The Bear Story

A few days ago I shared an essay titled “The Bear.” It’s from my first book and I’ll link the essay here, but to summarize, my grandmother used to tell a story about a bear and an old woman who was stirring her soap. The old woman is singing about her loneliness and the bear keeps getting closer and closer until finally he carries the old woman off and eats her.

My grandmother told the story to us grandkids late at night when she wanted us to sleep. She sang the bear parts in a deep, shaky voice, and her timbre and tone hinted at dark things beyond the windows.

Forty years later I drunk-dialed my grandmother and asked her to tell me the bear story. I used to drink back then and sometimes while deep in my cups I needed to hear her voice. To be taken back to childhood. To hear the rhythm of her words and remember being a child fighting sleep, fascinated with the darkness of the world.

My grandmother lived alone by then. My grandfather had been gone almost 30 years and she had been alone all that time. I was very drunk and almost crying listening to this story about a bear who ate an old woman who was obviously my grandmother, and when my grandmother finished the story she told another one, this time about being raped at age 14.

Afterward she told me about the numerous other men who had tried to abuse her in one way or another. How many times she was at the mercy of such men. How they shaped her life for years and years until my grandfather came along.

Even then she had a tough life. She lost two children. Was paralyzed once. Was hospitalized for tuberculosis.

I never planned to write the bear essay. I could claim some ownership of the story about the bear, but I could not even begin to write about her rape. How she felt, as if it had been her fault, still too young to understand exactly what had happened other than that she had been hurt and it would be a long time before she understood how hurt. How the family was too embarrassed and ashamed to do anything about it other than tell her to forget it happened.

Instead of forgetting, she left home, because fuck that. Because she stands 4 foot 11 inches but doesn’t take any bullshit, especially from men.

The longer she talked the more I loved her. Her voice seemed to grow stronger with the telling, as she unburdened herself of almost 80 years of repressed memories.

And because I’m a writer, I wanted her stories to be heard.

“Have you ever thought about writing this down?” I asked her.

A week later my father called to ask what I had done to my grandmother. “She made me bring her two yellow legal pads, and a pack of ball-point pens,” he said.

“She’s writing,” I told him. “You leave her alone.”

I called occasionally to check on her progress. And maybe I need to tell you that my grandmother never had much of an education. It just wasn’t in her cards. It wasn’t in the cards for most woman of her age and economic means.

She wrote her name at the top of the page. Every morning she woke and stared at the blank page and thought about the enormity of the story before her. The reach and ramifications. How far back it went.

I’m not sure how long she labored over it. When my grandfather died she wrote a poem about him. As far as I know, it’s the only thing she’s ever written. She’s never driven a car. She’s never used a computer.

But she wanted her story shared, so she tried to write it. She looked back at her life and thought about how to convey that life in words.

It’s so hard to write, friends. It’s even harder when you haven’t had a voice your whole life. When you haven’t had a say in how your life is supposed to go, when your life has been battered and bruised before it even gets started, when the world tells you your story isn’t worth hearing and you might as well keep quiet about all the shit that has been done to you. The world never gave my grandmother a chance to tell her story. From the beginning, she was told to keep quiet. That no one would care. That it was best to be silent and obedient and obey the systems that silenced her.

“You tell the story for me, Paul Allen,” she finally said. She’s the only person in the world who still calls me Paul Allen. She says it like it’s one word. Like it is the essence of me, all my best traits captured in the rhythm of how she says my name.

“You’ll know how to tell it,” she said.

At the time, I thought she was wrong. I had no idea how to tell her story, except of course I did. It was always waiting for me, always right there in front of me, in the bear story. All her fears. All her sleepless nights worrying that some man would come along and carry her off to be eaten.

Turns out her faith in me was founded, and I can’t tell you how that makes me feel, like some vast and distant wind sweeping across the ocean inside me. Like maybe I finally did something right.

Because of that faith, I’ll keep shouting her story from the rooftops. I’ll shout it on the streets, I’ll scream it in the halls of congress when bad men pass bad laws restricting women’s rights, I’ll whisper it into the dark forest late at night to warn away the bears.

Write for the people who don’t have a voice, friends. Tell the stories they can’t.

There are bears in the woods, and they’re coming for us.