, by Pat Conroy.
"... Even her dreams smell like death to me. ...""... In Colleton, everyone expects you to be a certain way and the whole town makes sure that no one deviates very far from that central idea. The girls are all pretty and perky and the boys all kick ass. No, I'm sick of hiding what I really am, what I feel inside. I'm going to New York where I don't have to be afraid to find out everything there is to know about myself. ..."
"... I want to be in a place where if I go crazy for a while it will pass unnoticed. This town has driven me nuts by the sheer effort it's taken to pretend I'm just like everyone else. I've always know I was different. I was born in the South yet I've never been southern a single day in my life. This thing has almost killed me, ... I've been sick, crazy-sick since I was a little girl. ... It's been a terrible strain to get this far."
I was not quite ready to abandon the only life I have ever known or was meant to know up to this time. There was no corrective for growing up and the terror of departure was upon me, insinuating itself in the very rhythms of my tenuous gestures of farewell. I was trying to form the secret words that my heart was screaming out with an inarticulate and soundless passion. An eighteen-year banquet of light and grief was coming to an end and I couldn't stand it and I couldn't tell them what I felt. A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in the rainwater.
My humiliation and powerlessness now complete, I felt a quiet shift in my bloodstream as the man groaned and thrust deep inside me. He did not take notice of that subtle moment when a murderous rage shivered through me.
... and the radio played on without the slightest trace of pity.
In our sleep they would rise from the dust of our terror and rape us a thousand times again. In immortal grandeur they would reassemble their torn bodies and burst into our rooms like evil khans, marauders, and conquerors, and we, again, would smell their breath in ours and feel our clothes ripped away from our bodies. Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; its afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams. Throughout our lives these three dead and slaughtered men would teach us over and over of the abidingness, the terrible constancy, that accompanies a wound to the spirit. Though our bodies would heal, our souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation. Violence sends deep roots into the heart; it has no seasons; it is always ripe, evergreen.
I could feel his sperm leaking out of me. He had told me something true before he died; something in me would always belong to him. He had mortgaged a portion of my boyhood, had stolen my pure sanction of a world administered by a God who loved me and who had created heaven and earth as an act of divine and scrupulous joy. Randy Thompson had defiled my image of the universe, had instructed me exceedingly well in the vanity of holding fast to faith in Eden.
"... you don't just walk away from a day like this without paying a price. Two hours ago I had a guy humping me, Luke, while he stuck a knife to my throat. I thought I was going to die. I thought he was going to butcher me like a hog in the living room. He kissed me, Luke. Then he was planning to kill me. Can you imagine killing someone you've just kissed?"
Savannah stayed in the shower for over an hour, washing herself obsessively, cleaning the stranger out of her.
I do not think the rape affected me as profoundly as my adherence to those laws of concealment and secrecy ...
Three days later, she cut her wrists for the first time.
My mother had raised a daughter who could be silent, but could not lie.
