Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes I think that Dr. Jordan is a little off in the head. But I would rather talk with him about potatoes, if that is what he fancies, than not talk to him at all.

I did not give him a straight answer, because saying what you really want out loud brings bad luck, and then the good thing will never happen. It might not happen anyway, but just to make sure, you should be careful about saying what you want or even wanting anything, as you may be punished for it. This is what happened to Mary Whitney.

He says, Is it not wonderful that such a thing grows under the ground, you might say it is growing in its sleep, out of sight in the darkness, hidden from view. Well, I don’t know where he expects a potato to grow, I have never seen them dangling about on the bushes.

any more,

Anymore

Behind me I could hear the music of a flute, and this made me very nervous.

I say, I can’t remember, Sir. I can’t remember what I dreamt last night. It was something confusing. And he writes that down. I have little enough of my own, no belongings, no possessions, no privacy to speak of, and I need to keep something for myself; and in any case, what use would he have for my dreams, after all?

That is not really my Confession, I say, it was only what the lawyer told me to say, and things made up by the men from the newspapers, you might as well believe the rubbishy broadsheet they were peddling about, as that.

Mary Whitney was once a particular friend of mine. She was dead by that time, Sir, and I did not think she would mind it if I used her name. She sometimes lent me her clothing, too.

It doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins. Perhaps mine began when I was born, for as they say, Sir, you cannot choose your own parents, and of my own free will I would not have chosen the ones God gave me.

I did indeed come from the North of Ireland;

My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.

She’d begun life under Aunt Pauline’s thumb and continued the same way, only my father’s thumb was added to it. Aunt Pauline was always telling her to stand up to my father, and my father would tell her to stand up to Aunt Pauline, and between the two of them they squashed her flat.

I wanted her to be stronger, so I would not have to be so strong myself.

As for my father, he was not even Irish. He was an Englishman from the north of it, and why he had come to Ireland was never clear, as most who were incl...

at the time they married, he had money in his pocket, as well as good prospects, for he was indeed a stone-mason,

Aunt Pauline said my mother would not have married him unless she’d had to, and it was covered up, although there was talk of my eldest sister Martha being very large for a seventh-month child;

So my mother and my father each felt trapped by the other.

Also he claimed my uncle said he’d tricked my mother into marriage so he could have a fine time, living at ease and dipping into their money from the shop; which was true in part, as they could not refuse him because of my mother and the children.

One thing he said was that his children were too many in number, and would have been even for a richer man. As they wrote in the papers, there ended by being nine of us, nine living that is. They did not put in the dead ones, which were three, not counting the baby that was lost before being born, and never had a name.

She did so long to be decent again, and for us to be decent as well. But it is very hard, Sir, to be decent, without proper clothes.

When I reached the age of nine, my older sister Martha left to go into service, and so all the work that Martha used to do around the house was now on me; and then two years after that, my brother Robert went to sea on a merchant ship, and was never heard from again;

Then there were five little ones and myself remaining at home, with another on the way.

They also call it an unhappy condition, and that is closer to the truth—an unhappy condition followed by a happy event, although the event is by no means always happy.

Our father by this time was fed up with it. He would say, What are you bringing another brat into this world for, haven’t you had enough of that by now, but no you can’t stop, another mouth to feed, as if he himself had nothing to do with it at all.

Our father used to go away, even as far as Belfast, to work for the builders that had hired him; and then when the job was over he would come home for a few days, and then be out seeking another piece of work. When he was home he would go to the tavern, to get away from the squalling.

But most of the looking about he did was at the bottom of a glass, and there were always those willing to help him look; but when he was drunk he would become angry and begin cursing the Irish,

And so he would drink by himself, more and more, and as the drink got stronger the nights got longer, and he began to miss jobs of work in the daytime. And so he got a reputation for not being reliable, and the jobs of work became few and far between.

the fishermen would sometimes give us a fish, a nice herring or a mackerel, and any sort of food was badly needed at home; sometimes we did not know what we were going to eat from one day to the next. We were forbidden by our mother to beg, and we would not, or not in so many words; but five ragged little children with hungry eyes is a hard sight to resist,

I will confess to having a wicked thought, when I had the young ones all lined up on the dock, with their little bare legs dangling down. I thought, I might just push one or two of them over, and then there would not be so many to feed, nor so many clothes to wash. For by this time I was the one who had to do most of the washing. But it was only a thought, put into my head by the Devil, no doubt. Or more likely by my father, for at that age I was still trying to please him.

