The mother (whose name is never given) took to keeping weapons by her bed to fend off her husband’s attentions. Beasley’s mother had a child every two years there were also a few abortions. The second starts: ‘It is perfectly clear to me that life is not worth living, but it is equally clear that life is worth talking about.’ And talk she does. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christlike, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children. I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen. The memoir recounts Beasley’s difficult childhood and her triumphant escape. (Copies of the Texas Book Club edition occasionally surface, selling at $125 or higher.) As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining that a rare book dealer was asking $40 for a copy of the book, which had been priced at $2.50. Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. In 1989, with Beasley’s fate still a mystery, Larry McMurtry encouraged the Book Club of Texas to bring out an edition of five hundred copies for which he wrote an afterword. For decades it has been almost impossible to find.
In 1925, Beasley had published a memoir called My First Thirty Years with the Contact Press in Paris, now reissued in only its third edition (Sourcebooks, £12.30). It came out in Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan (which became Cosmopolitan) and was billed as ‘The personal Story of Edna Gertrude Beasley, who came from the WORST POSSIBLE environment and ACHIEVED international success’.
O ne of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’.
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