Disappearing Southern Women

As I listened to Rick Bragg's presentation last week at the Arkansas Literary Festival, he gave a quote by William Faulkner that I have not heard before then. It basically went like this: "Women disappear from Southern towns like beads off a broken strand of pearls." The quote was startling and immediately made me analyze the reasons why this statement could possibly be true. By the next morning at the Literary Festival, as I attended South Carolina writer Dorothy Allison's question and answer session, I realized I had known the answer all along.

As for me, I left my home state of Mississippi the week after I graduated from high school. It was a planned move a long while in coming since I had made the decision at age fifteen. My family, unlike that of Dorothy Allison, did not include numerous cousins and siblings who were subject to drug addiction, early deaths from reckless driving, accidental drownings, and early pregnancies. I had a sister only, and my mother had been an only child. The element that does bind me to Allison's story is that we were both victims of sexual abuse at an early age, by a stepfather for her and a step great grandfather for me. One of my new friends recently told me her abuser was a surrogate uncle.

As children we are, of course, helpless to change our situations because someone has to take care of us in our early years. We become our own advocates, however, as we approach the magical age of eighteen and the possibility of our independence at last. The road for Allison, for Bragg (who suffered much in the hands of an alcoholic father), for me, and for many other Southerners can be a torturous one as we move from the dysfunction of our families to mental and emotional recovery. We cannot do this by staying in the South.

We simply feel we must leave the scene of the crimes committed against us in order to heal. Often, ironically, we choose--after a number of years away--to return to our home states. Perhaps through our writing and speaking of childhood horrors others might be saved from such a fate. We can only hope that to be true.