October 28, 2016 - 16:25
The novel “Getting Mother’s Body” by Suzan-Lori Parks focuses on the members of the Beede family, who are notorious for their bad luck, and all that they are able to achieve in spite of it . Throughout “Getting Mother’s Body” various characters often use the Beedes’ reputation as a punchline, and this element of humor makes it more difficult to pin down the nature of Beedeism. Beedes are poor, undignified, unlucky, the kind of people who bury treasure in the ground and are always able to scam their way into getting what they want. That list was derived mainly from comments of non-Beedes, like Dill Smiles, and Beedes-in-denial like Estelle Beede Rochfoucault. The Beedes understand themselves a bit differently. Having borne the twin burdens of bad luck and a bad reputation, they see tenacity as the center of the Beede identity. According to Roosevelt Beede, Beedes don’t have much luck or money, but “being a Beede means being able to bear the unbearable, so I guess I would rather be a Beede than be anybody else in the world.” (107) Unlike Roosevelt, Billy Beede is more conflicted on if she wants to be a Beede, especially because of her very Beedeish late mother, Willa Mae. However, Billy’s quest to escape her mother’s fate can never fully succeed, because the past will always linger in visible and invisible ways .
No matter how much Billy hates Willa Mae, she can’t erase the impact she had on her life, as evidenced by Billy’s reliance on what Willa Mae taught her. When Billy is wants to buy a $130 wedding dress despite only having $63, she has to find what Willa Mae called The Hole in the bridal store owner. We learn from Billy’s narration that, “Mother said she could see The Hole in people and then she’d know how to take them. She could see Holes all the time but I ain’t never seen one. Until now.” (27) It’s no coincidence that this ability manifests in Billy at this particularly vulnerable moment. She’s in a tricky, emotional situation, knowing she has to make her money stretch if she wants to have a wedding dress and shoes. Billy’s narration makes it clear that she wants us to believe that she is in control of her situation, but she is at the mercy of Mrs. Jackson, who ends up taking pity on her. In our most vulnerable moments, we are most likely to let down our guard and reveal our true natures. In this case, we see Billy using her mother’s technique, almost without thinking, showing how easy it is for her to slip back into Willa Mae’s ways when she’s not actively trying to avoid them. We see another example of this later in the novel, when Billy is again strapped for cash, this time for gas to get to LaJunta, and she uses Willa Mae’s ring trick. Willa Mae tells us that her and Billy used to pull that trick together, and that “My Billy’s got promise. She’s the best Finder I ever seen. She’s got what you call a Natural Way.” (202) Billy’s “Natural Way” allows her to succeed in the way her mother succeeded, which is to say, in spite of her circumstances. The phrase “Natural Way” is especially poignant, as it reinforces the idea that your nature will always guide your actions, no matter how much you try to reject or alter it.
There are also important parallels between the lives of Willa Mae and Billy, which lead us to conclude that Billy didn’t put as much distance between herself and her mother as she had hoped. Willa Mae’s story of getting pregnant with Billy, leaving Billy’s father, and raising the child with Dill very closely mirrors Billy’s journey and her marriage to Laz. Both Billy and Willa Mae become pregnant out of wedlock. Both Dill and Laz deal with not being seen as “real men” in the traditional sense, as Dill was assigned female at birth and Laz was still a virgin at age 20. Yet both end up taking on the role of a father, when the biological father of the baby fails to do so. Billy was determined to not have her pregnancy end the way that Willa Mae’s second, fatal pregnancy did, but in doing so, Billy just ends up mirroring Willa Mae’s first pregnancy.
Ultimately, even if Billy could defy her nature, her story would still be too entangled with that of her mother to ever be truly separate from her. Billy’s motivation to go to LaJunta is to retrieve the jewelry she believes Willa Mae was buried with, with the hopes of selling it and paying for an abortion. Billy is desperate to abort her pregnancy, since discovering that the father of the baby was an already-married father of six children, but she is determined to have a doctor do it, rather than risk dying the way Willa Mae died by attempting it herself. However, even though she is motivated by her need to avoid her mother’s fate, she is still relying on her mother’s jewels to make this possible. It’s a paradox of sorts, that she needs her mother’s skills and jewels in order avoid becoming like her mother. She may have taken a different path than Willa Mae, but that path is still connected to the long road of her family’s history, and can never be separated.
“Getting Mother’s Body” reinforces, through almost every character, the idea that the past lingers and continues to influence the present and future. Even the relatively minor character of Myrna Carter, who sits next to Billy on the bus, offers insight on the subject. While passing through an empty desert landscape, Myrna wonders out loud if, “this land round here was ever crowded … 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.” (61) One of the only things that separates humans from other animals is our awareness of a time before our existence. We can never have a perfect record, and we often impose our own time’s ideas on the past, but we are still haunted by people we’ve never met, simply because they existed .
The past is powerful and inescapable, even when we are focused strictly on the present. Billy is trying to leave the past behind as much as possible, but she is irrevocably scarred by her mother. In the closing lines of the book, as Billy rides back home to Lincoln, she tells us that, “In front of my belly, beyond the hood of the truck, was the back of Laz’s hearse with Mother’s body riding inside and the road unrolling out ahead.” (257) No matter how hard Billy tried to put the past behind her, in the end her mother is still right there in front of her, guiding her through the road ahead. The French fabulist Jean De La Fontaine once said that “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it,” and that seems to ring true for Billy. She has to get her mother’s body to escape her mother’s fate. In other words, she can’t have the future she wants without venturing back into her past for assistance. Billy is thrown into a difficult set of circumstances, but is able to navigate them with her resourcefulness and willpower. In this way, and in every way, Billy is a Beede through and through.