by Vincent, Bev
Susannah Dean, Odetta Susannah Holmes, Detta Susannah Walker, Mia
I am three women . . . I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you saved. [DT2]
When Odetta Holmes was five years old, she was struck in the head by a brick while her family was up north for her aunt’s wedding. They were walking to the train station after a taxi driver refused to pick them up because they were black. Odetta was on the inside of the sidewalk, to keep her from getting too close to the traffic. The police never found out if the brick was dropped deliberately or if it fell by accident. She was in a coma for three weeks, and after she recovered she suffered periodic blackout spells that were the earliest manifestations of a mental schism. The brick may have caused this mental illness, though Odetta may have already been predisposed to it and ka just helped out.
Her tarot card is the Lady of Shadows, she of two faces, symbolized by Janus.
An only child—more or less—Odetta is the daughter of a small-town dentist who became wealthy after patenting several dental processes. After her mother died, Odetta took care of her father until he died of a heart attack in 1962, leaving her heir to a fortune worth $8 to $10 million. She grows up to be a pleasant, socially gracious, refined and cultured young woman. She may not have been educated at Morehouse—a reference to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—but she has a college degree from Columbia.
In the late 1950s, she is inspired to become a civil rights activist by Rosa Parks, but also by her memory of the prejudiced taxi driver. In Oxford, Mississippi, where she allows her friends to call her “Det,” the police aim fire hoses at her group and she’s put in jail. Occasionally resentful of her treatment at the hands of white people, she knows that hate will only hinder her work. “Man of Constant Sorrow” is the avatar of songs that inspires her to the movement.
Though she tells Eddie on the beach by the Western Sea that she has never been with a white man before, she in fact had a white lover named Daryl while at Oxford. All her life she works to gain self-respect, despite the barely suspected saboteur lurking in her mind. She thinks of herself as Negro and is offended by Eddie’s use of the word “black.” Her parents never spoke of their difficult past in the South, even when she became interested in her own background. Her father told her, “I don’t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.”
At the age of twenty-five, she inherits the Holmes Dental fortune. Her home is a luxury penthouse apartment at the corner of Fifth and Central Park West. Perhaps the only black person in the exclusive building, she is literally “above” the others who live there. She’s almost as well known as Martin Luther King. Her face has been on the cover of Time magazine.
The biggest change in her life prior to being sucked into Mid-World in 1964 occurs on August 19, 1959. Though she’s wealthy enough to be chauffeured everywhere, she doesn’t want to become a “limousine liberal,” so she rides the subway. While waiting at Christopher Street station for the fabled A train Duke Ellington held in such high regard,15 someone pushes her. She knows only that it was a white man, not realizing that it was the same man who dropped the brick on her head when she was five—any more than Jack Mort realizes he’s victimizing her a second time. She misses the third rail, but the train cuts off her legs at the knees.
During the ambulance ride, both of her personalities fully manifest as she freely drifts between calm, polite Odetta and foul, vindictive, dangerous Detta Walker, who appeared only infrequently during the years since her head injury.
After she loses her legs, she disappears occasionally, sometimes for hours, days, even weeks, and often returns bearing bruises. A different car brings her back each time. Odetta isn’t aware of these episodes. Her mind fabricates alternate memories that fill in the blanks. She rubs her temples lightly with the tips of her fingers each time Detta threatens to take control.
Detta is Odetta’s mirror opposite. Odetta is a civil rights advocate; Detta Walker hates white people passionately. Detta doesn’t know about the penthouse; Odetta doesn’t know about the dingy loft apartment in Greenwich Village where Detta stays.
Detta is at least partially aware of the vast blanks in her life and suspects something is wrong but doesn’t know what. Compared to Odetta, she has much more missing time to account for. She doesn’t think about it much, though, because when she’s in charge “her needs were too sudden and pressing for any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done. Roland would have understood.”
Detta talks like a cartoon black woman, “Butterfly McQueen16 gone Looney Tunes,” like a cliché. She curses in a gutter patois so darkly Southern that even Eddie can’t understand it. She’s an equal opportunity hater, but she has two primary targets: white people and her aunt Sophia. She blames her aunt because Odetta was hurt while they attended Sophia’s wedding, but she doesn’t consider that the accident is responsible for her existence. Detta objectifies her anger, focusing it on the blue plate her mother gave Sophia as a gift. She steals the “forspecial” plate and crushes it beneath her foot while she masturbates. Susannah Dean will use similar plates as weapons in the Calla. Subtle irony . . . or ka.
