October 19, 2016 - 02:20
i know this is late, i'm sorry! midnight tuesday isn't a great deadline for me because i go into rehearsal at 5 and get out (and start studying) at 11. anyway. here's what we talked about in class today.
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"people will talk. let them talk. i can bear it. i am a beede... june flowers is a beede by marriage, not birth, so what june flowers can bear is another story." (roosevelt, page 51)
later (page 107), roosevelt expands on this, noting that
"there's lots of families i coulda been born into, families with more luck, or more 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 all the world."
" 'i tried to help her out,' my wife says.
'she's a beede and it can't be helped,' i says." (mr. israel jackson, page 83)
what can't be helped? the dress, or the fact that billy is a beede?
" 'i've risen above my beedeism,' i say...
june and roosevelt and billy will never rise above their beedeism. they will always be beedes, which is to say that they will always be grubbing in the dirt."
(estelle "star" beede rochfoucault, page 137)
did she? rise above her beedeism, i mean. is that possible?
"but billy ain't my blood. roosevelt ain't my blood neither... i feel like i done fell into the river of beedes and got swept along in they thick brown water... i was too far downstream to just get out. beede is more my blood now, i guess. like i got one of them transfusions." (june flowers beede, page 173)
what defines blood? how does one "become" a part of a history?
throughout the book, there's a "rep and rev" theme of family, of history, of what it means to be a Beede. It's interesting to contrast the ways in which people struggle against or choose to accept the "inheritance" of Beede blood, of Beede luck, of Beede life.