Dorothy Allison
Appearances
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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?
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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...
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
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.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
It was only when I... began to really deal with the problems in my own life that had resulted as being, that getting out of being the victim and into being a survivor was when I started to get angry. And it was nightmarish to be angry at her that way.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
There I met the people I had always read about, girls whose fathers loved them innocently, boys who drove cars they had not stolen, whole armies of the middle and upper classes I had not truly believed to be real, the children to whom I could not help but compare myself.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that had consumed me. And like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I began to court it, cowardly, traditionally, that is, in the tradition of all those who had gone before me, through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people's violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
It's like math. It's like one and one. You take a child and rob that child of all self-esteem, you will get an adult that has no sense of their own worth. Wow. I spent a good portion of my late teens and early 20s trying to find a way to die without having to actually take the responsibility to kill myself. It's a direct result. I've seen it in so many other people.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I've seen it in some of my younger relatives. It's just, it's a devastating impact. The hard thing is to change it, to crawl out of that black depression and begin to think of yourself as a human being like other human beings instead of a monster. What helped you do that? I'll tell you the truth. I think it was feminism. It's...
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I began to believe that there was an explanation for what had happened to me. And I came to it largely through a political understanding. I went away to college and somebody talked to me about Marx and showed me, you should be a communist. They said you're working class. Well, I'm not much good at that because communists need to do what they're told. But I started reading and trying to study.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
Why is it that these things happen and why is it that everybody especially believe that incest and violence happens to poor and working class kids? And I lucked into a study group, a feminist study group, and all of a sudden it was bigger. It wasn't just that we were poor.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
It was because I was a girl child and because girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back. And that began to let me be angry. It began to let me believe that I wasn't this monster that deserved what had happened to her, but somebody who had fallen under somebody else's madness.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
Oh, I did something. I did a number of things nobody else in my family had done before. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school, the first person to go to college. There have been two since. And I have come of an enormous family. It's just that both of my sisters dropped out of high school in the 9th and 10th grade.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
It's just not something that we were given the idea that we could do. But a lot of it had to do with my mother. My mother believed that I was this incredibly special person, that I was... Brilliant. She thought that I was just amazing. So when I was five or six years old, she started getting me books, and she started saving money to send me to school. She would put quarters in a tip jar.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
She did it my entire childhood. The point I went to college, she had almost $200, and she'd been saving for more than 10 years.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
It wasn't exactly a life in which you could keep money. But if you make that decision with my mother's encouragement, believing that I was different, a lot of other things come along. The fact that I was so bright and won so many prizes and awards and things drove me away from my family. I didn't have any choice about leaving. I didn't know how to talk to them after a while.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
The hard part was going back. Right.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I think I was about 11. And I wasn't entirely sure all of what it meant. Yeah. I just knew that I didn't have any of the same desires that everybody else around me. I wasn't much interested in boys or the whole cycle that you get into of getting boyfriends and doing that whole thing. But I was madly, passionately in love with a little girl down the street.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
And I was always in love with a little girl down the street, no matter what little girl it was or where we were. I don't think there was a day in my adolescence that I was not madly in love with somebody, and she was always female.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
Yeah, right. I began to think or worry that people would think that I loved girls because my stepfather had raped me. It was one of the...
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
Yeah, almost everyone that I've ever talked to says, well, that's it, that's why. But I don't believe it. I believe that my lesbianism has been a source of energy and power in my life. It's almost as if, oh, you must hate men because he did these terrible things to you. That's why you love women. But I don't think of it that way. I don't love women because I hate men.
Fresh Air
Kerri Russell On 'The Diplomat'/ Remembering Dorothy Allison
I don't even particularly hate men. I happen to love women. And lust is a little bit more basic than running away, you know?