January 13, 2022 37She follows up with a description of her
own early fascination with copulation,
which is just as unsparing, casually ad-
mitting that she and her younger broth-
ers enjoyed “watching and talking
about animals in their sex acts, and... I
was quite as interested in our childish
efforts at sexual intercourse as they
were.” That degree of honesty is Bea-
sley’s mission throughout the book.
She addresses every physical sensation,
including the “contraction or move-
ment in the region of my sexual organs,
which was nothing more or less than sex
desire,” and moments of corresponding
guilt or shame.
After the umbrage of her opening,
she records her consciousness of phys-
icality in a remarkably matter- of- fact
manner. She notes as well the process
of learning to suppress such feelings,
beating down sensual daydreams with
“mental blows like those of my father’s
sledgehammer against the anvil.” She
candidly acknowledges having a score
to settle with her brothers yet relates
their escapades in the same tone that
she uses to describe church meetings.
When her mother whipped one brother
for having sex with a cow or another
for making free with the hens, leaving
“their rectums torn and bleeding,” it
was just another day in the life.What’s more, she refuses to make a
joke of herself or the grotesqueries of
her family, and her direct tone prevents
this book from becoming a forerunner
to the weird American vogue for com-
edies about enormous broods, such as
the 1940s best sellers The Egg and I,
Betty MacDonald’s rural memoir in
which the fecund couple are the hillbil-
lies Ma and Pa Kettle, and Cheaper by
the Dozen by the siblings Frank and Er-
nestine Gilbreth, retailing life among
a family of twelve. Fascination with
profuse human litters continues today,
with reality television gawking at the
Duggars, a Baptist family in Arkansas,
in 19 Kids and Counting. That show, as
Beasley herself could have predicted,
was canceled after it emerged that their
eldest son had sexually molested some
of his sisters.
At a time when large farming fam-
ilies were still common, Beasley was
mortified by the size of hers and espe-
cially by their vulgarity of speech and
behavior. Despite the presence here
of western elements—covered wagons
and dryland farming—this family had
none of the modest airs and graces of
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s. Lucy, Beasley’s
ma, constantly raged over her husband’s
failure to provide, because Beasl ey’s
pa, like Wilder’s, wasn’t much of a
farmer. His daughter recalls his griping
about the grass being “too dry, or the
summers too hot, or the cotton crop
too little.... Something or other was
always wrong with the big central taps
of the resources of life.” This pa drank;
he played the fiddle missing three fin-
gers from his left hand after blowing
them off with a six- shooter, and he had
a habit of expectorating on the walls
and urinating outside the front door.
He regularly abused his children and
livestock, whipping an old mare with a
chain until one of her eyes popped out,
beating his sons “with as little concern
as though they were cast iron,” flaying a
daughter until she defecated blood.
On several occasions he struck or
choked his wife, and Lucy, for her part,
delivered “slaps and thrashings” to thechildren. Not without reason, Lucy was
“obsessed,” according to her daugh-
ter, with the notion that her husband
intended to kill her. After the birth of
their tenth child, she begged him to
desist, whereupon he denounced her
in terms the current Texas legislature
would surely admire: “There’ll be more
wimmen in hell for trying to keep from
having babies than for any other one
thing.”
It was Lucy Beasley’s exhaustion,
fearing that she would die if she had
any more children, that precipitated
the breakup of the family. After re-
covering from her thirteenth birth (it
emerged later that she had also had
three abortions, though we never hear
the details), Lucy prevailed on two
of the older girls to sleep in bed with
her, guarding against further marital
duties with a poker and a shovel. Not
long after, she and the children left
her husband on the farm, ostensibly to
pick cotton for the season, promising
to return. Instead, borrowing money
to supplement the cotton proceeds,
she bought a small house in Abilene,
moved the children there, and filed for
divorce, an act considered so shocking
in the community that Gertrude could
not bring herself to say the word even
as an adult. In response to questions,
Lucy and her children would imply that
William Beasley had died, saying, “He
is not living,” a euphemism for “He
is not living with us.” While her ex-
husband was still alive, Lucy described
herself on one census form as widowed.
