In the Country of Women. Susan Straight

In the Country of Women

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ALSO BY SUSAN STRAIGHT

Between Heaven and Here

Take One Candle Light a Room

A Million Nightingales

Highwire Moon

The Gettin Place

Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

Aquaboogie

The Friskative Dog (for children)

Bear E. Bear (for children)

First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)

Some of these chapters have appeared, in different form, in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Oxford American, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Best American Essays 2010, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Linda Hogan for permission to reprint a portion of her poem Walking.

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are provided courtesy of the author.

Photograph on title page: Rosie Morris and Alberta Sims

ISBN: 978-1-948226-22-6

Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

Phone: 866-400-5351

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965034

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For General and Alberta Sims,

and John and Gabrielle Watson

Author’s Note

Memory is a sixth sense, or seventh—and so belongs in specific truth to the people who told me these stories over a span of fifty years. I’ve written them here as they were given to us—people whose lives were not documented by history but by their own persistence in retelling all of us, again and again, how we came to be.

For the six generations of women in this book:

“Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on.”

— JAMES BALDWIN

Contents

Prologue: Homerica

PART I

1 Little House in the Thistles

Glen Avon, California, 1963

2 The First Bullet

Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876

3 The Dance

Ruby Triboulet, Colorado Prairie, 1921