section>
ALSO BY SUSAN STRAIGHT
Between Heaven and Here
Take One Candle Light a Room
A Million Nightingales
Highwire Moon
The Gettin Place
Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights
I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
Aquaboogie
The Friskative Dog (for children)
Bear E. Bear (for children)
Copyright © 2019 by Susan Straight
First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
Some of these chapters have appeared, in different form, in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Oxford American, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Best American Essays 2010, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Linda Hogan for permission to reprint a portion of her poem Walking.
Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are provided courtesy of the author.
Photograph on title page: Rosie Morris and Alberta Sims
ISBN: 978-1-948226-22-6
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965034
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For General and Alberta Sims,
and John and Gabrielle Watson
Author’s Note
Memory is a sixth sense, or seventh—and so belongs in specific truth to the people who told me these stories over a span of fifty years. I’ve written them here as they were given to us—people whose lives were not documented by history but by their own persistence in retelling all of us, again and again, how we came to be.
For the six generations of women in this book:
“Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on.”
— JAMES BALDWIN
Contents
1 Little House in the Thistles
Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876
Ruby Triboulet, Colorado Prairie, 1921
Rosa Leu, Aeschlen, Switzerland, 1944
Riverside, California, March 1974
7 Olympia—One Can Could Get You Pregnant
Riverside, California, June 1974
Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1915
9 Driveway #1—The First Love Letter
Riverside, California, May 1976
