Betty

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel is a novel based on the childhood of the author’s mother, Betty. The story is fictional but loosely tied to McDaniel’s mother’s real life, even using the names of her family members. McDaniel grew up in Circleville, Ohio, a town similar to the fictional Breathed where the novel takes place. Betty was originally published in 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

This guide refers to the Kindle edition published in 2020.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism, colonialism, violence, bullying, physical abuse, animal cruelty and death, depression, self-harm, attempted suicide, child sexual abuse and rape, incest, termination of a pregnancy, drug addiction and overdose, anti-gay bias, a lynching, death, and murder.

Plot Summary

Betty’s father, a Cherokee man named Landon Carpenter, marries Betty’s mother, a white woman named Alka, after they sleep together in a graveyard. Alka’s father beats Alka when he notices her pregnancy, and Landon cuts her father’s soul out of his nose before marrying Alka. Years later, Betty is born to Alka and Landon in Arkansas. She is the fourth of their eventual six children. After white mineworkers shatter Landon’s knee in a racist attack, they leave Arkansas and travel around the United States for two years. When Betty is six, they return to Breathed, Ohio, a town near where Landon and Alka met. They settle in an old, deteriorating house that the town believes is cursed. Landon plants a garden in the backyard and builds a stage, teaching his children about their Cherokee heritage. In the Cherokee tradition, only women were powerful enough to plant, and they used the stage to sing to protect the garden. The girls play, sing, and write at the stage, which they call “A Faraway Place.”

Throughout the story, the local newspaper The Breathanian reports mysterious gunfire that haunts residents at night. With their eldest brother, Leland, away in the Army, Betty and her siblings, Fraya, Flossie, Trustin, and Lint, go about their daily lives, playing in the creek, making art, and gardening. One day, Alka attempts to die by suicide, and she spends days in the hospital recovering. She has always loved the color yellow and dreamed of owning a lemon grove, and Landon tries to cheer her up by pinning lemons to the trees. Soon after, the sisters steal a jar of their father’s moonshine and accidentally burn down a church. Flossie attributes this to the curse on their house.

At school, both students and teachers mistreat Betty for being Cherokee. One day, a girl named Ruthis, who regularly bullies Betty, claims that Betty has stolen her coin purse. Betty does not have it, but the teacher beats her backside with a ruler until Ruthis finds the purse in her own desk. Landon tries to counter their racism by telling Betty stories to make her feel special.

When Landon gives bark to a woman to relieve her constipation, Alka mentions that the bark can also get rid of babies. The next morning, Fraya is sick and bleeding, and Betty realizes that she tried to use the bark to end a pregnancy. The doctor removes the bark from inside Fraya and takes her to the hospital, where she slowly recovers. When Betty turns nine, Alka tells her that her father repeatedly raped her when she was a child and that her mother let it happen. Betty writes what happened to her mother and buries the story under the stage, not knowing what else to do.

One day after playing with Flossie, Betty sits in the barn and sees Leland rape Fraya, wrapping her hair around a window crank to trap her. Betty says nothing, terrified that people will blame Fraya. Later, when Fraya cuts off her hair, Betty admits what she saw, and Fraya tells her that if she tells anyone, she will die by suicide. Betty writes down Fraya’s story and buries it near her mother’s.

Fraya moves out of their home and into an apartment above the cafe where she works. Flossie gets her period for the first time. She and Betty dance like their Cherokee ancestors to ease her pain. When Alka’s father dies, the family attends the funeral, and Alka’s mother lets her grandchildren inside her house for the first time.

When a stray cat gives birth to kittens in their home, Alka throws the mother cat out the window, killing it. She then picks up the quilt with the litter of kittens inside and smashes it on the ground until the kittens are all dead. She holds Betty’s hands around the quilt and forces her to participate. When Betty sobs and begs her to stop, Alka says that she begged her father to stop, too. She tells Betty that she was as innocent and helpless as the newborn kittens in the quilt when her father raped her and yet nobody stopped him.

