Excerpt : The Revolution of Little Girls by Blanche McCrary Boyd, 1991
Narrator and Don: Narrator’s POV, internal and physical conflict
Language: formal, clinical
Setting: Southern atmosphere, humorous, looking back to youthful innocence
Character: shows sexual maturation/gay awareness, alcohol dependency throughout scene. Main character comes a step towards understanding herself, shows her detachment from male/female sex. Reliance on others’ experience creates humor.
Don put down his chicken leg. “I don’t know what Darlene said to you, but we don’t have to do anything. We really don’t.”
“Could we drink some beer?” I said.
So, while the chicken and fried potatoes congealed in their grease and the salad wilted in its pool of dressing, Don and I drank a pitcher of beer, and I began to relax . . . .
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
In the bathroom I confronted the most serious obstacle to the loss of my virginity: Under my skirt I was wearing a panty girdle. I hadn’t really meant to wear the girdle, but when I was dressing I kept hearing my mother’s voice saying, any woman looks better in a girdle, so I’d put it on experimentally, and it felt so secure, so bracing, that I’d left it on. Now I didn’t know what to do about it. I considered taking it off, but it was too bulky for the pocket of my trenchcoat.
What I did have was a Norform vaginal suppository that Darlene had given me to insert, “just before intercourse.”
(In the parking lot after her double shot of bourbon) His fingers moved tentatively up my legs. “My god, what’s this?” he said, encountering the girdle.
I wanted to explain but I was too dizzy.
His hand wandered around the flesh of my thigh, then moved inward and upward. The dissolved Norform was all over the crotch of the girdle. “My god, you’re wet,” he said.
I tried to hold still.
“Okay,” he mumbled, sliding two fingers awkwardly up the leg of the panty girdle. When he touched me something flashed in my head, and my hips pushed hard against his hand.
“Oh, my god, oh my god,” he said, pulling his hand free.
“I’ll take it off,” I said. “No problem. Here, I can take it off.”
Don was still crouched over his hand. His fingers glistened in the darkness. A lump appeared behind his knuckle and swelled while I watched.
“It’s . . . it’s growing,” I said.
“It’s sprained,” he said . . . . failure at sex, no pleasure
Don’s hand was not sprained. He had broken a blood vessel behind his knuckle. Overnight the blood spread under his skin, turning it puffy and greenish. By the end of the week his hand had turned black, with a dark red palm . . . .
Don followed me to several classes. “We’ll try it again. We’ve got to try it again.” He looked vulnerable, stunned by love, extending his black hand.
I never wanted to see Don again in my whole life, so I felt relieved when my mother telephoned and said, “Why don’t you fly home this weekend . . . .
