1. It starts as a muffled cry.
2. Down a long hallway into a wood paneled room with a wall of windows against which branches slap in a howling wind.
3. No one hears it.
4. It builds and builds and then it eventually dies.
5. “You’re the least important person in the room and don’t you forget it,” Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion.
6. Joan Didion copied that into her notebook and it wasn’t until late in her career that she was able to enter a room “without hearing some such phrase” in her inner ear.
7. Think of Jane Eyre pitted against the insufferable foe-like Mrs. Reed and her bullying children. After Jane’s altercation with John Reed, Mrs. Reed sweeps into the nursery, “crushes” her on the edge of her crib, and tells her not to “utter one syllable” for the remainder of the day.
8. After reading one of my poems aloud in college, a female teacher said, “My dear, you have two voices, one tentative and one too fast, and both are a misery.”
9. Teachers talked about the voice as if it was disembodied.
10. Yet, I instinctually knew it emanated from my person and my person had a body, in which there were two girls—one who was trapped and feared she had no voice at all, and another who wanted to shout out and make a rumpus.
11. The injunction to remain silent incites Jane, and she is compelled to speak regardless of the consequences. “It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will…something spoke out of me over which I had no control.”
12. It can’t be taught.
13. “The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.” Willa Cather
14. “I’m a very bad subject person,” Jamaica Kincaid said.
15. A subject person is a person at the mercy of others—like Jessica and her governess, like Jane and Mrs. Reed, like me and my first-grade teacher Mrs. Joy who commanded the class to be silent. “Silence,” she’d say, ruling it to be so. Breaking us to attain it.
16. My mother sent me to school in first grade outfitted in a fancy white dress. At recess I climbed the monkey bars and hung upside down even though I had been told not to. The shiny white dress flew over my face and Bruce Wray taunted me with I can see your underpants, I can see your underpants. I jumped down from the bars and punched him in the stomach. A crowd gathered and in the skirmish Mrs. Joy materialized and marched me back to the classroom whereupon my mother was called. The teacher told me not to say a word, but like Jane I could not be silent, and she put tape across my mouth. When my mother arrived and saw my torn dress and my mouth covered, she smiled at Mrs. Joy and said, “Yes, that’s the appropriate response.”
17. I came to believe a large body was a prerequisite for vocal power and concluded that the disappointment in my voice was tied to my body. I wasn’t tall enough, large enough. I simply wasn’t enough.
18. I wasn’t silent exactly. I spoke but I spoke in such a way that I didn’t speak. My voice fell backwards onto itself and sounded as if I was speaking from the bottom of a deep well.
19. I swallowed my voice.
20. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and then I thought how it is worse, perhaps to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf
21. The most remarkable voice I encountered in the studio of the voice was the poet Richard Hugo, not coincidentally a large man. His voice could hold multitudes.
22. On my walk home after hearing his voice in the chill autumn night, with the sidewalks skirted in fallen leaves, I cursed Richard Hugo, and then I cursed myself. I might as well have a raised a fist to the moon hanging ponderously in the pitch-black sky for all the good it did.
23. How did he get that voice? Was it something he ate? Did people listen to him with attention from a very young age? Or was he born with it?
24. I envied his voice for I was tired of being told to speak up, we can barely hear you.
25. I felt such a sense of constriction, of lack.
26. My voice—I—was anonymous, bare as workshop walls. The poems I wrote in school, under the school master’s gaze, shrank smaller—a little box, a sentence, a word, a letter, a blank space where the poem—the person—was supposed to be.
27. Of course, I was listening in all the wrong places. If I had been listening to Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, or Jamaica Kincaid, they might have told me my voice was better than it sounded to those teachers, even if it would take most of my life to realize it.
28. Years passed. And then one spring day I put my incredible shrinking poems away. I said “I’m putting you away” and buried them.
29. An hour later out popped the letter P.
30. An explosion.
31. Posture. My posture, women’s posture.
32. Who knew I had so much to say on the subject of my bodily history. Until that moment I was unaware I had feelings, passionate feelings, about my standing, about the alignment of my back and neck and head. Or how much I hated being badgered to stand up straight all my life.
33. I wasn’t straight at all. That was the thing. I was rounded, curved.
34. Forces had been percolating for years that I had stuffed down and locked away. That afternoon in the third floor attic of my house the words were released and the rock wedged into the mouth of the cave rolled away.
35. “I consider anger a badge of honor. I’ve really come to love anger. When people say you are charming you are in deep trouble.” Jamaica Kincaid
36. Here’s to you, old voice, cry muffled and un-muffled, unfathomable to your core, connected in countless fucked-up ways to the history of being born, but somehow in the pine and the redwood smashing against the windows in that dismal workshop of a nursery and the patch of earth at the back corner of the yard of your childhood where I took my dolls and buried them, in the muscled flank of the horse of ingenuity that I rode when I first felt my voice like blood rushing through me—I love, I hate, I suffer, I am.
Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor of The Year Award for the State of Michigan. Companion to An Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is at work on Haze, a narrative of marriage and divorce during her college years.
