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Francesca Caramazza

ESEM Changing Our Story

Anne Dalke

10/21/16

Getting Mother’s Body Essay Rough Draft

Suzan-Lori Parks’ novel, Getting Mother’s Body follows the travels of Billy Beede, a 16-year-old girl searching for money to use to get an abortion.  Every chapter of the book is from a different character’s perspective and shows a continual progression of the story.  One of the most commonly seen narrators is Billy and many of the other characters speak to give insight on Billy’s life.  As all these different characters get their chance to express their ideas and move the story along, the question arises about whether they are all individualized characters, or if Parks is the only real narrator.  I believe that even though the author speaks for all of the different characters, they all have unique voices.

Dear Ms. Lori-Parks, 

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 was a very interesting character. 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 opposite in many ways and her actions highlight Billy’s key personality traits.  

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.

Rosa Nanasi Haas

Exhibiting Africa

Monique Scott

Oct. 21, 2016

Edun Ara Oshe Shango (Axe Dance Wand)

One of the most prominent features of the novel Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks is that it is strikingly similar to As I Lay Dying, the famous stream of consciousness novel by William Faulkner. The stories are, in fact, almost identical. It is quite bold to model your debut novel after a so famous and widely critiqued novel, and the reasoning behind such a choice is not quite certain. However, I will make the case that Parks’ modeling of her own story after Faulkner’s highlights the struggles that the Beede family must endure due to their race, as well as the motivation that drives Billy Beede to change her fate.

“Everyone’s got a Hole. Ain’t nobody ever lived who don’t got a Hole in them somewheres. When I say Hole you know what I’m talking about, dontcha? Soft spot, sweet spot, opening, blind spot, Itch, Gap, call it what you want but I call it a Hole.” (Parks p.30-31) The word that I will like to draw upon from this quote is the term, somewhere. Billy Beede says that everyone has a hole in them somewhere, but what if it’s not just a matter of somewhere, but someone.  Everyone is this novel has a hole in them somewhere, but for Dill Smiles his hole was someone.

The main reason I chose our classroom as our meeting place was that we needed to meet with another section within the class. Probably somewhere else near Taylor Hall would be nice, but the weather report stated that it would be raining during our class time (though we found out it actually did not).

I did not like having class in Taylor in the beginning of the semeter because the light in the room made my eyes feel uncomfortable. Since the week before, Han Bin took us back to our classroom, I found out that our classroom was not unbearable as I used to think. It actually brought back some different feelings as we were sitting on classroom chairs rather than cozy sofas.

I thought that this book was very interesting. I especially enjoyed the complex relations all the characters had with each other. This was especially so with the relationships between Dill, Billy, and Willa Mae. These relations were even more intriguing because of the pseudo family relationship of father, daughter, and mother that these three had. The love-hate relationship between all of these three created a complicated story with very complicated characters.