Trespasses

by Johnson, Lacy M.

• ISBN13: 9781609380786
• ISBN10: 1609380789
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-15
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoirrecounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can't escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study. As she dismantles the complex history of a forgotten place while fighting to keep its people whole, Johnson reflects on a place that outsiders can cross into or pass through, but may never fully know. From formal and informal research methods, Johnson has produced an innovative collection of prose poems and essays that together create an exciting work of contemporary nonfiction. Examining region through the lenses of memory (experience), history (memory made public), and theory (experience abstracted), Trespassesis a deeply intelligent work, at the center of which is the author, always feeling as if she doesn't belong but not sure where she else she should be. In this profound work, Johnson drifts gracefully back and forth between timelines and voices in a way that illustrates how her present is connected to the many pasts she chronicles.

Excerpts

a slur

that no one ever says out loud. Not to me anyway. Instead:one of those. One of ours withone of them. They can’t believe it. Degenerate, they mean. Filthy. Poor. Disrespectful. Which describes no one I know. The girl in my English class wears her hair in tight, neat braids, raises her hand and always gives the right answer.Such supine poverty exists there. Her skin is smooth and smells like lavender. My mother says her family took out a second mortgage on their house.The other side of the tracks.I should know better than to be her friend. My father tries to explain:I’d shake one’s hand. I’d even take blood from one.He says this slowly, carefully, his eyes unblinking and intent, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, his feet planted firmly on the floor.I just don’t want one marrying my daughter. Loud-mouthed, he means. Godless. Promiscuous. Illegitimate. Leech. But he doesn’t say it, not to me. Failure. Wretched. Danger. Scourge. Instead, my mother says,Disowned.Disappointment. Disaster.Low-class, she means. Vulgar. Ignorant.Embarrassing, she says in the kitchen, slamming cabinet doors, opening the refrigerator, rooting for nothing in particular.Seriously, she says, turning on the faucet, her palms braced against either side of the sink.What will everyone say? What will everyone think?]