Audrey D. Thompson

Writing Against the Grain

“Around the preposition ‘at’ on Grammar Street,” that’s what my godmother would say whenever I’d ask a question and put “at” at the end – Where do you live at? Where should I put my bags at? Her refrain, while funny to me as a kid, was a constant reminder of how my own words can unwittingly betray me. It’s ironic that I’ve become a writer, making my living by “properly” putting words together and teaching others to do the same. Although, being trained in rhetoric, with a repertoire of skills to navigate just about any given rhetorical situation, I am still trying to find my way around those prepositions and still struggling to ask the right questions the right way. There’s much more at stake now on Grammar Street, and yet the more I understand the rules of grammar the more necessary it is to break them.  

It would take years of studying African American history and learning about the “politics of respectability” to understand why it was so important to my godmother that I learn where to place prepositions in a sentence. Misplacing the preposition “at” could not only signify that I was stupid or poorly educated, but, even worse, unworthy of respect. My grammatical errors were political and, much to my godmother’s chagrin, could be used (as they so often have been in the past) to justify relegating all blacks to an inferior status. Over the years, my laughter at her rejoinder turned to shame and then into a paralyzing fear of the thought that others might suffer because I was dumb. Ever since, I’ve thought that the only remedy against this kind of socio-political muteness was to master the mechanics of the English language – to learn all the comma rules, proper capitalization, subject-verb agreement, how to avoid split infinitives, correct dangling modifiers, etc. I learned enough “to pass,” and, in the same way that blacks who could pass as white gained access to certain sectors of American society denied to those who couldn’t, my learning to write and speak well opened many doors. I had become respectable but didn’t recognize my own voice.

Not until I read the writing of another Audrey was I able to catch a glimpse of something that sounded like the fearless, inquisitive girl I once knew myself to be. In her words: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The subversion expressed in this sentiment is encapsulated by Audre Lorde’s intentional misspelling our old English first name. For me, dropping the letter -y begged the homonymic question: Why? Why had I invested so much time and energy into mastering the tools of the English language, only to lose the confidence to use them to make room for my own voice? With Lorde and my other literary mentors, I am constantly reminded that such willful resistance to behaving properly, such disregard for putting things in their proper place is characteristic of little black girls. Alice Walker calls it acting “womanish” and rebukes our being miseducated to deem this behavior a sign of disrespect. bell hooks, who also intentionally used her name to dismantle the hold of the master’s language on her voice, inspired me to think of transgression as a practice of freedom.

Whether or not their acts of defiance are enough to dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and bell hooks represent the writer’s ability to imagine other ways of being when Grammar Street leads to a dead end or writer’s block. Their “alternative routes” around notions that grammatical correctness can signify anything about a person’s inherent worth are the signposts I’ve used to find my way home. Yet, in following their directions, I have also discovered that writing against the grain comes at a cost. For me, this has meant fewer publications and more than a few unpublished masterpieces, either because I intentionally resist writing about subjects that are more likely to get published, or I actively pursue them in transgressive ways that are less likely to be accepted. If, however, writing is to serve a higher purpose that lifts every voice (including mine), then I must be willing to pay the price and take the courage to write freely so that whoever reads me hears “me” and can see exactly where I’m at.