GETTING MOTHERS BODY

Getting Mother’s Body written by Suzan-Lori Parks traces the life of the Beede family and the main character, Billy Beede, how she searched for money for abortion and how she tries to get away the influence her mother had on her while can never get rid of it, which the book title implied “getting mother’s body” that she became Willa Mae to some degrees. I was impressed the way Suzan-Lori Parks tells the story that each chapter of the book is from a different character’s perspective and reveals the progress of the story.

The author’s subjective influence in the novel is not apparent. The characters in Getting Mother’s Body have different personalities, styles of speaking, there’s no positive character nor negative ones. Some believe Susan has her own voice in the characters of her novels that she uses them as tools to speak for herself, but I think she is not connecting to the characters that much and they are not used as ways to explore her own personage. The way that the novel is laid out allows the reader to experience the events from many different perspectives and discover the different aspects of events or secrets behind. The plot, or the structure of the novel is hence well-rounded and three-dimensional.

After reading “Getting Mother’s Body”, I get the idea that the past lingers and continues to influence the present and future. On the bus, the girl who sits next to Billy named Myrna Carter says when passing through an empty desert landscape, “I wonder if this land round here was ever crowded,”Myrna goes, “You know, if like, millions and millions of years ago this part of the world was a busy place. Sorta like Dallas, or New York City, you know. Bustling with Stone Age activities, Stone Age skyscrapers, cave people, you know, in they animal skins, hurrying hither and yon, shoulder to shoulder. You know there’s a place in Mexico where they got evidence of the visits of spacemen.” (61) We always have impacts from the past and impacting the present at the meantime, other’s influence on the earth also influences us. The past is powerful and inescapable, especially on Billy who wants to escape her mother’s fate and although trying hard to get rid of the past, could only escape it through getting her mother’s body and repeating her mother’s fate. In other words, she can’t have the future she wants without returning back into her past for assistance. Billy is a kind of woman that is tough, resourceful and powerful, “hot and wild” according to the novel, she can navigate it in such a difficult circumstance. She is different from other Beede but also in every way reflecting the traits of her family, like every Beede does.