Every Little Girl Is A Princess.

When I think of South Carolina, it isn't the South Carolina of Pat Conroy. It doesn't have the windswept dunes and the oppressive heat of a hot Southern sun boiling down on the felt military cap of an anxious Citadel plebe, or the willowy Southern royalty standing on the steps of St. Michael's Cathedral, clutching her Charleston Receipts. It isn't the South Carolina of Dorothy Allison, either, with a weary childhood of dirt yards and weathered clapboard houses and bad jokes (What's a South Carolina virgin?...a ten-year-old who can outrun her brothers).

I fall directly in the middle, into the middle class, into a world where the rules for conduct were legion and often contradictory. White middle class children were severely chastised for not Yes sir-ing and No ma'am-ing black people, but just as strongly discouraged from befriending them. The rumor of dating a black man was more ruinous to a white girl that the rumor of being a lesbian - so ruinous, in fact, that while I was in high school one of my classmates soaked her head in gasoline at the Kwik Station and lit a match when the rumor pointed its finger at her.

As far as white girls in general went, common opinion was that it was worthless to educate them. Our purpose was to marry and have children of our own. You don't need an education for that, said many of the fathers, including my own. As loudly as they trumpted that opinion, privately they pushed us to study, study harder, go to college, finish college. They paid for our tennis lessons, our swimming lessons, our horseback lessons, our soccer uniforms. They went to every game, cheering and filling the coolers with Gatorade. Sunday afternoon, they'd be back to calling women's sports worthless. Mothers told their daughters to stay in school, to be independent, and to marry as soon as possible. We were never to have sex, but to be as attractive and flirtatious as possible. We were praised for being tomboys and climbing trees, and lectured on the importance of being a lady, as we rubbed our runny noses on our sleeves from high up the magnolia trees. It was horrible for a woman to fight, but equally horrible for her not to win. Free to Be You and Me was feminist poison, but my mother left her church group when it was suggested that women were inferior to men.

Aiken is, to my mind, still one of the most beautiful places in the world, and when I think of it, I think of trees and horses. Oak trees, pine trees, palmetto, and dogwood, the scent mixed in the sensually heavy air with the scent of horses, the brush whisper of the leaves and the clacking of horse hooves blending together. Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and Swale were names as familiar to us as Jordan and Pippen were to Chicago children. I grew up in the seventies, before the boom of the Southside, before the town doubled in size and Whiskey Road, so named for the nondescript trucks that ran bootleg whiskey between South Carolina and Georgia, was a major road rather than an inconveniently built conduit between the mall and downtown. My entire neighborhood, built on what was once Whitehall Plantation, was still new and heavily wooded. Ranch-style and two-story homes were built out in a spiral from around the Plantation house, and we lived in one of the newer houses, the west side up against another ranch-style house, the north, east, and south sides surrounded by woods. My legs were scabbed and bloodied from running in the woods all day with my neighbor Allie, our pigtails rumpled and filled with bark and twigs, our faces smeared with dirt. Summer days started early. We were out of the house by 8:00 in the morning, and returned only twice when my mother would step out of the house and make a loud, blasting whistle with her tongue and two fingers, an abrupt shriek that could be heard from any point in the neighborhood, and was recognized by everyone. More than once, I'd be two blocks away, playing inside someone's house when someone else entirely, who had seen us climbing into the house through an open window, would knock on the door. "Tell Miss Leigh Anne I think I heard her mama whistling for her," they'd say, and my hostess' mother, who often didn't even know I was there, would come upstairs and send me home. I only had about 5 minutes to get back before I'd get into trouble, but that didn't matter, because the town was so small that everywhere was only 5 minutes from everywhere else. My mother would feed me lunch, and whoever else I brought home with me. If we were too filthy to sit at the kitchen table, my mother would take us out to the laundry room where she had an enormous utility sink built extra large in order to hose down dirty children with ease. All the neighborhood children had been soaked in that sink at least twice before being allowed to sit down and drink jelly jars of sweet tea and inhale sandwiches made of white bread and sweet condensed milk, or peanut butter, banana, and mayonnaise sandwiches before vanishing into the woods again until dark.

Before the Catholic high school my sisters attended let out at 3:30, we would cut through the woods and come out behind another plantation house, the Knox estate. The Knox Estate had an enormous gnarled magnolia tree whose thick branches stretched up flat and wide, high enough for a pack of teenagers to climb to the top and sit comfortably to smoke joints and bullshit before going home. We'd find roaches stubbed out casually on the trunk and tossed onto branches. Sometimes we'd find cans of beer, but not often. Then as now, it was easier for teenagers to buy drugs. And in 1975, it was pretty damned easy to buy beer, if you were 16.

Often, Allie and I would play in my sprawling backyard. There was so much to do in my backyard alone: caterpillar circus, worm waterpark. At first, worm waterpark was just Allie and I digging up earthworms and sliding them down my swingset slide. After we realized that the metal slide, which had been baking in the summer sun all day, was cooking the earthworms, we ran the gardenhose down the slide to cool them off and drowned them instead. Earthworms are notorious party poopers when it comes to children's games.

It had been a busy summer morning, and Allie and I had already been soaked in the tub, had a change of clothes, and had been sent back outside. We were squatting near the back of the yard, up against the chain link fence, making an elaborate sculpture out of a pile of dogshit.

Making a truly great dogshit sculpture was a serious creative endeavor that Allie and I had many complex rules for. You could not touch the dogshit with your finger. You could not squash the dogshit with a brick. You could only change the shape of the pile if you left the log unbroken. You were encouraged to festoon it it with pine needles, rocks, sticks, and small stones. You were expressly forbidden from decorating it with any of my toys. You could not move piles of dogshit together and create one huge sculpture, unless you were truly inspired. Abstract sculpture was the best. There were more rules, one of which I'm sure included not telling our mothers, but I can't remember them all. It was a deadly serious artform, and we were engrossed in it totally and completely when we heard a small voice behind us.

"What ch'all doin'?"

A small tow-headed girl, wrapped in a beach blanket and wearing flip-flops stood on the other side of the chain-link fence.

"Makin' a sculpture out of dog poop."

"Oh."

She had emerged silently from the woods from some unknown point. Allie and I had never seen her before. She stood there, smiling shyly.

"My name's Ruby."

"I'm Leigh Anne," I said, "this is Allie. My best friend, Allie." Allie smiled smugly, her place acknowledged and secured.

"It's nice to meet y'all," she said primly. She shifted her weight from side to side and waited.

"Why are you wrapped up in that blanket? It isn't cold," said Allie.

Ruby grinned. "It's cause...." she said, then through off the towel while screaming "Ta daaaaaaaaa!" She was stark naked underneath. She twirled around in a circle, her hands over her head, then cut an anxious look back into the woods, as if her mother might have materialized right behind her.

Allie and I were charmed. "Hey, you should come play with us!" I said. "Lemme run in the house and get you some clothes!" Ruby tossed her flipflops and towel over the fence and began to climb it as I ran toward the house.

"Don't sit on those spiky points on your way over," cautioned Allie, "You'll hurt your bird."

"I'm not gonna sit on it! You crazy?" said Ruby as she swung over one bruised leg, then another.

Once in my room, I grabbed the terrycloth romper and underpants that I'd kicked off before lunch. Ruby shimmied into them without comment or complaint. They fit just fine. We turned our attention back to my dog's leavings.

"Have you thought about putting an acorn cap on it? Maybe as a hat?" suggested Ruby. After that, it was like the three of us had known each other for years. By the end of the summer, Ruby had integrated fully into the pack, playing for hours in homes of women who had no idea who she was, who would find her sitting on their potty or demanding lunch and iced tea.

"Whose little girl are you?" they'd ask, and she'd give them a name they did not recognize, to which they would shrug and say, "Well you gotta go home for dinner."

Ruby's mother, in turn, became used to the parade of loud, grubby girls, yes ma'aming, please and thank you-ing her while they tracked dirt on her linoleum floor and fed dog biscuits to Ruby's three-year-old brother.

Christmas is coming, and it seems very important to the toymakers that parents know that all girls want is to be pretty, shopping, dieting princesses. It makes me grateful that despite the conflicting ideals I was given, when I was growing up little girls were at least left alone to establish our own playground rules of etiquette, only allowed inside our own homes to simulate sex acts between Barbie and Ken on rainy days, and I really don't think we did that badly.

Will you be my friend if I show you my outrageous nakedness?

Why, yes. Would you like some dirty underpants to put on?

Certainly. And may I suggest an acorn hat for your dogshit sculpture?

Oh, you're too kind.

Yep. Not bad at all.