Betty

The Prologue begins with “I’m still a child, only as tall as my father’s shotgun” (3), introducing a motif that runs throughout the story: a juxtaposition between the innocence of childhood and the violence that surrounds Betty. This motif appears again in the first line of Chapter 1: “A girl comes of age against the knife” (7). In the Prologue, she measures her height against a gun in the same way that she later measures time against the death and tragedy of her youth.

Betty’s story starts before she is born, when her parents meet, reflecting the lessons she has learned from her father about Storytelling as an Expression of Love. Because it is an expression of love, her story does not begin with herself. Instead, it begins at the moment her parents meet and her family begins, characterizing her parents as people before their identities become eclipsed by their parenthood. The first chapter foreshadows the secret of Leland’s birth revealed later in the story: At this point, it appears that Alka is so immediately smitten with Landon when she meets him in the graveyard that she immediately has sex with him and becomes pregnant. The truth—only revealed much later in the novel—is that when she meets Landon, she is already pregnant with her father’s child, the product of rape, and that she is looking for a more suitable father for the baby she is carrying. By withholding this information for now, Betty increases the dramatic impact of its revelation later while allowing her parents’ genuine love to develop without the shadow of this secret hanging over it.

Landon’s first act as Betty’s husband is to take revenge on her father for his years of abuse. The method of this revenge—attempting to cut out the man’s soul through his nose—illustrates the importance of storytelling to Landon’s character. The idea that the soul resides in the nose is not merely symbolic to him: Myth has a home in the physical world and impacts physical reality. This worldview will continue to characterize him throughout the novel. This act of violence against Alka’s father establishes him as the antithesis of this evil man. At this point, Landon has no idea of the extent of Alka’s father’s abuse. He only knows that he hit his daughter, and he finds this so offensive that he is willing to kill him if Alka so desires. His act of violence against Alka’s father is symbolic as well as actual—it takes away her father’s power over her, removing this malevolent presence from her life and replacing it with his own kind and supportive presence.

When Betty witnesses the aftermath of the miners’ racist violence against her father, she turns to storytelling, writing with her crayon on the exterior of the car where she hides. This is the first of many instances in which Betty turns to writing to make sense of the violence in the world around her. This is also the first time Betty realizes that many people do not see her father as the infallible figure that he is to his children. For the white miners, Landon’s Cherokee heritage is not a reason to respect him but rather a reason to hurt him. As always, Landon makes up an invisible enemy to protect his children from the truth—he tells Betty that they released a cave monster at the mines. Despite seeing the truth, Betty is still too young to face it, and she writes a happy ending in which her father slays the cave monster.