“They’d try to get away with just scribbling something down, but if the hospital didn’t mind how a baby’s middle name was spelled, they were definite about having a father’s last name. So Granny gave one and Ruth gave another, and the clerk got mad, and there I was, a certified bastard by the state of South Carolina.”

This passage details the ordeal Anney goes through at the hospital when Bone is born. The birth certificate will become a symbol of the stigma of being labeled “trash” that Anney and then Bone will have to deal with. It speaks to the importance of class in the novel. Bone’s coming of age will happen against the backdrop of poverty, and she will have to contend with class-based discrimination even as a child. This mirrors the experiences of Dorothy Allison herself, and her interest in class became a large part of the motivation to write this novel.

“Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground.”

Although it is Anney who first struggles against the pejorative label “trash,” Bone too will come to know the sting of being described as such even as a young girl. Dorothy Allison has written extensively on class, and she has noted that depictions of impoverished characters that she saw early in life were usually limited to men. In this novel she wanted to write about women in poverty and to describe the uniquely gendered experience of growing up poor and female in the American South.