Betty

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, violence, self-harm, attempted suicide, and child sexual abuse and rape.

“I remember the fierce love and devotion as much as I remember the violence. When I close my eyes, I see the lime-green clover that grew around our barn in the spring while wild dogs drove away our patience and our tenderness. Times will never be the same, so we give time another beautiful name until it’s easier to carry as we go on remembering where it is we’ve come from.”

Betty reflects on the complex nature of her childhood, remembering both the love and the violence that went alongside it. The author uses imagery to build an extended metaphor that describes the loss of childhood innocence. This quote also comments on the nature of remembering—how overarching phenomena are compressed into small images to preserve a memory.

“Didn’t they know this about him? That he was the wisest man in the whole damn county? Possibly the whole world?”

Betty asks these rhetorical questions about her father after she learns that he was attacked by white miners for being Cherokee. The questions demonstrate the naive conviction that a child’s parents are the center of the universe. This represents Betty’s initial mindset, which evolves as she grows up to see her father as human.

“All around, the hills stood like a great exclamation from man to the heavens. Known as the foothills of the Appalachians, the exposed sandstone formed ridges, cliffs, and gorges shaped and cut by glacier melting. Covered in a green mix of moss and lichen, the ancient sandstone was named after the things it resembled. There was the Devil’s Tea Table, Lame Deer, and the Giant’s Shadow. Names handed down to each new generation as if they were as valuable as heirloom jewels.”

This use of imagery brings to life the landscape that surrounds Breathed, Ohio. This description emphasizes the land’s ancient beginnings and its role as a repository of generational memory. By naming the earth, their ancestors brought it to life and passed down their perception of the world, a form of Storytelling as an Expression of Love.