December 13, 2016 - 12:57
“People will talk. Let them talk. I can bear it. I am a Beede so I can bear the people talking…. I guess what Billy do or don’t do, or what she get or don’t get, is no more than just part of the plan.” So reflects Roosevelt Beede, accepting the decisions of his willful, pregnant, unmarried niece, Billy. Roosevelt’s stiff lipped, resigned response to his family’s luck is typical of the characters in Susan Lori Park’s novel. Throughout ‘Getting Mother’s Body’ the poor, Texan family comments on what it means to be a Beede, as they travel to Arizona to retrieve the remains of Billy’s mother and the jewels supposedly buried with her. Indeed, it does seem for most of the novel that the characters will retain their fated hard luck. Willa Mae’s lover reveals early on that he took the jewels from her body. Roosevelt, an ex-preacher finds his church burned down, and, and Billy seems destined to follow her mother’s, dishonest, unhappy path. Then, at the end, the trajectory of the story shifts. Willa Mae is uncovered with a real diamond ring, and each of the characters finds what they have been looking for throughout the story. The surprising twist leads the reader to ask about the theme of inheritance in the novel. What keeps the character’s in the paths of their families, and how do they escape them?
Billy is the only character who never mentions ‘Beedeism’ or refers to the inherited bad luck of her family. To the contrary, she maintains a defiant, forced optimism when it comes to her prospects of getting married or finding the money for an abortion. She rejects the idea of inheritance altogether, denying both the claim that she bears any resemblance to her mother as well as the possibility that the dead woman was buried with any real jewels. Yet, even as Billy claims she is “no Willa Mae”, she seemingly becomes increasingly like her as the novel continues. She adopts her mother’s tricks, learning to recognize the ways in which people can be taken advantage of, and occasionally stealing. It is hard to believe that Billy can’t recognize the ways that she is becoming like her parent, rather, it seems that she simply refuses to acknowledge them.
To all appearances Billy could choose not to follow in her mother’s footsteps. As Billy’s aunt says “Willa Mae didn’t never amount to nothing”, but Billy has a talent at doing hair and could make a living if she wanted to. But she quit her job in a hair salon and dropped out of school even though she was a good student. Willa Mae was never married but Billy could marry her honest, middle class neighbor if she accepted him. Key to the idea of inheritance in the novel is understanding why, given her other options Billy chooses to “become” her mother, even while denying their similarity.
Billy seems to be angry with Willa Mae for dying and leaving her without guidance. She says at the end “The thing about not watching my mother get old is that I wasn’t never sure what I was gonna get, cause if you don’t got yr folks to look at… then you don’t got a good idea really of where you’re headed.” She believes that her mother went to the grave with only fake jewels, not leaving Billy anything of use for her as she becomes a woman. Figure out why Billy makes same decisions as mother.
Billy is able to escape from her mother’s shadow when she confronts her bones and comes to terms with Willa Mae. Another character, Laz, remembers Billy crying at the end as she sits next to the grave and her mother’s bones. “She’s saying things that I don’t understand. Words threaded through with a long private string of goddamned yous, the kind of curses that’s said between mother and daughter, I guess” (253). After Laz finds Willa Mae’s diamond ring hidden in the hem of her dress, Billy changes direction. In the final chapter she has decided to marry Laz, and no longer expresses regret at having a child.
Other character’s experiences reinforce the idea that making amends with family is part of the answer to escaping inherited bad luck. Roosevelt also experiences a dramatic change in fortune at the end of the novel, regaining his calling as a preacher and starting his own church. He says that he stopped hearing God after he asserted his dominance as a man over his wife and refused to move out to be with her family. But, at the end when he apologizes to June and suggests they go to California she tells him he sounds like her husband, the preacher. They decide not to go back to the gas station and Roosevelt starts work in a church of his own again.