A year or so after the split, the
household was again thrown into tur-
moil: Lucy received an urgent call say-
ing that Willie, the eldest daughter, was
“dying” in a town twenty miles away. It
transpired that she was actually giving
birth in a house of prostitution, having
sought shelter there after being “ru-
ined” by a man who had promised to
marry her. She and the “bastard” were
instantaneously banished by Lucy,
amid loud laments that the family was
now “disgraced.”
While relaying these tumultuous
scenes, Beasley begins to analyze her
intense physical and emotional sen-
sitivity, ranging from tears and trem-
bling to “nervous prostrations” and
delirium, a fear that her body might
fall “into pieces.” She attributes her
nerves not only to the mayhem at home
but to her will to succeed in school, an
ambition she steeled herself to pursue
even when it exposed her to the mock-
ery and jealousy of her siblings, none of
whom shared it.
The family’s financial situation grew
perilous, with Lucy peddling vegeta-
bles from a cart, taking in boarders,
and sending her children out to pick
berries or cotton, exposing her daugh-
ters to further sexual harassment. The
Beasley girls were fondled or molested
by males aside from their brothers, in-
cluding a preacher and the one- armed
proprietor of the berry- picking opera-
tion, who tried to rape Gertrude’s older
sister Emma in the middle of the night,
excusing himself (after she threatened
to “knock hell out of him”) by recalling
the eldest sister’s degradation.
The word “whore” assumed immense
power in their lives. At eleven or twelve,
Beasley found herself practically par-
alyzed by shame, waiting inside the
school outhouse with her teacher to use
the “privy,” when she spotted a fresh
obscenity carved in large letters on a
wooden seat: “Fuck me you whoar.”Teacher or whore seemed to be the two
likeliest roles available to her. Given
her mother’s travails, the third option,
wife and mother, had no appeal. In later
life, despite temptation, she adamantly
refused to allow any of her many suit-
ors to so much as kiss her. “A ll the trou-
ble in the world came through kissing,”
she writes.Beasley’s pursuit of an education was
an epic task of physical heroism, con-
ducted amid the domestic equivalent of
the Augean stables. As a young child,
she was assigned to do the “disgusting
washing” for her two next- youngest
siblings:I had stood over whole tubfuls...
and shaken off the worst in the
water; then secured a tub of clean
water and continued until the ba-
by’s diapers were rid of all their
dung and ready to be washed with
the other things.Until the age of twenty- two, she “con-
sumed all my surplus energy” in such
perpetual household tasks, washing
and ironing before breakfast, after
school, and on Saturdays. “How much
I have washed!” she cries at one point.
Her hatred of her older brothers was in-
tensified by their refusing to help, even
when out of work.
Keeping up with her studies along-
side such labors led to breakdowns: fits
of weeping and a delirious collapse at a
school graduation exercise. Nonetheless,
she pressed on, winning a scholarship to
attend a Christian academy, earning her
first teacher’s certificate at seventeen,
and completing a bachelor’s degree at
Simmons, a local college. By the time
she was twenty, she was the chief finan-
cial support of the family, teaching in
tough rural schools, proving her mettle
by whipping a seventeen- year- old boy
for “making obscene pictures.”
At twenty- one she moved to Chi-
cago, where she spent five years teach-
ing and studying for a master’s degree
in education at the University of Chi-
cago. There she heard Margaret Sanger
speak on contraception and the birth
control movement, becoming an aco-
lyte. When she learned that an older
sister was expecting, she was appre-
hensive, writing that “it was a terrible
thing to bring a human being into the
world under any circumstance; a trag-
edy, yes, a crime to bring one unloved,
unwanted.”
In other ways she was not progres-
sive: racist attitudes she absorbed as
her mother’s child (Lucy was raised on
an Alabama plantation where her fa-
ther was the overseer) were challenged
by friends and fellow students when she
saw fit to defend the Texas taste for mob
violence, earning her the nickname
“Lyncher.” “Ain’t your people civilized
yet?” one asked, and she decided to
adopt northern ways “in Yankee land,”
jumping into a swimming pool with
“negro girls.” It’s unclear, however,
how open- minded she became.
Even as she achieved success, she
railed against authority, denouncing
the Chicago School System, where she
taught, as “a perfect hell of lies and stu-
pidities,” symptomatic of larger evils.
“America is the land of murderous
institutions,” she wrote, throwing her
lot in with the Socialists. In 1919, after
earning her master’s degree, she went
to teach in Bellingham, Washington,Closing the Chasm
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