To vent her racial anger, she picks up white boys at roadhouses and teases them into a sexual frenzy before cutting them off. It’s a dangerous game, and she’s been beaten a few times, but she prides herself that she has never been raped. Every one has gone home with blue balls, making her the undefeated queen prick tease.
Detta likes to steal trinkets from fancy New York stores. She doesn’t care what she takes—she throws the items away afterward. Taking is what matters. She sees herself as cheap, like the objects she pilfers.
Roland entered Eddie’s mind undetected. Detta recognizes his presence as soon as crosses through the doorway. Her split mind is used to compensating for alien personalities. Roland experiences a sensation “like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.” Detta is intelligent but ruthless, hateful and as deadly as a lobstrosity.
She is heart-stoppingly beautiful, but when Detta is in control her beauty only enhances her interior ugliness. Her grin “seemed the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.” Roland recognizes that she does things purely out of meanness and that her only real goal in life is probably to be killed by a white man—which means that Odetta will die, too.
Though Roland has no understanding of psychology, he unites Odetta and Detta by forcing them to acknowledge each other. When Odetta sees Detta through the doorway—and vice versa—she can no longer deny the other’s existence. While Jack Mort is being cut in half by a subway train, Odetta and Detta divide physically, struggle and reunite as a new entity, who takes the name Susannah, the middle name of both facets of her personality. The name has greater significance: the Hebrew version, Shoshana, means “rose.”17
Odetta was a combination of her parents’ attributes—her mother’s shyness and her father’s unblinking toughness. Susannah has features from both of her previous personalities: Detta’s “fight until you drop” stamina tempered by Odetta’s calm humanity. She is hard and soft, passionate and acerbic, stronger and better than either of her components.
When she shoots she channels Detta, and when stirred to anger it is often Detta’s voice that emerges. During those times, Detta “dances the commala in her eyes.” Often she doesn’t realize it until she replays in her mind what she has just said. She is scared of Detta, but knows that this part of her is shrewd. Detta is the one who solves the riddle of the prime numbers in Lud. Odetta never got better than a C in math in her whole life, and Detta claims she wouldn’t have done that well without her help. “Poitry-readin bitch like her too good for a little ars mathematica, you see?” [DT3]
There are indications that she has more aspects than just these two. When she travels as Mia, Roland hears her speaking in numerous other voices, and when Eddie is shot in
Algul Siento, she flits through an array of personalities. Walter said she has at least two faces.
She has a casual way of speaking and calls her friends “sugar” or simply “sug.” She remembers enjoying some of the things she did as Detta. “I know I’d do it all again, if the circumstances were right.” She loves Eddie, who had loved Odetta, and ritualizes their marriage by taking Dean as her last name. “If she did not call herself Susannah Dean with pride as well as happiness, it was only because her mother had taught her that pride goeth before a fall.”
She is often the voice of calm reason to counter her husband’s brashness. Susannah loves Eddie because he makes her feel whole and freed her from “a foul-mouthed, cock-teasing thief” and “a self-righteous, pompous prig.” She proudly wears on a leather thong around her neck the wooden ring he carved for her. It was a surprise gift, too large for her hand, but she won’t let him make her a new one. Eddie fills the hole in her heart that she believes all people are born with and exist with until they find their true love. She wants so much to bear his child that she dismisses the early signs of her pregnancy, fearing that it is hysterical.
Her feelings for Roland are more ambivalent. Her love for him is a mixture of fear, admiration and pity. The Detta part of her hates him for forcing her into this strange land. She admires his strength and indefatigable single-mindedness. Though she understands him at least as well as he understands himself, he still has the capacity to surprise her.
Susannah is arguably the only member of the ka-tet from New York who doesn’t have to grow up. She’s the oldest, but also the only one who had a well-adjusted childhood. Her parents were an active, loving presence in her life—unlike Jake’s absentee parents—and she doesn’t have the shadow of guilt that Eddie’s mother and brother gifted him with. By the time Roland draws her and unifies her, she is reasonably balanced and mature and rarely descends to the levels of immaturity Eddie is still prone to.
Perhaps ka countered her emotional maturity by breaking her physically. Though she is strong, her missing legs make her vulnerable and she sometimes has to acquiesce to being carried around on a sling. She tolerates this, but in the same way Oy tolerates being carried by someone other than Jake, and there’s always a chance she might bite because though Odetta seems to be permanently gone from her personality, Detta still lurks in the wings.
