false 25354 0452287057 9780452287051 5414 524 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167685113m/25354.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25354.Bastard_Out_of_Carolina 5599 Dorothy Allison 10905 960 5 6 false Thu Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2000 Mon Nov 26 19:00:18 -0800 2007 Mon Nov 26 20:03:48 -0800 2007 “Bone” wasn't just an accident, she was born by one, delivered after her 15-year-old unmarried Mama-to-be Anney was thrown through the windshield of Bone’s drunk Uncle Travis’s Chevy while sleeping in the back seat. “Mama” survived with hardly a scratch, but was unconscious just long enough for her sister Ruth to decide her own name would fit the newborn child, with her mother’s coming in a close second. Ruth Anne Boatwright. And just long enough for Aunt Ruth and Granny to fill in two different names on Bone’s birth certificate for the father, and get the word ILLEGITIMATE stamped in big red ink letters on it. And it’s the shame of this word, and its ultimate erasure, that drives Mama in Dorothy Allison’s home-grown Bastard Out of Carolina, a shame that is only superficially lifted after the courthouse with the records burns down.
Of course, it wasn’t Ruth or Granny or Mama who messed up. It was what they inherited from the Boatwright men, whose wallets held "little faded pictures of pretty women who were not their wives.” Men who weren’t men unless they’d spent some time in jail. Men who “looked young,” while the women “seemed old, worn down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up” after them. Men rewarded, Annie learned quickly, while the good ones were punished. Like Lyle Parsons, Anney’s first husband. Another body ripped from her own by a car accident. “Now you look like a Boatwright,” Aunt Ruth says at his funeral. “You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’ll look till you die.”
Like Mama, Bone was born a Boatwright. Born to be abused by men. She'd wish she'd been “born a boy” and do things Boatwright men would do: breaking and taking things that weren’t theirs to break and take. More than from anyone, she learned this from Glen Waddell, the next man her Mama met and married. Glen Waddell aspired to be a Boatwright man. Breaking and taking. Like at the hospital, while his wife is delivering their dead baby upstairs and Bone’s Baby sister slept in the back seat. Vandalizing little Bone’s virginity. “He pushed my skirt to the side and slid his left hand down between my legs, up against my cotton panties. He began to rock me…”
Allison details the torture Bone suffers from Glen, foreshadowing her future with menacing metaphors and sinister similes she sees. “The spring Mama married Glen Waddell, there were thunderstorms every afternoon and rolling clouds that hung around the foothills...The moon came up with a ghostly halo almost every night…” And when Bone finds a photo album, she tells us, “Beside Mama…was [Glen] half in shadow…not one clear line of who he really was behind those eyes.” Conveniently, Glen moves his family to a secluded house "near the railroad tracks…” where Bone’s journey takes its most terrible turn.
“You let your mama know you are happy so she can heal her heart,” her Aunt Raylene tells Bone after the baby’s death, not knowing she is sealing the little girl into a world of silence. But even after her aunt and mother uncover the truth of the terrible abuse, only more violence and denial are born, and Bone—true to her name—goes further into herself, repressing a rage that is as hidden as Daddy Glen’s is not, and developing an ironic independence from the Boatwright family, which seems to be finally sinking under the weight of its years of dysfunction. But the reader is left wondering just how high on the mast Bone has managed to climb as the waters swirl below her, and if having to look down at her own mother’s abandonment of her with Glen will not predict her own ultimate demise, or whether Aunt Raylene, Mama’s spinster (read lesbian) sister, will arrive in enough time and with enough room in the lifeboat to save her niece.







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