There’s a good chance you haven’t read a family saga likeBetty.
The novel, a BEA buzz pick, is set for release on Aug. 18.
Below, an excerpt lays the groundwork for the family readers will soon know intimately.
Credit: Knopf
Matthew 7:18
When the first snow of each new winter came, my mother would go into the parlor.
My mother sits in this chair after opening all the windows.
She’s wearing her prettiest housedress.
A pale pink one with clusters of tiny cream and bright blue flowers.
I’m certain the flowers count out to any odd number.
Her toes curl as she rests her right foot on top of her left.
Depending on which way the wind is blowing, the snow comes in.
At first the flurries melt before they land.
Then they pile lightly like dust, bringing their cold in.
I can see my mother’s breath and the way her skin prickles.
This is winter to me.
My mother sitting in a spring dress in the middle of the parlor while the snow comes in.
Dad running in and closing the windows in between wrapping a blanket around her.
This is winter to me.
Houses are built in the beginning by the father and the mother.
Some houses have roofs that never leak.
Some are built of brick, stone, or wood.
Hands of flesh, bone, and blood.
But other things, too.
My father’s hands were soil.
My mother’s were rain.
No wonder they could not hold one another without causing enough mud for two.
And yet out of that mud, they built us a house that became a home.
This blue-eyed son was named Leland.
“He’s got her blonde hair.”
“Her paleness.”
“Her cupid’s bow.”
With their new son, Mom and Dad decided to settle in Breathed, Ohio.
It was the town Dad had grown up in after his family’s move from Kentucky.
He thought it would be a nice place to raise his own family.
“So my children can be as strong as the river,” he said.
Five years after Leland came Fraya, in 1944.
“God gave Leland to us to be our older brother,” Fraya once said.
“I can’t think God was wrong.”
When I remember Fraya, I conjure the blur of a thousand swinging lights.
“Sweet as honey,” Fraya would say.
As she grew each passing year, Dad would hold up her arms.
“You’re my measurement,” he told her.
“Why am I your measurement?”
Fraya always asked, even though she knew what he was going to say.
“Because you’re important.”
He would stretch her hands out to either side of her.
“You’re my centimeter, inch, and foot.
The distance between your hands is the distance that measures everything between the sun and the moon.
Only a woman can measure such things.”
Fraya asked to remind herself.
“Because you’re powerful.”
In 1945, Fraya became an older sister when Yarrow was born.
After Dad plunged Yarrow into the river, he caught a crawdad.
He lightly scratched the crawdad’s claw against Yarrow’s palm.
“So you will always have a strong grip,” Dad told Yarrow.
From that time on, Yarrow grabbed everything.
Beads from out of Dad’s pocket.
Yarrow would grip onto these things so tightly, Dad called him Crawdad Boy.
I never got the chance to call him this myself.
A nut was lodged in his throat.
Perhaps he thought the nut, with its shiny brown exterior, was a piece of hard candy.
After he was covered with dirt sown with yarrow seeds, Mom and Dad packed up Leland and Fraya.
They couldn’t bear to live in a state whose symbol was the buckeye tree.
Once they left, they moved from place to place.
Mom seemed to get pregnant in one state, just to have the child in another.
In 1948, she nearly died delivering Waconda on the bank of the Solomon River in Kansas.
Dad reckoned the baby weighed fourteen pounds when she was born.
The afterbirth came before Waconda.
Dad tried to stuff it back in, or at least that’s how the story goes.
That’s what her name translated to.
Our Spirit Water lived for ten days and cried for each of them.
Dad tried to release the cry by rubbing Waconda’s throat with an earthworm.
Come night, Mom would rock Waconda, hoping to nurse her to sleep.
Nothing seemed to help.
The day in question, Waconda was crying in her cradle.
“Waconda, like be peaceful,” he said.
“All this cryin' is gonna give you a watery soul.”
Mom was in the bedroom using a cotton ball to apply witch hazel to her face.
“Won’t the child ever shut up?”
Mom asked her reflection in the mirror.
Nine-year-old Leland and four-year-old Fraya were on the living room floor, making sheep out of more cotton balls.
They both shouted, covering their ears.
Then, it was quiet.
In the silence, Waconda was found with a cot- ton ball stuffed into her mouth.
Three years later, in 1951, another daughter came into the family.
Flossie was Mom’s easiest delivery.
“The girl came right out.”
Flossie always was eager to make her grand entrance.
“Ain’t no doubt I was born to be special, too,” Flossie later said.
“Most babies are born in some silly bed or the back of a stupid car.
But me, I was born on a staircase.
Despite it not being true, Flossie would claim she shared a birthday with Carole Lombard.
Sometimes it was Lillian Gish, Irene Dunne, or Olivia de Havilland.
In Flossie’s mind, she was only ever a song and dance away from fame.
