From
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Shortly after Williams's father ran off with another
woman, carbon monoxide killed her mother in a Denver rooming house.
Williams, born in the early 1950s, was only four, so her Aunt Daisy
took her in. Many readers have a Daisy in the family. She reminds
you to "urinate or move your bowels" before leaving home,
and freely discusses buying Kotex or other intimate matters, pretending
she can't imagine why you're so sensitive. Beyond her eccentricities,
Daisy's attitudes on race matters are complex and often troubling;
she doesn't hesitate to call her niece the N word—in scorn,
not humor. Born into a Tennessee sharecropping family in the early
1900s, Daisy left Klan territory by marrying a 79-year-old Civil
War veteran, who took his young bride to his western Nebraska ranch.
Soon more of Daisy's family went West, but financial difficulties
reduced them all to subsistence lifestyles. Still, when Daisy was
raising Williams, she'd barter her own labor, washing floors for
school tuition, so her niece could "Do something, goddamn
it. Be somebody."
And she has—Williams, who published a portion of this book
in O Magazine, is a gifted storyteller, and her tales of Daisy
are unforgettable. Photos. (May)Look for PW's upcoming q&a
with Rita Williams.—Ed.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The
Last African-American Widow of a Union Soldier PW Talks with
Rita Williams by Bettina Berch -- Publishers
Weekly, 4/3/2006
In her first book, If the Creek Don't Rise [Reviews, Mar. 13],
Rita Williams tells tales of the subject of her memoir, her Aunt
Daisy.
You
open your memoir with Daisy saying, "Hush up. Hold
your mud," but then you go right ahead and tell all. You
never worried she'd be mad at you for writing this book?
Not
only would she be mad, she probably would have tried to kill
me! But you know what, I figure at the end of this, I'm gonna
be dead anyway. What's important is what's left behind, and
this record needs to be there when I'm long gone.
Daisy
believed her harshness—and her harsh language—
would toughen you up. Did it? Did you hate her, as you sometimes
say?
Absolutely—because
I wanted to be like the other kids. I wanted to go skiing.
I wanted a cardigan set. This whole business of making me strong—in
certain ways it did, and in other ways I'm deeply wounded.
There's a problem with beatin' on kids to toughen them up.
Sometimes they get hurt.
As
we get older, we often find ourselves becoming the person who
raised us. Do you see yourself becoming like your Aunt Daisy?
Oh,
yeah, I really do. I know that I am very grounded in the earth.
I'm very grounded in language. I remember one day when my aunt
and I were standing at the edge of the creek and we looked
down, and there were these new baby trout, and Daisy looked
at them with such tenderness and said, "Aw, ain't they
sweet"—who thinks of fish as sweet?
Why
did she enjoy fishing so much?
Remember,
Daisy starved as a child, so just having enough protein was
a big deal, connected to absolute survival. It's like saying—"I
got my supper and I didn't have to ask anyone for it."
I feel like she wanted to be free of that welfare thing that
so many of us got mired in, not having the skills to make our
own way. Being a real hunter and being able to catch her own
supper and her own breakfast, that was a big deal. Oh, Daisy
was big on food. Growing it, processing it—that entire
cycle represented a whole level of freedom we don't appreciate
today when we run down to the Safeway and ask for trout with
the heads chopped off and the guts gone.
What
are you planning on doing, after the book's out and everyone's
finished celebrating?
Well...
I think I'm going to plant some tomatoes.
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