They may be interesting, but there isn’t that spark of life required for a truly memorable hero. They just don’t have the depth to carry the book. It’s like digging through rock.

But put me in the head of a woman, and I just can’t shut up.

I believe I know reason for this. Where I come from, with the exception of preachers, politicians and drunks, men just didn’t say much of anything interesting, at least while children were present.

When I was a child in Mississippi, my relatives ritually got together for reunions and holidays on my grandparents’ farm. Hoards of family. As soon as they did their handshaking, hugs and kisses, the group segregated themselves. The men all wandered to the front porch while the women went to the kitchen. The kids went to the barnyard to clobber each other in fierce corncob wars.

I was no fool. I hung out with the women.

I had tried sitting with my father amongst the men, but they did little to keep me entertained. They would only grunt a few words about the crops or the weather or their trucks. They didn’t look at each other when they talked nor call each other by name. They could have been talking to the mailbox out there on the road. To me they were just a boring bunch of farmers sitting around and grumbling to themselves.

No, I found out soon enough that back in the kitchen was where the action was. As pots boiled and peelings piled up on newspapers in the floor and the oven made us sweat, the women excitedly pooled their information about the extended family—the births, sicknesses and deaths, triumphs and tragedies, stitching together the history of our people, that ongoing drama that they acted like was the most interesting thing on God’s earth. Of course they spiced it up with what non-relatives and the unchristian were up to. There was always plenty of saucy gossip that couldn’t be told about one’s own people. When they were all up to date, then they drifted back in time and told their memories of growing up with each other. There were twelve children so everybody had a different slant on things. These were stories I had heard over and over but they never lost their magic because the affection with which they were told was always fresh and the urgency not to forget was always present. Like the time my granny was out hanging clothes and the boar hog got loose. He supposedly ran between her legs and then rode her around the yard, Granny all the time trailing that sheet behind her like a flag. These women laughed until they cried and cried until they laughed. Nothing boring about any of it. Such voices never die.

And then there was church. During the half hour between Sunday school and the preaching service, the men again gathered out front on the church steps where they smoked their cigarettes, shifted uncomfortably in their suits and talked of the animals they had shot over the weekend or how Mississippi State looked for the fall season or the price of cotton.

But back in the sanctuary, the women leaned excitedly over the pews, their amazing hats touching in animated conversation. And the powder and perfume! A summer-time’s worth of flowers spiced their stories, told in urgent, rushed whispers, trying to get in the last word before the organist called us to worship.

Today, when I sit down, alone in a room to write, those are the voices that come to me full throttle. They are still the company I prefer to keep. They are generous and opinionated and mostly they understand that story is a magical thing, because it is both life-giving and life-preserving. I love these women. They are my women. It would be impolite not to listen when they speak and disrespectful not to record it. That’s the best excuse I can come up with.

Besides writing across gender, I also have been known to commit the politically incorrect crime of writing across race and sexual orientation, culture and ethnicity. But I believe when the final book is written, the one that at last gets it right, I don’t think that we will be represented by separate and distinct chapters. One for men and one for women and one for gays and one for blacks. Instead I’m beginning to get the idea that all of us will inhabit every word together.

Until then, when people ask me if I have the right to cross the race line or gender line or the sexual orientation line or the regional line, my reply will be, “Let’s don’t talk about if I have the right. Instead, let’s talk about if I got it right.”

Then we can begin a truly great and necessary conversation.