Web Paper or Special Event

The novel “Getting Mother’s Body”, centers on the story of Billy Beede and the struggles she goes through due to her past and present choices. June, Billy’s aunt, was a very interesting character in Billy’ story.She played a small role in the novel but influenced how other characters were perceived. Her relationship with Billy is overlooked and the impact that she makes on her is not really discussed. June is Billy’s foil and her actions highlight Billy’s key personality traits. 

In Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan Lori-Parks, the relationship between Billy Beede and Willa Mae was dysfunctional. Billy Beede never wanted to be associated with her own mother. After they received a letter from Candy Napoleon about how she had sold some part of her land and that some developers were in the process of building a supermarket in the land where her mother’s grave lay, she threw all her cares into the wind. She said, “Willa Mae getting paved over don’t bother me none.” (44) She was not troubled by her mother’s death either. She told Snipes, “Willa Mae passed and it didn’t bother me none. I was glad to see her go.” (9) She called her by her name, Willa Mae, instead of mother. Albeit Billy Beede didn’t care about her mother, Willa Mae did care about her welfare.

I very much enjoyed visiting each garden that we visited on Tuesday. I loved the fact that our tour guides were highschool students and that they were so knowledgable on their culture and were willing to teach those that were not. I also loved how close they were with their community and that they are one with nature and their heritage when planting vegetables and maintaining this garden. I especially loves venturing off into the garden and observing and picking a few of these vegetables because it reminded me of home and the cultural food that my family makes. Being just a couple hours away from home and not being able to literally taste where I come from makes me a bit sad.

Going to Norris Gardens was a really get experience and a brilliant way to learn about a culture I was unfamilar with beside the textbook descriptions I learned in highschool. I really loved how we were about to explore the gardens, following young women who had both emotional and physical attachments to the garden in that they were Puerto Rican and familiar with this area in Philly and they helped grow and maintain the gardens. I loved how the gardens were interactive in that we could taste the fresh produce and go inside the replica houses that were full of antique artifacts either from Puerto Rico or countries in Western Africa that were part of the triangular trade.

At the gardens we visited I could really see the contact zones that emerged from the contact the African and Puerto Rican communities made with both each other and with the communities of the United States. The beautiful and expressive murals really expressed the past and determination of the ancestors who created this contact zone.

In the class, we discussed the three levels of the title. Two physical meaning and one about Billy’s mental change. For those two physical levels, the facts that Billy Beede is pregnant and getting into a mother’s body shape day by day and she’s going to Lajunta to get Willa Mae, her mother’s body are no denying. But from the perspective of the mental level, the mental heritages that Billy Beede gets from her mother, is not that obvious and determined. Is she really getting her mother’s body mentally?

Sophisticated, sociable, dangled by so many people, Willa Mae seems so different with her daughter, who is naïve about sex and everything, at the beginning of this story.  Except for having a fatherless baby, Billy Beede doesn’t have too much in common with her mother.

            “I want to tell Billy how she’s just like her mother, but that would be like picking at a scab,” Roosevelt Beede. (Parks 224)

For a masculine-presenting biological female in rural Texas in the 1960s, Dill Smiles appears to receive a surprising level of acceptance from the other characters in Suzan Lori Parks’ Getting Mother’s Body. Despite confusion or uncertainty about his gender identity, the townsfolk of Lincoln, Texas generally allow him to live as man and respect him as a person, as a friend, and as a good hog farmer. The persecution we would expect a character like Dill to face as a twenty first century audience does not play out in accordance with our historical knowledge of the time, and I for one was glad. But as good as things may seem for Dill, I want to explore how Park weaves in the threads of Dill’s struggle.

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.