As Betty writes at A Faraway Place, Flossie approaches to tell her that she has been raped by a local boy. Betty writes Flossie’s story and buries it with her mother’s and Fraya’s. She walks down the main road of Breathed and gets picked up by a slightly older boy in a car. She kisses him, and when he starts to touch her, she says no, and he stops. She tells him that she wanted to know if the word “no” still meant something.

That summer, Betty works for a woman known as Old Woman Slipperwort, who tells Betty that she’s beautiful and advises her to always be herself.

Betty goes with Trustin to sell his paintings in town, stopping at the home of a woman named Ms. Pleasant, whose face is always covered by a mask. Ms. Pleasant explains to Betty that when she was young, she witnessed an act of evil and did nothing about it. God punished her by disfiguring her face. Leland returns to Breathed, and Betty confronts him for raping Fraya, but he tells Betty that she is just as guilty as he is because she did not stop it. Betty uses her father’s pocketknife to cut his nose open like Landon did to Alka’s father. Unaware of what Leland has done, Landon punishes Betty for attacking her brother. Betty sprints back to Ms. Pleasant’s house and rips off her mask, revealing that her face looks perfectly normal. When Ms. Pleasant looks in the mirror, she sees her face as horribly disfigured.

The sisters often climb up the town’s water tower to swim, and Trustin waits at the bottom because he is afraid of heights. Betty gives him leaves to use as wings so that if he falls, he can fly. When the sisters come down, they find him sprawled out and bleeding at the bottom of the ladder, and he dies before they can get help. Betty tries to write about what happened, but all she can say is that she killed him.

Landon begins to drink more moonshine after Trustin’s death. One night, Betty finds him outside asking the sky why it took his son away. She confesses that she killed Trustin, and Landon assures her that it was not her fault.

At school, the white children harass Betty, and the boys lift up her skirt, so she decides to wear shorts. The principal tells her that wearing shorts attracts attention from men and that her Cherokee ancestors were conquered because they gave women too much power.

One day while gardening, Leland ruins their corn, and Betty nearly tells her father what she saw, but Fraya destroys the garden and slits one of her wrists to stop her. Meanwhile, Flossie meets a man from a rich family in Breathed, and her mother encourages her to have his baby to ensure access to his money. She succeeds in this and promptly marries him but hates pregnancy and motherhood.

Betty spends an evening with Fraya, and on her way home, she finds an owl crucified on a barbed-wire fence. A woman helps her save the owl. She returns to Fraya’s apartment to tell her about it, but Fraya is already asleep. The next morning, Betty sees that Fraya is dead. On the way home, she realizes that the owl is still stuck in the barbed wire, and there is no sign of the woman she saw the night before. It turns out that Fraya died from an allergic reaction because her hand was stuck in a jar with a bee. The police rule it a suicide. Leland leaves town after Fraya’s death, and Lint and Flossie make excuses not to join Betty and her father to scatter Fraya’s ashes around Breathed.

At age 17, Betty takes her writing more seriously and begins to see herself as beautiful. One day, Flossie ties her son Nova’s shoelace to the tracks as a train approaches. When Betty finally convinces her to save Nova, the train stops in front of them just in time. The next week, Nova falls from the bed and sustains a brain injury. Flossie goes to Hollywood to follow her dreams, leaving her son with her mother-in-law. Flossie becomes addicted to drugs and dies of an overdose years later.

One day, Betty and her father are sitting in the woods and telling stories when blood starts dripping from Landon’s nose. They say that they love each other before he tells her to leave Breathed. The next chapter reveals that this actually did not happen and tells the true story of Landon’s death, in which he collapses in their home, bleeding profusely from his mouth, and dies in the hospital. When Leland appears for the funeral, Betty tells him that his real father is their Grandpappy Lark. She shows him the story of what his father did to Alka and then the story of what she saw him do to Fraya. Leland admits that he killed Fraya because she was pregnant and wanted to keep the child. Betty points a shotgun at him, and Lint emerges to throw rocks at him. Betty says that the flames of hell are already upon him, and he begs for help as he feels their burn. Neither Betty nor Lint help him, and he eventually drives away. At Landon’s funeral, people tell stories about his kindness and love. Soon after, Betty decides to leave Breathed. Lint chooses to stay to continue his father’s business and look after Alka.