talking ugly
Amy Rowland The silencing begins early. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. The words washed over me in an evangelical church in the small North Carolina town of my youth. It’s a town you haven’t heard of, unless you know about Joan Little. She made history there in 1975, and has been erased in the place where she made it. Constant silencing results in collective forgetting. Joan Little and I share the same hometown, but I never knew she existed until I moved away in adulthood, and happened upon a reference to her groundbreaking case. I might have learned of her in high school, where I learned bits of local history, for example, that my town was the first in the state to erect a monument to the confederate dead, a statue that still stands in the community cemetery. I might have been playing in the back of my father’s Main Street barbershop in August 1974, as Joan Little, 20, sat in the basement of the courthouse two blocks away. It was in this basement cell that in the early hours of August 27, Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard, was found dead. He had been stabbed eleven times with an ice pick. Joan Little was missing. I was five that summer, listening for night sounds of hunting dogs and train whistles as I lay in my hot room in a ranch house across from a gas station, so I might have heard as they searched for Ms. Little with dogs and rifles. But I did not know of Joan