For a time there was money, but things did not improve, and words came to blows, although my poor mother did little enough to provoke them;

Uncle Roy, who was a very plain-spoken man, said he didn’t know a man who could turn good money into horse piss faster than my father could.

By now it was no longer the little money our father brought into the house that was keeping us alive. Instead it was my mother and her shirt sewing, at which I helped her, and my younger sister Katey too;

although we had our little potato patch and our own cabbages, it was by no means enough; and she would bring leftover pieces of cloth from the shop, out of which our own clothes were made, such as they were.

Our father was long since past asking where such things came from. In those days, Sir, it was a matter of pride for a man to support his own family, whatever he might think of that family itself; and my mother, although weak-spirited, was too wise a woman to tell him anything about it. And the other person who did not know as much about it as there was to know was Uncle Roy, although he must have guessed it, and seen that certain items vanished from his own house, only to reappear in ours. But my Aunt Pauline was a strong-minded woman.

Uncle Roy said to Aunt Pauline that there had to be a change, as he could not go on supporting our family now, with his own to think of,

Uncle Roy said who ever said anything about starving, what he had in mind was emigration. Many were doing it, and there was free land to be had in the Canadas, and what my father needed was to wipe the slate clean. Stone-masons were in great demand over there because of all the building and works that were going forward,

Aunt Pauline said that was all very well, but who would pay for the passages? And Uncle Roy said he had some put by and would reach very deep into his pocket, and it would be enough to pay not only for our passages but for the food we would need on the journey;

my father was in a hurry to get himself out of the way. So he put a good front on it, and said it was a new start in life, and it was generous of my Uncle Roy, and he would regard the passage money as a loan and would pay it back as soon as he began to prosper; and Uncle Roy pretended to believe him.

As for his generosity, I suppose he thought it would be best to bite the bullet and pay out one large sum of money, rather than to be bled to death over the years penny by penny; and in his shoes I would have done the same.

Uncle Roy's mama didn't raise no fool

After all they were sisters, and had been through thick and thin, and they knew that once the ship set sail it was not likely they would ever see each other again in this life.

My Aunt Pauline brought a good linen sheet, only a little flawed, from the shop; and a thick warm shawl, as she’d heard it was cold on the other side of the ocean; and a little wicker hamper, and inside it, packed in straw, a china teapot, and two cups and saucers, with roses on them.

We slept at an inn which was so thick with fleas you would have thought it was a dog kennel;

Ew

I was told that it brought logs of wood eastward from the Canadas, and emigrants westward the other way, and both were viewed in much the same light, as cargo to be ferried.

I saw three crows sitting in a row on the crossbeam of the mast, and my mother saw them too, and she said it was bad luck, for three crows in a row meant a death.

our mother insisted on keeping Aunt Pauline’s teapot with her, as she did not want to let it out of her sight; and she tied the wicker hamper to the upright post of the bed with a piece of twine.

It was everyone together, crammed in like herrings in a box, and no windows or any way of letting in the air, except the hatchways that led down.

What a recipe for disease

What with the pitching and surging of the ship, and the creaking it made, and the sloshing of the waves, and the noise and the stink, and the rats running to and fro as bold as lords and ladies, it was like being a suffering soul in Hell.

I thought of Jonah in the belly of the whale, but at least he only had to stay there three days, and we had eight weeks of it ahead of us; and he was in the belly all by himself, and did not have to listen to the moaning and vomiting of others.

That is lucky.

The ship was after all only a sort of slum in motion, though without the gin shops; and I hear they have got better ships now.

But there is nothing like a strong bout of seasickness to remove the desire for a scrap; and those who would cheerfully have cut each other’s throats on land, were often to be seen holding each other’s heads over the scuppers, like the tenderest of mothers; and I have sometimes noted the same thing in prison, as necessity does make strange bedfellows.