Summary
A story told in multiple voices, Bloodroot follows the bloodline of the Lamb family through three generations of women in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Guided by blind passion, the women of the novel pursue love with abandon but always return to nature and to each other for final refuge.
The plot of Bloodroot centers on Myra, a free-spirited girl who grows into a troubled adulthood, but the novel begins with the story of Myra’s grandmother, Byrdie Lamb.
Byrdie is raised in a small rural village called Chickweed Holler, where she lives with her mother, grand-mother and two great-aunts. The generations of women form a tight-knit and loving unit, separate from the life of the other families in Chickweed Holler.
Life in Chickweed Holler is simple and rustic. Byrdie is happy there, experiencing only occasional hardship as on an overnight trip with one of her great aunts. Itchy feet, interpreted as a wander-lust, have plagued Byrdie her whole life. One night an aunt, Myrtle, takes Byrdie out travelling the countryside. In the dark of night, camping a field, Myrtle presents Byrdie with a chance to see her future lover in the smoke of a campfire. Byrdie is frightened by the potency of the vision she receives when a face appears fully formed in the fire.
The women perform a special service for the community, doing magic to heal and help the people of Chickweed Holler. This makes them venerated outcasts in the community, a special but suspect group.
When Byrdie gets sick, the aunts cannot heal her themselves. Byrdie is taken to a man who has never seen his father, a man named Clifford. By breathing into Byrdie’s mouth, her affliction is healed but the episode holds a greater significance for the family. Clifford, soon nicknamed Pap, falls for Byrdie’s mother and courts her, ultimately marrying her to the delight of Byrdie, who quickly fell in love with him as well.
The family is happy, though Clifford takes Byrdie and her mother to live on his farm in Piney Grove, far away from Chickweed Holler, where they farm and live a quiet life.
As a young teen, Byrdie meets Macon Lamb, eight years older than she is, and falls for him right away. The two meet in church in Piney Grove where Byrdie struggles to gain Macon’s attention. She succeeds and the two soon get married when Byrdie is fourteen years old.
Before marrying Macon, Byrdie steals a blood-red ring from her employers, the Cochran’s, and uses the ring as a wedding ring, giving it to Macon. Byrdie then moves in with Macon on Bloodroot Moutain, where she spends the rest of her life.
Years go by and Byrdie and Macon have five children. Only two of them live into adulthood, but both die before reaching the age of twenty-two. The last child, Clio, is like her mother: headstrong, passionate. She marries a man with whom Byrdie does not approve. Clio has a child, Myra, and dies in a car accident when Myra is still an infant.
Thus, Byrdie and Macon raise Myra as their own.
Also living on the mountain as Myra grows up are two families, the Barnett and Cotter families. The Cotters have two children, Doug and Mark. The Barnett family have no children. Myra grows up playing with the two Cotter boys, both of whom attempt to court Myra. Doug confides in Mr. Barnett often about his feelings for Myra as the two strike up a mentorship.
Through elementary school, Doug and Myra have a special friendship but Myra quickly leaves the friendship behind when she meets...
(This entire section contains 1553 words.)
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John Odom, a beautiful and dark young man from town. Like her mother and grandmother, Myra falls passionately for the man who catches her eye and tries to catch his.
Desperate to draw him to her, Myra follows the taboo recipe she’s heard about in stories from Chickweed Holler: she eats a chicken heart. The rite works, as she hoped it would, and soon John Odom and Myra get married. This time Byrdie has given her blessing to the marriage, but quickly begins to regret Myra’s choice.
Myra is slower to form regrets, but before long she too longs for escape from John Odom who becomes a possessive and abusive toward Myra. Having moved into a run-down house near the train tracks, John and Myra embark on a married life. Myra cooks and cleans and is restricted to the house by John Odom’s rules of marriage, which are strict and patronizing.
Balking initially at these restrictions, Myra tries to learn how to live under John’s rules but under John’s increasingly violent and alcohol-driven depression she fails to achieve balance. When Myra is assigned duties as a house-keeper in Odom’s father’s house, she encounters both depravity and distasteful attitudes that make her wish she had never married John Odom.
John’s younger brother, Hollis, talks to Myra often and pursues her subtly and persistently. When Myra sneaks out of the house to find information about her dead parents, Hollis discovers her and delivers her to John, who beats Myra for the transgression. Myra continues to attempt to find more information about her parents.
She meets her aunt (her father’s sister) and hears an overwhelming story of her parent’s negligence in raising her. Immediately afterwards, Myra accepts a ride from a young man who works for her aunt. Myra asks him to take her to his house outside of town. He reluctantly agrees and the two spend a night together.
When Myra returns home she is punished by John and locked in a lightless, fetid crawl-space beneath the house by the train tracks. This is not the first time she has been forced to endure the crawl-space. On this last occasion, Myra realizes that she is pregnant and escapes from the crawl-space with a plan to leave John for good.
She enters the house where John has passed out, drunk, and Myra decides to take the wedding ring from his finger before she leaves the house. The ring is the same one that Byrdie had given to Macon as a wedding ring and Myra cannot bear the thought of leaving it behind. To get the ring, she has to cut John Odom’s finger off.
Escaping and returning to Bloodroot Moutain, Myra moves in with her grandmother. Myra has babies, twins, while hiding on Bloodroot Moutain, afraid that John Odom will come looking for revenge. He never comes, but Myra refuses to leave the mountain even after the children are born and Byrdie, who has grown quite old, dies.
The children are raised on the mountain, living a rather wild life with Myra and never going far from the rustic and now run-down house where the three live. Descending into a paranoia and quietude, Myra slips further and further away from her children, sometimes leaving them to fend for themselves for whole days when they are as young as six.
The twins are taken away from Myra one day when a pair of old women come to the house and discover the children naked on the floor of the house. The police are called and Myra loses control in a fight, struggling to keep her children safe from the world outside the mountain. Myra is institutionalized and the children enter the foster care system, staying together only for a short period of time.
The male twin, Johnny Odom, is sent to reform school for long stretches and upon being released begins to seek out news of his father and his father’s family. He tracks down his uncle, Hollis, who repudiates Johnny and curses his mother. Johnny gets his revenge by burning down the Odom hardware store.
His sister, Laura, manages to make her it halfway through high school before she meets a young man and falls passionately in love with him. She leaves her foster home and marries the young man, getting pregnant soon after.
When the young man dies, Laura is left to raise the child by herself but she is forcefully removed from the house she shared with her husband by her mother-in-law.
Johnny Odom meets a man who invites him to stay on his property as Johnny has nowhere else to go. Johnny reluctantly accepts and goes to live in a storage shed on the man’s estate outside of town. This is the same man who Myra had met and slept with one night before becoming pregnant.
Johnny has no way to know about this man’s relationship to his mother and stays on the property for months, falling in love with the man’s girlfriend. After a fight, Johnny leaves and seeks out his sister.
He finds her in jail. Laura had pushed a social worker down a flight of stairs when the latter, sent by Laura's stepmother, came to take her baby away. She had fled the scene, leaving the social worker lying injured at the bottom of the stairs.
When Johnny finds Laura she has had her baby taken from her, but the two plan to retrieve the baby and visit their mother for the first time in the insane asylum where she has been for over a decade.
