by Samiksha Ransom
“I envy you, Betty. You’re free as a plant.”
~ Tiffany McDaniel, Betty
Tiffany McDaniel’s Betty, published by Knopf in 2020, is the coming-of-age, coming-of-voice story of Betty Carpenter. Given the environment in which the author’s mother grew up, the story blends truth and fiction. Betty narrates the story of the women (and men) in her family. “That’s my family. Milk and honey and all that old-time bullshit.” In the process, she unravels the truth about a cruel world that is eager to snatch even an ounce of power that a woman might have earned for herself. In such a world, a Cherokee woman is doubly disadvantaged for being a woman and a Cherokee. She is perceived by the world not for who she is, but rather for who she is not: a man and White. But as a young girl, Betty finds comfort in this – her father says she is wonderful because she’s Cherokee, his “little Indian.”
As she grows older, she realizes that colonisation not only skewed the manner in which White people view the Cherokee, especially women, but also how Cherokee women are viewed by men in their own community. Before colonisation, the Cherokee, matrilineal and matriarchal, believed in the power of women and nature. Women were powerful. Post-colonisation, just like White men, Cherokee men too gradually erased Cherokee women’s social status, identity and power. Betty’s mother, Alka, describes this ‘new world’ as a place where any man has the power to decide a woman’s fate. She describes this power imbalance as “just a glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowin’ tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin’ back against a wall, watchin’ a girl walk by on her way home, knowin’ she’ll never get there.” Yet Alka seems to believe in some sort of agency that a woman might possess. She says, though “a girl comes of age against the knife,” the “woman she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her.” Alka herself is never able to dare herself to fly, break the glass or speak the language of freedom. In fact, in her efforts to purge her pain, she dumps it on Betty. “I had my father’s eyes, but now my mother’s pain.”
As life goes by it portions out to Betty her own share of pain. When Ruthis, her dear friend-for-a-day and potential-friend-for-life, begins to taunt her at school because she is Cherokee, Betty is deeply hurt. When Alka acts out what her own pappaw did to Alka as a child, Betty is stupefied. At the age of nine, when Betty does not know the word for rape, she witnesses her elder brother Leland rape her elder sister. Pain paralyses her, claims her voice, and numbs her into silence. So, when her classmates search for her ‘tail’, calling her a ‘monkey’, though she burns with rage, Betty lacks the words to articulate it, let alone defend herself. And who can speak when their mother slits her wrists in the kitchen on a boringly pleasant morning in February?
But Betty isn’t the only one in her family to lose her voice to pain – Fraya tells no one about what Leland did to her, and Alka, too, has probably not even told her husband, Landon, about what her pappaw did to her while her mother shut the door and prepared chicken for her father. But it’s not that the victims do not speak at all; it is just that they speak a different language. For Alka, it’s the language of abuse, anger and erraticity she displays towards Betty. Fraya finds her voice in firing gunshots into the nothingness of the woods every night. The noise frightens the residents of Breathed so much that the newspapers notice it. Fraya also finds her voice in the song she sings to herself in the garden – “At five years old, the little girl cries, the wolf has arrived to eat her alive.”
In the midst of all this pain, life does also seem to bear big bright yellow sparkling joy, the color of fresh lemons still ripe on the tree. Her father, Landon is the best she could have. In Betty’s words, he “was meant to be a father.” Landon speaks of being Cherokee as a wonderful thing, tells Betty wondrous stories of the Fantastical Eye of Old and A Faraway Place that she knows not to be true, yet believes because, “Through his stories, I waltzed across the sun without burning my feet.” According to Betty, despite the troubles between her father and mother, Landon “was meant to be a husband, too.” On Alka’s first meeting with him, when she spoke to Landon about owning a whole grove of bright and beautiful lemons, he listened carefully. “How can you not be happy with all that yellow?” So, when she attempts suicide and survives it, Landon takes the family out for a picnic under the trees. When Alka looks up to the trees, she finds “lemons dangling from maples, oaks, and sycamores, elms, walnuts and pines. Trees that had never in their life borne such yellow fruit.” She gasps, “You gave me my beautiful yellow world.”
As Betty grows up witnessing the pain of her mother and sister, as well as her own, she begins to resent and question the situation, while also daring to feel the pain. Eventually, what Fraya and Alka do not – cannot – do, Betty does. She gives shape to her pain and the pain of the women in her family. She cradles, articulates, and confronts it. She not only fires gunshots in the woods in Fraya’s memory after Fraya’s death, she also writes the stories of her mother and sister. In fact, when Leland returns home for Fraya’s funeral, Betty reads them to Leland. Patting her chest she proudly challenges, “You can’t destroy her story, Leland. I keep it here.” When Betty runs into Ruthis on the street, she hugs and grants her the forgiveness that Ruthis didn’t ask for. With such release, Betty begins to feel that “god exists in little ways we don’t always see unless we happen to be looking at the very moment a sister dares the demons and reminds you that not all paradises__ have gone just yet.” Those paradises and demons are presented by Betty in a manner that seems like the fulfilment of a vow: “And one day, when I write this story, you’ll open the book and find small slivers of mirror. Not everywhere, just over the names I’ve given the devil. When you collect the slivers and put them together, it’ll be your reflection that you see.” A novel of extraordinary force, Betty is a novel to re-read whenever one needs strength, especially when one needs, in spite of the demons of one’s world, something bright, happy and fresh, soft and gentle, like a beautiful yellow world curled up in a sliver somewhere in a corner of this world.
