Red Blood, White Myth, and Blue Dreams
I balance on a two-by-four, feathering the trigger of my staple gun with impatience. My shift ends in 15 minutes and then it’s a race to be showered, transformed, and through D.C. traffic. Sawdust and little flecks of paint, from the metal table I build roof trusses on, cover my overalls and exposed skin. My nails are manicured inside my beat-to-shit deer-hide gloves. I am the only woman out here in the yard, and I flex my fingers, swollen from hammering and gripping the staple gun all day, wondering if my rings will fit.
Probably not.
Another set of boards is tossed up to me, and I fall into the rhythm of work with one eye still on the clock.
An impossible two-and-a-half hours later, I walk into the Georgetown hotel with my raw honey-brown hair swept down my back, wearing a black ribbed dress that reaches my ankles, wrists, and neck, but is split up my leg. My work-hardened thighs are visible with each step, bare until the wool work socks I’ve tucked down into my boots. My lipstick is perfect. My skin glows under my soft makeup, the product of two layers of lotion I swathed on at 5 a.m., leading a man at work to ask me why I was sweating in the 20-degree predawn. I’m here to meet my friend and fellow author before we do an event celebrating the release of her latest New York Times bestselling book. Taking a seat at the bar, I keep my back straight, arms relaxed, aware of the glances of men and women who trickle by.
They don’t look at me because I am beautiful, but because I am caught between reality and myth, and they can sense the shimmer of edges. I envision this as a spell, cast for a changeling, and I have to wrench the terms of the spell away from sex. For some reason it wants to naturally warp that direction. As if I only know how to cast myself away from my roots in the work of the body. I am an author, I tell myself, fingering the edge of the menu, which is a romance of the mind. Not a laborer, which I was two hours ago, firmly in my body. I am not a myth, I tell myself, I am real.
I exhale and order a Miller High Life.
It’s easier, I think, to cast complex, raw truths in the light of myth. I still think of my father that way. Criminal turned Navy engineer turned Appalachian preacher, it’s easier to understand his life through the veil of the unreal. In myths, you don’t have to make sense of a man who preaches love and forgiveness and then holds you against the wall, pinned by your throat. Myth never forces you to ask questions about his story of being detained in Colombia for drug trafficking on the way back from selling pumps from Appalachia in Chile. I wear the gold chain he got my mother in South America, and a hungry magic lurks in its links.
Thinking of him in terms of myth allows me to think of the worst of my memories in the same light. Where being locked in a dog kennel outside in a winter night, without a coat, is only another Grimm tale — where I had as much chance of being rescued by a passing coyote as my sister. Maybe my sister was the coyote, slipping through the dark unseen. Fur shivering. Small white teeth gleaming in the snow-lit moonlight. See, even now, these myths weave themselves. I can barely remember now, whether it was my sister or whether it was a coyote. The truth, I think, is that I don’t remember being rescued at all.
At 18, I thought I could be a politician. I didn’t understand politics then — having grown up without cable, newspapers, internet, or even NPR. The only thing that deigned to reach us, in our isolation, was talk radio. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage were political voices with no opposition. They were simply the way the world was. The only voices we had.
No, I thought I could be a politician because I couldn’t be a prophet. And both faith and politics, I understood, were about story. To be a politician in America, I knew I had to be born blue, risen red, boots laced tight while I took the step from nothing into something. All on my own. The American dream. Of the people, but not in the people. I bathed in the shining light of myth while crushing plastic every night for 12 hours — my skin raw from the edges of my T-shirt, my hair twisted up under a hard hat, every penny I earned going toward supporting myself through college.
While I worked, I envisioned myself in sleek, designer pantsuits delivering my campaign speeches — stories about how I had done it on my own, with God’s blessing, overcome poverty (even though it was only the elite that thought I was poor), worked my way through college and law school into the embodiment of the American dream. An alarm buzzer broke my thoughts, and I rushed off to fight a ceiling-high expanse of skin-burning plastic that bloomed from a malfunctioning line and threatened to swallow all of us in one gulp.
By 30, I had accomplished every dream I’d ever cast. Not as a politician, it turns out, but as a teller of stories all the same. I was published. I lived paycheck to paycheck in a heady, debt-ridden middle-class way. I bought fruit out of season and had three children who had never even noticed the WIC signs in the grocery store. I did interviews. I had a publicist. I wore Yves Saint Laurent (secondhand, but no one knew). I slept in five-star hotels and had panic attacks in the bathroom of Nobu. I had cast the spell. I became the myth. But when I did, something happened. Something terrible.