“Come with me,” she’d say, “if you want, Betty.”
Little ol' me.
I was born in 1954 in a dry claw-foot bathtub in Arkansas.
In the face of Flossie’s jealousy, I was named after Bette Davis.
“She made me so nervous,” he said, “my belly filled up with butterflies.
I could feel ‘em flutterin’ from one side of me to the other.
It was like I had inhaled a wind that never settled.
To calm myself, I drank the glass of milk Bette handed me.
With her knowledge or without it, the milk was ill with whatever ills milk.
To have a nauseous butterfly in one’s stomach is not a good idea.”
Dad rubbed his belly in remembrance.
This butterfly had a fever high enough to make me feel I had lit a candle in my stomach.
The butterfly got caught in that web and my belly was ever so happy.
The spider is still inside me.
My tummy is its home now.
I wonder if God shouldn’t have given us all spiders in our stomachs.”
Hiss, hiss, speak, girl, speak.
The rattlesnake bit him when he removed it from under my blanket.
After sucking the venom from his veins, Dad cut the snake’s head off.
He buried the head in a hole as deep as his arm.
Shake, shake, rattle, rattle, speak, speak.
My father’s hair was black.
His skin was brown like the beautiful mud-bottom rivers he swam in.
Shadows lived in the angles of his cheeks.
His eyes were the color of the powder he made out of walnut hulls.
He gave these features to me.
The earth stamped on my soul.
He gave these things to me.
“They’ll call you worse, Betty,” he said.
“But what is cherry key?”
He made his lips open funny when he said theoso I giggled.
“Cherry key,” I said again, repeating it until I got it right.
“But what is it?”
“Cherokee is you,” he said, putting me on his lap.
From out of his pocket, he pulled a small piece of deerskin.
“It looks like a dog’s back.”
I petted the side that had fur.
“It does, don’t it?”
he asked before turning the skin over to point out the strange lettering written on the smooth side.
The ink was blue and blurring on the edges, as if water was taking the writing away.
“This is what it looks like to write Cherokee, Betty,” he said.
“My momma was given this skin by her mother.
Momma would be able to breathe again.”
He inhaled until his chest filled.
When he let the breath go, he blew the small hairs around my crown.
“I can’t read it.”
I ran my tiny fingers over the fading words.
“They’re written funny.
What do they say?”
“They say don’t forget who you are.”
“Did your mother forget who she was?”
“Is that why she needed to be reminded?”
“We would have to say we were Black Dutch.”
“What’s that?”
“A dark-skinned European.”
“Why couldn’t we say we were cherry key?
I mean Cher-o-kee.”
“Because it had to be hidden.”
“But, why?”
“Cherokees were bein' moved off their land and onto reservations.
But you’re able to only lie to yourself for so long before it wears ya down.
She had to remind herself who she truly was.”
I looked up at him.
“Who am I?”
“You’re you, Betty,” he said.
“How can I be sure?”
“Because of who you come from.
You come from great warriors.”
He laid his hand against my chest.
“You come from great chiefs who led nations to both war and peace.”
I would sometimes dream of these ancestors.
I waited for these voices to beat me alive.
Two years after I was born, I became an older sister.
My little brother Trustin was born in Florida in 1956.
When Dad was dunking him in the river, a bass swam by and struck Trustin’s backside.
Dad said it would make his son a good swimmer.
When Trustin got old enough, he would dive into the water.
He loved the splash and the way the water spotted the rocks on the bank.
“It’s like a paintin',” he said, always finding images in the splash marks.
“The kind of paintin' that goes away when it dries.
It reminds us nothin' lasts forever.”
A year later, in 1957, Mom delivered another son they decided to name Lint.
They said he was Mom’s midlife crisis baby.
“Mom’s crisis seeped into him.”
Trying to understand Lint was like trying to find your way out of dark woods.
All we knew was that he became easily upset.
If he ate too much or spoke too loudly, he worried we would send him away.
He grew increasingly concerned Mom and Dad would not stay together.
With that, Dad took the placenta from Lint’s birth and buried it six feet deep.
He covered it with stones to ensure Lint would be the last.
He would say that this human and this life are
bound together as a reflection of one another.
“Some people are as beautiful and soft as peonies, others as hard as a mountain.
He playfully scratched our arms until we laughed.
He bent his fingers like spider legs before making a buzzing sound with his tongue against his teeth.
“Bzzzzz.But too many are as bothersome as pesky attic flies.Bzzzzz.”
He flew his finger through the air.
“We moved our fingers with his.
“What are we like, Dad?”
“Well, us Carpenters are like berries.
Rich, juicy berries that grow deep in the woods.
Excerpted fromBETTYby Tiffany McDaniel.
Copyright 2020 by Tiffany McDaniel.
