Precious Bane and Me

Precious Bane was my very favorite book as a teenager.   If you read it, you will probably not understand why.  When I recently reread the book, I was puzzled, too, that this obscure book resonated so clearly with me at such an age. 

The novel by Mary Webb is about a girl born with a hare-lip during the middle ages, when everyone thought this sort of deformity was a sign of your innate evil. The protagonist, Prue, accepts her fate as an outcast, more or less.  She's resigned to the fact that no one will marry her, and lives vicariously through the romantic exploits of the village beauty, her best friend, Jancis.

In the meantime, Prue goes about her life observing and loving and feeling and being. 

When handsome, smart, funny Kester falls for her, it's because he sees her for who she is, "hare-shodden lip" be damned.   He knows the way she sees things, how she thinks about things, matters.

So there I was, your typical suburban teen, with my Dr. Scholls, the stacks of Vogue and Teen Miss on my beside table,  tennis lessons and college visits scheduled up the wazoo.  I could tell you everything there was to know about evolution and birth control and Rowe v. Wade.  I could tell you that superstitions about harelips and weird haunting spirits were poppycock.  Yet I felt a deep kinship with a protagonist who thinks like this:

          ...if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.  So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory?  How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over?  What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?

Like Prue, I sensed an otherness in myself that I still believe most people that age (or any age) feel, but don't admit to.    Because there are so many ways of being different--whether because they are a different race from those around them or poor when the rest of the world seems to be rich or because they learn differently or look different or simply think in unorthodox ways.

Pretty much from day one, I was xx because I spoke my feelings.  This was not always valued in my family, where surface  I was different in the way I looked at the world, and sometimes (to this day) my family holds me apart for that.  That is the kind of Being Different that can mark you internally as surely as a harelip can mark you on the outside.

To make matters more complicated, my parents were liberal (outspoken) Southerners in a northern town of buttoned-up Conservatives, so I was different in a more "meta" way.  There were people who hated me the minute they heard my last name, who called us "commies," or worse.  When my parents people made a public point of not joining one of the many local golf clubs because none of them accepted people of color, .

I was different because, in spite of my blond hair and blue eyes and white skin and big house and seriously-accomplished family, I knew I could not be defined by those things.  My Self would come out no matter how hard I pushed it away (and believe me, I pushed it away hard at times).

Prue Sarn loved Kester, sure, but more than that, she loved herself, refusing to be defined only by what others believed she could be.  I haven't always been so true to myself, but the example of her   But she held up the lamp.