Dorothy Allison
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dorothy Allison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I didn't daydream about fire anymore. Now I imagine people watching while Daddy Glenn beat me, though only when it was not happening. When he beat me, I screamed and kicked and cried like the baby I was. But sometimes, when I was safe and alone, I would imagine the ones who watched. Someone had to watch. Some girl I admired who barely knew I existed. Some girl from church or down the street.
Or one of my cousins. Or even somebody I'd seen on TV. Sometimes a whole gang of them would have to be trapped into watching. They couldn't help me. They couldn't get away. They had to watch. In my imagination, I was proud and defiant. I'd stare back at him with my teeth set, making no sound at all, no shameful scream, no begging. And those people who watched admired me and hated him.
I pictured it that way. and I put my hands between my legs. It was scary, but it was thrilling, too. Those who watched me loved me. It was as if I was being beaten for them, and I was wonderful in their eyes.
It's curious because it's what I did as a child, and I've talked to other survivors, and it's one of the ways in which you can fight the feeling of being this contemptible being. Because basically, when you're subjected to that kind of abuse as a child, you almost always begin to feel that it's justified.
that there is really something wrong with you, that you're this terrible person that this is happening to. And the only way I ever found, really, to deal with the emotional onslaught of those feelings was to begin to feel like a martyr, this almost Joan of Arc figure in my own mind.
Oh, yes. And it's hard to explain to people on the outside of the experience, mostly because it's really hard to admit that. that you could take that experience and convert it into your own erotic charge. I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to analyze it. I simply know that it happens and it becomes a way to make it your own experience.
Absolutely. It's like the myth of rape, you know. Obviously, if you orgasm during rape, then it must not have been rape. So if a child begins to feel erotic excitement while being manipulated by an adult, does that give the adult permission to do it? It's a horrible thing to even imagine.
And you don't... Part of the reason to keep it a secret and to be quiet about that feeling is that you might give someone... any small measure of encouragement to feel they have a right to do this. They have no right ever to sexually touch a child. It's just not possible to do. There's no justification for it.
And the fact that the child might, in fact, manufacture some erotic excitement is not a justification for it. But if we pretend that it doesn't happen, then that guilt, that self-horror stays.
That I find upsetting. We don't have... Especially if you're a child. I mean, my incest started when I was five years old. I wasn't capable of making any decision about what I wanted to do. I didn't have the capacity to do that. If... When I began to feel all these funny feelings that I could not explain to myself, all I experienced was horror.
I began to think that I was the terrible person I was being told I was. And it's taken me most of my life to make the decision that that's not the case. Would you tell us the story your relatives told you about how you were born? I was born in a car accident. My mother was on the way to the airport with a bunch of my uncles and aunts, and they hit another car.
And she was in the back seat asleep, so she was thrown over the front seat, through the windshield, over the other car. She wasn't hurt too bad, except that she had a concussion and was unconscious for three days. And, of course, I was born while she was unconscious.
which meant that my grandmother and my aunts were at the hospital, and they got into an argument while talking to the clerk and didn't manage to manufacture the manufactured marriage my mother had been going to get through. So I became a certified bastard. How old was she when she gave birth to you? Fifteen. One month past her 15th birthday. She was a child. She did eventually marry, right?
My mother married three times. Well, the first marriage was annulled. But she married my stepfather when I was five and lived with him until she died.
Yes. Did she know about it? Yes and no. One of the things that's hard to explain to people is that my mother knew because there were... I told her. Actually, I didn't tell her. I told one of my cousins who told her. What's hard to explain is that she did not let herself know all of everything that was happening. She couldn't have.
And when I grew up and I would go home and talk to her, we would have these very long, slow, painful conversations. And she was enormously guilty that she had not been able to stop it. And she tried. That's one of the hard things that I try to show in the book is, like my mother, Annie in the book, tries desperately...
to prevent what she sees happening even though she doesn't see a lot of what's going on and she tries to protect her children she believes absolutely that the man she loves will is going to change that what's happening is just because he can't find a job because his father is mean to him because he's hurt and wounded that he's just she thinks of him as this little boy that she's going to mother into being a good man and she cannot believe that that's not happening
Not until I was in my 30s did I really start to get angry at her in that way. My mother... My mother loved me. My mother spent her whole life desperately trying to make my life and the lives of my sisters better. She literally worked herself to death taking care of us, trying to make some small difference.
And if you had ever had a way to meet her, you would have met someone that was just extraordinarily loving, kind. and a very large soul human being. And that's, I was madly in love with my mother. And I knew how impossible her life was. She worked as a waitress her whole life. The best job she ever had was as a cook. She was constantly sick. There was enormous bills.
She never, never got her life under control. And she always thought if she just worked a little harder, did this little thing more, it would be possible. That having her there, having her like this barrier between me and what was essentially a really cruel world, I loved her enormously. I could not possibly have been angry at her while I was at home. And for a long time after, she was my heroine.
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