Summary

The narrator tells the story of her great-grandmother, Shirley Boatwright, a mean woman who was cruel to all of her children.

Shirley Wilmer came from some wealth, the only daughter in a peanut-farming family with five sons in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was married off to Tucker Boatwright when they were both in their teens. Soon after, the Boatwrights started having children, even though Shirley hated children and called them "devils and worms and trash" (21). Shirley thought her family was of better quality than the Boatwrights -- the family to which her children belonged -- because they owned their own farm. She thought the people who worked at the local coal mine -- a group that included her husband, Tucker -- were lesser than she was. Shirley worked at the mill, a place she thought was better than the mine.

Mattie...