Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but you realize you never needed anything in it anyway.

“People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.”

But there was no God, Earle told me, no God and no hope in churches. People were better off learning to rely on themselves and each other, instead of running around praying for what they weren’t going to get.

could not have explained, but it was not actually baptism I wanted, or welcome to the congregation, or even the breathless concentration of the preacher. It was that moment of sitting on the line between salvation and damnation with the preacher and the old women pulling bodily at my poor darkened soul. I wanted that moment to go on forever,

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

Whatever magic Jesus’ grace promised, I didn’t feel it.

I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication.