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Change Me into Zeus's Daughter: A Memoir (Paperback)
by Barbara Robinette Moss
| Category:
Memoir, Female writing, American South, Grown-up story, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A remarkable story of resilience and redemption, this book is an important witness to the destructiveness of family secrets and the hope for people demanding change for themselves and their families. |
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Author: Barbara Robinette Moss
Publisher: Scribner; New Ed edition
Pub. in: July, 2001
ISBN: 0743202198
Pages: 320
Measurements: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01091
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743202190
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the most beautifully written books about growining up in the American South. Highly recommended to be read together with Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. |
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- MSL Picks -
The book is set during the late 1950s and 60s in Alabama in the towns of Eastaboga, Anniston, Birmingham and Kimberly. The book tells why Ms. Moss sought a life of art and beauty.
Her father was an alcoholic, too proud to accept charity, too violent to stay out of trouble, and too charming not to control his children's hearts. Ironically, it was he who told his children one night about Venus, the daughter of Zeus. Pointing to the star, he told them she was cherished and beautiful. Venus was "a star that encompassed everything I had been praying for. I closed my eyes and made a wish: Change me into Zeus's daughter."
Ms. Moss's mother provided an escape from the ugliness of their lives. She focused her children's attention on the liberal arts since she was an educated woman whose only fault was submissive compliance, not only to her husband, but to life's traumas.
Many chapters tell of the antics of Ms. Moss's siblings. Her stories are strictly Southern with descriptions of bright lilies, blue foothills and red clay. Describing a field of gladiolas, she says "...the slender stalks had soaked up energy from the sun all day, we could hear them grow, jubilantly crackling as they pushed toward the stars. Solar furnaces. Cosmic rockets."
When she's older, Ms. Moss suffers from perceived ugliness due to several moles and a severe overbite. Ridiculed by classmates, she saved money to have the moles removed. She also worked to pay for braces on her teeth and underwent facial surgery at the University of Alabama Hospital at Birmingham. Further, she worked to finish college, raised a son and is now an accomplished artist of oil painting and multi-media art, according to several magazine articles I've read about her life.
The book's dust jacket reflects the two-edged story. On the front is a photo of the children and their mother sitting on the steps of a ramshackle house. On the back is a painting of a pretty, delicate face -- Ms. Moss's self-portrait in yellows and reds. She is more like Venus, not only in beauty, but also in the transforming power of her starry goddess.
(From Sherry Kughn, USA)
Target readers:
A must-own that should be in the library of every woman who reads English.
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Barbara Robinette Moss was the 1996 winner of the Gold Medal for Personal Essay in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Contest. That winning essay grew into this book and serves as its first chapter. Barbara is a full-time writer and artist and lives with her husband in Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
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From Publisher
Change Me into Zeus's Daughter is a haunting and ultimately triumphant memoir about growing up poor and undaunted in the South. With an unflinching voice, Barbara Robinette Moss chronicles her family's chaotic, impoverished survival in the red-clay hills of Alabama. A wild-eyed, alcoholic father and a humble, heroic mother along with a shanty full of rambunctious brothers and sisters fill her life to the brim with stories that are gripping, tender, and funny.
Moss's early fascination with art coincides with her desire to transform her "twisted mummy face," which grew askew due to malnutrition and lack of medical care. Gazing at the stars on a clear Alabama night, she wishes to be the "goddess of beauty, much-loved daughter of Zeus." Against all odds, the image of herself surfaces at last as she learns to believe in the beauty she brings forth from inside.
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Near the Center of the Earth
Mother spooned the poisoned corn and beans into her mouth, ravenously, eyes closed, hands shaking. We, her seven children, sat around the table watching her for signs of death, our eyes leaving her only long enough to glance at the clock to see how far the hands had moved. Would she turn blue, like my oldest sister, Alice, said? Alice sat hunched next to me in the same white kitchen chair, our identical homemade cotton dresses blending into one. She shoved my shoulder with hers as if I were disturbing her concentration and stared unblinking at Mother. Each time Mother hesitated, spoon in mid-air, Alice's face clouded and she pushed against my shoulder.
"She's dying," Alice whispered, covering her mouth so Mother could not hear her. "I told you she was gonna die."
I ignored her and watched Mother. I wanted to feel the kernels of sweet yellow corn slide against my teeth. I didn't care if they were poisoned. I was so hungry my head throbbed. The clock ticked as loudly as the clattering train that passed beside our house every day, each tick echoing against the wall and bouncing into my head, making my heart beat in my temples and my eyes want to close. I forced my eyes to stay open, to watch my mother as she ate. I stared at her; the light freckles on her face smeared into a large round blur, then snapped back into focus. No one spoke or moved. My oldest brother, Stewart, sat next to me, hands in his lap clenched into tight white balls; David, his chair pushed as close to Stewart's as possible, leaned forward with his arms spread across the table, ready to catch Mother if she fell. Willie and Doris Ann also sat together, their small legs sticking straight out, dirty bare feet dangling over the edge of the chair seat, Doris Ann's arms wrapped around the feather pillow from her bed. Mother held John cuddled in her lap, leaning over his head to spoon the beans into her mouth. He fussed and reached for the spoon, hungry and angry because she kept pushing his hand away.
Mother had waited all morning for a letter from Dad, a letter with money for food. When, once again, no letter or money arrived, she went out to the toolshed and brought in the corn and bean seeds for next year's garden. The seeds had been coated with pesticides to keep bugs from eating them during the winter. Poison. I watched Mother split the dusty sealed brown bags with a kitchen knife and empty the contents into bowls, the seeds making sweet music as they tapped the glass: "ting, ting, ting." She ran her hands through the dry seeds, lifting them to her nose. Did they smell like poison? She rubbed a fat white bean between her fingers and touched her fingers to her tongue, then spit into the sink, rinsed her mouth with cold water and spit into the sink again. She stood staring out the window above the sink, her hands limp in the bowl of seeds. She stood this way for ten minutes or more, staring out the window.
Then, as if released from a spell, she opened the cabinet and got out two colanders. She poured the dry seeds into them: corn in one, beans in the other, and ran water over and over them. She rubbed each tiny seed with her fingers and wiped the cool water on her forehead and the back of her neck. Her dress was already damp under the sleeves from the afternoon heat.
"Those seeds are poison, you know. Poison. If we eat them, we'll die," Alice whispered. She was eleven and knew these things. I tapped my bare feet against the kitchen chair and thought about this, deciding I would eat them anyway. I was so hungry and certain that no poison could kill me. I could just tell myself not to die and I wouldn't. I was that strong.
John slid from his chair and pulled at Mother's dress, kicking and fussing, wanting to be held, wanting to be fed.
"Alice, why don't you take the kids outside for a little while," Mother said as she churned the seeds through the water. She turned and caught Alice's disappointed face. "Just for a little while," she said.
We stumbled reluctantly out the back door. Alice peeled John from Mother's legs and carried him out; he liked to be outdoors and stopped fussing. We moved into the yard, each claiming our territory. Stewart and David ran into the garden and picked cornstalks, to joust like the knights in our storybooks. Alice took John for a walk in the shade of the oak trees, to push the leaves around and look for buckeyes. She began reciting from her favorite book - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - the part where the Mad Hatter sings Alice an example of what he sang for the Queen of Hearts: "'Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky.'" I sat on the steps with Willie and Doris Ann and listened. When she couldn't remember any more, she jumped to her favorite parts of "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
"The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking close at hand. They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand. 'If this were only cleared away,' they said, 'it would be grand! If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year. Do you suppose,' the Walrus said, 'that they could get it clear?'"
Pale mountains jutted in the far distance. I could see the gas station at the bottom of the hill and farther on, barely visible, our closest neighbor's house. Directly in front of me was the garden, or what was supposed to be a garden. The fierce sun had baked it brown before any vegetables had appeared, the temperature climbing to over a hundred degrees every day. Twelve rows of shriveled corn, dwarfed and fruitless. So many tomato plants, twenty or more, the little yellow flowers dried and stiff, not bothering to form into green balls. The tomato vines weaved in with the cucumber vines like the hot-pan holders we made on our loom. Grasshoppers, thriving in the heat, had stripped the cucumber plants. Vines, like curved barbwire, ran through the dusty red clay, in and out of the tomato vines and in and out of the bean rows.
Nothing to put up and stack on the pantry shelves for winter, no steam from boiling kettles fogging the kitchen windows, the aroma seeping into every corner of the house: tomato sauce, soup stocks, creamed corn, sweet bread-and-butter pickles, succotash, green beans, white navy beans, speckled pinto beans. Not one jar to open when the coldest days arrived, when it hurt to breathe the air. There had been no summer tomato sandwiches smeared thick with mayonnaise on white bread baked in the oven, no corn on the cob dripping with butter, no crispy cucumbers to eat, straight from the garden, still warm from the sun.
That summer, in Eastaboga, Alabama, what had flourished were the daylilies: thousands of them, in the yard hovering close to the house, around the trees, alongside the road and in the ditches. Dad called them ditch lilies. "Ditch lilies! Living in the ditches, like beggars. Returning every year - more and more of 'em. We can't grow goddamned tomato but we can grow thousands of these. We couldn't weed enough to make 'em disappear, even if we wanted to. 'But Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'"
Dad had pulled a handful of lilies up by the roots and tossed them into the sun to dry like bones, knowing Mother loved the bright red and orange lilies, knowing she did not want them to disappear.
The daylilies had not disappeared but, somehow, my father had. Alice said she had gotten out of bed one morning and he was gone and did not show up again.
"That's disappearing," she said matter-of-factly, hands on her hips. It was, after all, more mysterious to have a father who had disappeared than one who had just gone somewhere. And this time, we were sure, he had not just been put in jail for the weekend. The black-and-white sheriff's car had not driven into the yard. The sheriff had not, this time, stepped out of the car, tipped his hat to our mother and apologized for disturbing her, telling her he would bring our father back home in a day or two. No, this time our father had been gone for weeks. We wanted to ask Mother where he was but had learned not to ask questions, or speak of it except among ourselves.
Actually, Dad had not disappeared but had gone to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born and his brothers still lived, to find work. He left no money. He took the car. Said he'd write and send money soon. Mother couldn't drive anyway, so the car wasn't a great loss. The one time he had tried to teach her to drive, she had driven into a ditch. He never let her try again, claiming women weren't made to drive, they were made to take care of the home. And that's just what she did: wash clothes, iron clothes, wash dishes and cook meals for her husband and seven children.
Seven children: girl, boy, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, like descending stairs: eleven, nine, eight, seven, six, four and two years old, some without a full year in between; four with their father's hazel eyes and dark hair and three with their mother's blue eyes, but blondes rather than redheads.
I had just turned seven years old and didn't think Dad's disappearance was such a bad thing; no more dishes shattering into the wall, no more whiskey breath and smell of urine, no more fear of being discovered, of having to peek into a room before entering to see if he was slumped in a chair waiting for you to walk within his reach.
"Now I've got ya," he would shout, like he had just caught a raccoon raiding the corn patch, pulling his leather belt from the loops as the unwary one struggled to get free. You didn't have to do anything - anything at all - to get pinched, poked, shoved or hit, just be where he could reach you when he was drunk. "You belong to me and I'll do with you what I want."
Unless, which often happened, he decided you didn't belong to him at all... |
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| View all 9 comments |
Lisa Costantino (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-26 00:00>
In the tradition of Bastard Out of Carolina and Angela's Ashes, Change Me into Zeus's Daughter chronicles a child's coming of age in an abusive and dirt-poor environment. With the gripping narrative drive of both of those bestselling books, Barbara Robinette Moss's candid yet lyrical account takes hold of our hearts and doesn't let go until the final page. Her story juxtaposes heart-rending adversity with the playful chaos of eight siblings growing up in the 1960s South, with its creeping kudzu and soybean fields, its forthright and sometimes peculiar inhabitants, and its boiling racial tensions.
The hardships related here are both familiar and unique: the Christmas presents exchanged for drink money, the failed businesses, the decrepit shacks that served as temporary homes, the disturbing early-morning discipline. Under the tyrannical rule of a father who "inflicted pain recreationally, both physical and emotional," the only bright spot in Moss's childhood was her mother, Dorris. Slavishly devoted to her husband ("she seemed to crave him as much as he craved alcohol"), Dorris held the family together by absorbing most of the abuse. But in the end she lacked the courage to leave him, and her children had to act as their own protectors. As if poverty and her father's mistreatment weren't enough of a burden, Moss also had to contend with a face disfigured by malnutrition. As a result, she sought refuge in whatever elusive beauty she could find: the poetry her mother taught as a substitute for material things; the fertile, red Alabama soil; the love of her baby sister Janet. Her urge to create beauty and her longing to embody it culminate in surgery that transforms her face but brings with it a crisis of identity.
In her outpouring of memories, Moss occasionally gets lost in her tale, embedding flashback within flashback. More problematic is the portrayal of her father: he's relentlessly cruel until a near-fatal beating, after which he begins to briefly connect with his children. For us, it's too late, and we can only react to his death with a sigh of relief. But these minor quibbles are just that. Moss's extraordinary memoir enthralls us from its alarming introduction - in which Dorris feeds her starving children a meal of potentially poisonous seeds - to its poignant conclusion.
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New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-26 00:00>
This divinely titled memoir is... a Deep South cousin to Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." |
USA Today (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-26 00:00>
Elegant and moving... nothing short of an "Angela's Ashes" for Americans, beautifully written in female voice. |
Kirkus Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-26 00:00>
A writer remembers the indignities, the poignancies, the cruelties, and the compromises demanded by the deep poverty of her Alabama youth.In her debut volume, Moss says she wishes "to go back in time-to heal old wounds and reclaim my family." Such old wounds-and such a family. Her mother was an ex-Marine with a heart capable of myriad acts of forgiveness for her husband, a drunken, abusive ne'er-do-well whose serial failures as father, husband, and wage-earner would qualify him for a Faulkner novel-or for a guest-spot with Jerry Springer. Moss, along with her numerous siblings, somehow developed the character to persevere, despite (or because of?) Dad's eccentricities and the absence of amenities (like adequate food, clothing, shelter). Moss adopts a rough chronology, occasionally leaping elsewhere in time to visit a moment of particular importance or to prepare us for something of ensuing significance. She begins with a stunning, symbolic account of her mother's preparing a "meal" of seeds they had intended to plant-seeds saturated in pesticide: there is nothing else to eat. With increasing momentum, Moss takes us through a weird series of sensational funhouse incidents. In the 1960s her father yelled out the car window to blacks marching to Washington: "Get a goddamned job!" Cruel classmates, noting Moss's comprehensive dental problems, called her "Bucky Beaver." (She later underwent a painful experimental facial surgery, emerging from it to more closely resemble Zeus's daughter Aphrodite-Moss substitutes "Venus," confusing the Roman and Greek names for the goddess of beauty.) A tornado "sucked from under the porch in a feathery cloud" the chickens they had hoped to raise. Her uncle Jake lost a game of Russian Roulette, blowing part of his skull out onto his front steps. Moss divorced twice (one husband beat her), had a son, went to graduate school. Her father, unable to tolerate chemotherapy, shot himself in the head.A lucid and sometimes lurid reminder that pain, deprivation, and humiliation need not destroy; they can also animate. |
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