Mama “”Everything’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she told me. The pretense was sometimes the only thing we had to give each other.”(390) In the short story Mama, Dorothy Allison’s mother and daughter characters are survivors; they are lower class women with unspoken hardships both inside and outside the home. Both women faced issues that society did not want to confront at the …showed first 75 words of 570 total…

…showed last 75 words of 570 total…saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again.”(386) They had to be each other’s saviors because there were no places for them to turn to. In that era there were no women’s shelters or any other organization for abused women and children to go to. No matter what they went through they both knew that everything was going to be all right. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography** none