By: Ruth
Write what you know. Every writer has heard this and quite possibly heeded it as good, sensible advice. Seems obvious, too, what could be easier? Course, it also seems boring. Most of us write to get away from who we are, our status quo, our situation. Who hasn’t said, I don’t particularly like what I know. Let me do something else.
But say you have heeded the advice and given it a twist, looked deeper and at a slant, and you’re about to turn up something you know but at a more exotic, more esoteric, more real level. You’re turning up something lively, charming, spicy, fascinating, wicked, or profound, and possibly not thought by you before because it is an exploration below the surface. But it is something only you could think of, because it is authentic, it is you.
So perhaps you’re in a writing class and the teacher assigns “write something you know.” You choose to write a story based on fact (a scene based on facts and characters from your childhood) but with elements of fiction in it, giving you wonderful latitude. Hm, not sure where this is coming from. Could be it doesn’t matter. Some say that memory and imagination are the same thing. Suddenly writing what you know looks like fun.
Call it what you will. Creative nonfiction or fictionalized memoir. Don’t be too concerned about genre. Just write.
So this is what I did.
When I was a child of about 9 or 10 in small town Kentucky, I would go every week down the hill to Lizzie Birch’s house to sell her a dozen eggs. We kept chickens for eggs for our own use and when they were too old to lay, we ate them fried for Sunday dinner. The extra eggs we sold to the neighbors for fifty cents a dozen.
The fascinating thing about Lizzie was she was black, at that time called “colored.” Most of the black people in town lived in the “Bottom”, an area in a valley on the edge of town. But Lizzie lived just under the hill, down a gravel side road from us. In the segregated world where I lived, I only saw the black people who came to me, like Viola, who came to our house to mop the floor and do the wash on Fridays, or Flora who came to my school to clean the floors and the bathrooms. But Lizzie was different. I got to go to her house, talk to her sitting at her kitchen table, see her sink and shelves and cupboards and kitchen curtains, smell what she was cooking, be in her world, something I thought was very exotic.
Accompanied by my brother or sister, I knocked on her back door, looked shyly through the window, heard her say, “Well, look who it is. Come on in,” went in and sat the carton of eggs on her red-checked vinyl tablecloth. Before she paid us the fifty cents, she offered us a piece of candy from a big bellied, close-mouthed jar on the table. “Help youself to a peppamin?” came the invitation, as soft and sweet as the candy itself.
Who could resist a piece of peppermint, filling the air with nose tingling scent and then sharply bitter and sweet in the mouth? So you put your hand in the jar and grabbed a chalky, striped square, pulled it out, and popped it in your mouth. Delicious.
Every one of us children had, at some time, succumbed to the temptation of wrapping our fist around more than one piece and trying to pull ourselves out a little extra. But with a fist full of more than one piece, you couldn’t get your hand out. As you struggled to wriggle an extra piece out, soft hand adjusting and slamming against unyielding glass mouth, you got more annoyed and stupid all the time. Finally you realized you had to take just one piece of candy, as you were invited to do. You let go of one and quickly retrieved the other. Into the mouth it went, not quite so sweet as you remembered. Lizzie watched you the whole time, chuckling softly.
After you had your candy, Lizzie would draw fifty cents out of a soft leather coin purse with wrinkles around the clasp like the wrinkles around her mouth and put the coins in your palm. The inside of her hand was as pink as mine while her body was mahogany brown like the antique dresser in Mama’s bedroom.
Taking eggs to Lizzie was like a fairy tale, going into a foreign world, seeking your fortune, with a test of honor, a mistake of hubris and redemption. Learning a lesson at the hands of a wise, old seer, primarily benevolent, but with a touch of dark magic.
So how to work Lizzie into a story, who to make the quester and what lesson to learn? Of course, I know, I’ll use my older sister, beautiful, haughty, superior to everyone and everything, especially something as mundane as carrying eggs down to Lizzie for a small amount of money. My sister was so sure she was special, she was like someone out of another fairy tale—the wicked sister.
So in my story I had my mother make my sister, M.A., accompany me to Lizzie’s one day, against her will, because Mama always wanted us to go down in two’s and no one else was available and M.A. had always resisted going before.
Well, long story short, M.A. grabs the fistful of peppermints, gets her hand stuck, and instead of admitting her mistake and adjusting, she throws a fit, insults Lizzie, foolishly shakes her hand in the jar until she releases all the candy and gets nothing but her hand back. Lizzie, in blank-faced shock, gives her the fifty cents and M.A. runs back up the hill to Mama, with me following at a short distance. She tells Mama that Lizzie forgot to give her the money and she evil eyes me to not dare dispute her story. She assumes Mama will take her word over Lizzie’s, because Lizzie is black. The younger sister character is horrified at this injustice but afraid of opposing her sister.
But Mama knows M.A.’s lie can’t be true. She knows Lizzie well enough to know that she would never fail to hold up her end of a deal. However, Mama is afraid of M.A., who is so haughty and spiteful that Mama won’t confront her. Instead, she forgets to give M.A. her allowance that month, and when M.A. demands her money, Mama says, “OK, but you need to do extra work to get your allowance this month. Clean the bathroom and I’ll give you your money.” She glares at her intensely when she delivers the message and M.A. knows better than to challenge her.
So the moral universe is reestablished, although without a big moral reckoning scene. A race tale of a certain time and place is told. Family is used as fodder.
I turn the story into the teacher, who likes it very much. Praises it for the features I admire about my own story—characterization, folk tale elements, convoluted moral universe. Then, with a wise look on her face, she says, “It’s always tempting to get even toward family members by using them in a story.”
I stare at her in confusion, a little embarrassed but not sure why. She can tell I don’t like my sister, can tell that I need to retaliate toward her for past pain and suffering and that I think I’m so clever by using the retaliation in my beautiful story. She can see something I wasn’t even aware of until she points it out to me. I feel caught.
Later, I try to decide. Should I care that my sibling strife is so obvious? Should I try to hide it somehow? Should I take my sister as the evil, foolish, all-to-human antagonist out of the story? Or is it still a good plot twist even if the back story screams “look at me and be on my side”? I don’t know the answer and would love to know others’ thoughts on the question.