Post #98 – Memoir Writing – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Note from Women’s Memoirs: At the end of Suzanne Sherman’s insightful article, she tells you how you can learn about being included in one of her upcoming books. So after you read about her soon-to-be-released book, consider your stories that might be appropriate for her next collective memoir.
100 Years in the Life of an American Girl — Part II
Writing the stories of our lives helps us understand; hearing the stories of other lives enriches that understanding.
I was born in 1959, which means I’m a child of the sixties. We all know about that tumultuous decade, the great cultural revolution it was and the ways it changed American life forever. But as a child, the tumult was everyday to me; it was simply how life was. I could see it was a transitional time, as Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches and violent racial clashes overtook the news media. I heard about the KKK, but it never touched my life in West Los Angeles.
Interviewing women and girls to collect stories for my book about a century of girlhood (100 Years in the Life of an American Girl: True Stories 1910 – 2010), I learned so much about my world. Racially, American culture has proven more of a lumpy soup than a melting pot. Those truths show up in many of the girls’ stories, some from places I never would have guessed.
Pop culture highlights from each decade open the ten decade-chapters, but the stories that fill each chapter are the voices of the girls themselves. It’s not academic: I make no commentary and draw no conclusions. It’s for you, the reader, to see for yourself how life was and how it is, through the eyes of people rarely heard from and who are paying close attention to a world so new to them.
And what a world it is.
In the early 1920s Charlotte’s parents escaped Poland after decades of slaughter of Jews in pogroms. They settled in Indiana, opened a pharmacy, and had two daughters only to learn the local KKK was large and growing and their lives were still in danger, even in “the land of the free.”
Belva Carole lived in Savannah, Georgia in the 1950s, when segregation was the way of life. Water fountains, bathrooms, and waiting rooms at doctor’s offices were separate for “coloreds” and whites. “Coloreds” could only sit in the balcony at movie theaters, and neighborhoods and schools were separate. Classism was alive and well, too, in the Deep South. Her father was a gas pump repairman for Colonial Oil and at his company picnics “the bosses didn’t mix with laborers.”
Little Rock, Arkansas made the news when integrated schools became law in the 1960s, and at 12, Johnny moved from a part of town where “the whole neighborhood was like one big nurturing family” to North Little Rock and had to ride a bus to a school where she knew no one wanted her — not the kids, and not the teachers. For years, her father had driven her to school and waited in the car with her for school to open because the KKK was around and it wasn’t safe to be out. Somehow, bussing was worse.
Terri Ann was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese mother and an American GI, and she fled with her family to her father’s home in rural Georgia when Saigon fell in 1975. She was 6 years old. Rural Georgia wasn’t very welcoming to an Asian girl, and she learned about self-esteem and the power of love.
Jennifer was a young girl in that same decade in Molokai’i, Hawaii, the only white girl in a town of mostly Filipino pineapple plantation workers and native Hawaiians. Blonde and freckle-faced, she was never chosen to be a princess at the annual May Day festival, but in ways, she understood why.
Amy lived in the Bronx with a father who grew up in a tin hut in the mountains of Hong Kong and a mother who escaped Communist China as a child. Amy’s story of life in the 1980s as a Chinese American includes desperately wanting a Cabbage Patch Kid and trying to get her mother to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal instead of soy sauce chicken, cellophane noodles with mushrooms, and sticky rice.
Aalaa had a big surprise on September 11, 2001: her private Islamic school in Ann Arbor, Michigan was under threat by other Americans, and the animosity that suddenly came her way emboldened her as an 11-year-old who was born in Oregon and wore the usual shorts and tank tops at home after school. She started wearing the traditional head scarf, the hijab, to claim her background with pride.
Connectedness shows through this world of differences as the girls tell their stories, and the ways of play — from Kewpie dolls to WebKinz — puts a finger on the pulse of history as it’s being made.
Suzanne Sherman is an editor, memoir teacher, writing coach and blogger. She’s also a writing and publishing consultant who has helped put many wonderful books into print.
Suzanne’s own book, 100 Years in the Life of an American Girl: True Stories 1910 – 2010, will be published in 2013 and will feature amazing stories of girlhood from around the country in every decade of 100 years.
Visit her website at suzannesherman.com to sign up for her free newsletter and Facebook.com/100yearsinthelife for “sneak peeks” from each decade and updates on publication.
In May, Facebook page followers and newsletter subscribers (www.suzannesherman.com) are eligible for a drawing for free books. You’ll also be the first to get submission details for the next two books in the 100 Years in the Life series: “Coming of Age Stories” and “100 Years in the Life of a Woman.”