I thought it might be me. I starved myself white-woman thin and ignored my cheating husband, talked in code about the violence of my childhood, and tried to tell the story of becoming the fulfillment of this myth in a way that made it seem dignified and worthy. I stopped drinking beer. Dressed myself in blazers. Clipped my hyperbole. Stopped saying “fuck.” My politics had genuinely changed by then, and I spoke openly about institutional racism in publishing, half because my faith propelled the justice of it and half because I felt like I could prove I didn’t carry on the ignorance of the people I came from. I even did that wrong, and I sensed it without any ability to change it.
The myth I occupied wasn’t the one I meant to cast. I tried to wrench the spell by leaning into it. In the cold, cruel light of American realities, I was a feral creature loosed in the house, titillating and exotic. A degenerated version of whiteness. A rebel child who never learned the rules. A red-blooded, earthy woman who hinted always of sex and violence. Shahrazad by way of Appalachia, winding my stories for freedom.
I was hung in the end.
Be careful you don’t believe all the stories you tell. My father told me this when he called me a liar for saying he had abused me. My soon-to-be ex-husband said something similar when arguing about the semantics of whether and how many times he cheated on me. But their knives cut truth in a way they hadn’t intended. In the height of my power casting this myth, I sat in the sea off an island in south Georgia, bitterly complaining about how I couldn’t escape the stink of blue-collar about me, how I couldn’t escape the cut of mountain in my face, how it earned me nothing, how betrayed I was, how abused I’d been, feeling fully entitled to my anger of having bitten the gold coin of the American dream and finding it to be fake. “But isn’t this white resentment?” my friend asked gently as the waves rolled over us.
The truth. Under the white-hot Southern sun, I chilled. The truth was, the only product I could ever make with this spell I’d been given was resentment. Bitterness. It wasn’t a spell that was meant to be cast. It wasn’t a story that was meant to be told. Myths aren’t supposed to be real. I’d broken the rules and cast it, believing in it, willing myself into its light.
But it was a sickly light. A hollow dream.
And it broke me.
In the end, I was forced to unravel this myth. I faced the reality of my life instead of the myth of it. I ended my marriage. I let go of my parents. I accepted my place as always outside. I couldn’t go back, but I’d never belong. The reality is, in America, I wasn’t alone in that. It was still the sickly light of the myth that wanted to make me feel special in being cast out. I wrote in my true voice, knowing it was probably too raw and violent to be published. I went back to the work I understood, in a world I understood. I found relief surrounded by the rough edges of men, with a paycheck every week and the trusses sitting on the rack each day as a product I made with my hands.
I’m famous, I joke to the men.
It’s this or the lunch shift at the strip club, I joke to my author friends.
But now, I sit at the hotel bar in Georgetown, struggling to find my footing in the place where myth meets reality. There is a price for straying too far from the life you were born into, and I still have to figure out how to pay it. After the event, we go to dinner. I am out of practice, exhausted, and as I walk through the red haze of the restaurant, I feel like I’m falling away from my edges. The world is a lurid dream, and I am consumed inside its aching bowels. This isn’t a fight for dignity or worth, it is just a fight to exist. I’m flickering. I am fading. In a few more months, when my next manuscript is rejected, my voice will fall silent.
I make it home in time to be sick — something that’s always happened after events. Just the cost of the spell, I remind myself, shaking on the bathroom floor.
My alarm goes off three hours after I fall into a restless sleep. I wake. Put on my overalls and wipe the last bit of mascara off my eyes. Lace my boots. Layer on my coats. I walk into the sharp winter air, and I am real again. This is my true form, and I am disappointed in myself for it, somehow. For all my education, for all my effort, words, publicist, and the Gucci ring in my drawer, I am the same as the men I work with. We are angry at the dream for letting us down. Angry at ourselves for believing in anything. But mostly, we are stuck. I think that’s where we were always intended to be. That this myth is told not to give us hope, but to ensure we lose it.
The edge of despair beckons me in the darkest hours before dawn. It calls of comfort and emptiness, wrapped inside the ever-tightening folds of my bitterness. But as I begin work in the dark, and the moon bathes the yard, I remember white teeth and gleaming snow and the cold clink of South American gold chains on my neck. I see the terrible history that made me, the people who loved me the best they could, the God who is nothing but a God of tensions. I sit in the ashes of my life and breathe the smoke that rises like incense. Like an offering. I’ve burnt down my world, and it waits to be remade.
Maybe it’s the everyday lacing of boots and putting on of gloves that make up the story. Maybe it’s simply the work, done all the wrong ways and never ending in recognition. The community of those the American dream lost. The community that the church left behind. Maybe instead of trying to make myself inside this broken world, I make the world around me. Maybe there is still power in the truth, even if you are never heard.
But maybe I’m just trying to recast the myth.
Red Blood, White Myth, and Blue Dreams
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