Roland’s world is Susannah’s birthplace, and is a world where no one calls her names for being black (except Eben Took in the Calla, and she quickly puts him in his place), where she has found love and friendship. She excels as a gunslinger, never lacks for courage, and takes quickly to new weapons, like the Oriza plates she uses against the Wolves and again in Algul Siento. They give her an elemental satisfaction. After she kills everyone in the Fedic Dogan, she’s eager for more, believing that becoming a killing machine is what she was made for.
She likes to play parts—as she does when she pretends to be Roland’s gilly during their first meeting with the Calla-folken—and is aware that an understanding of her psychosis might have illuminated her childhood joy at pretending to be someone else. Exposure to Mid-World enhances her playacting to the level where she can imagine things and make them tangible, like the mental Dogan she creates to control her pregnancy.
Though her unified personality is strong, she meets her match when Mia possesses her to supervise the progress of her pregnancy. Mia cares nothing about Susannah, Odetta or Detta except when she needs them to help with her “new chap.” She implies that one of Susannah’s aspects invited her in, like a vampire is invited into a house. Though Susannah denies Mia’s presence at first, she excuses herself from strategy sessions where Mia might learn things that would compromise the ka-tet’s preparations for the battle against the Wolves.
Susannah knows that Mia lies and doesn’t care for her, but she agrees to help the demon because the baby is hers, too. Little is made of Susannah’s part as Mordred’s mother. She often refers to Mordred as “the other one” without acknowledging her maternity. She feels sympathy for Mordred’s plight while he struggles through the cold after them, but her feelings aren’t maternal. Her genetic influence seems minor, and she is rarely shown contemplating the nature of her child. When she and Mia separate to palaver, the pregnancy follows Mia. Perhaps Mia’s presence prevented her from integrating her motherhood into her personality.
She sympathizes with Mia’s single-minded drive to have a baby, someone to love and raise. Under different circumstances, they might have been friends. “She meant no harm to the universe,” Susannah says of the woman she calls the “body mother.” When she has trouble communicating with Mia—or when Mia has trouble speaking for herself—it is Detta who comes to the rescue. She seems to have a better understanding of the maternal imperative than Susannah does. “Ain’t hardly nothin in the world as pow’ful as a pissed-off Mommy,” she tells Susannah.
After Eddie dies in the battle to free the Breakers, Susannah agrees to continue with Roland and Jake. “Not because I want to—all the spit and git is out of me, Roland—but because [Eddie] wanted me to.” Part of her wants to see the Tower as much as Eddie did. Her destiny, though, doesn’t include reaching the Tower. She accompanies Roland through the hardest part of his journey, but after their encounter with Dandelo, she becomes depressed and has puzzling dreams of meeting Eddie and Jake in New York.
Other than Roland, she’s the only member of the ka-tet to escape death. In her final moments with Roland, she reverts to Detta, whom she often relies on when she wants to distance herself emotionally from a situation.
Though she became a true gunslinger over the course of her time in Mid-World, it causes her only a moment’s anguish to throw away Roland’s gun. She knows that if there is a life ahead for her in the version of New York where fate takes her, she must face it without a weapon. Once it’s gone, she doesn’t pause or look back. She knows ka is working in her favor this time, and the force of ka is enormous.
Susannah takes Eddie Toren’s hand and thinks she will die of joy.
Oy
Take one much-loved family pet, a Corgi with short legs, big ears and expressive eyes, give him a voice and a limited vocabulary and hey-presto! You end up with one billy-bumbler named Oy. [DT6]
Oy is a billy-bumbler, also known as a throcken. He has black-and-gray-striped, silky fur thick enough at his neck to make Jake’s fingers disappear entirely. His gold-ringed black eyes make him look like a raccoon crossed with a badger or woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good measure. He has a sharp, whiskery snout and a toothy grin. His muzzle is dark and his teeth are needle sharp.
Shortly after Jake returns to Mid-World, Oy joins the travelers and adopts Jake. He doesn’t like being carried by anyone except Jake, but he puts up with it when necessary. When Roland carries him while they search for Jake in Lud, the gunslinger feels “his claws splayed against the flesh of his chest and belly like small sharp knives. Then they withdrew.” [DT3]
He is normally shy of strangers, but occasionally surprises Jake by flattening his ears and elongating his neck to improve the petting surface for someone, like Benny Slightman or Reverend Harrigan. He even allows the Roderick Haylis of Cheyvin to pet him outside Algul Siento.
When he joins the group he bears the wound from a bite that looks like it came from another bumbler. Roland believes Oy was driven away by his own pack. He suspects that Oy is one of the few bumblers who remember men and that the others might have decided he was “too bright—or too uppity—for their taste.” His extraordinary chattiness may have provoked the others in his tet to expel him.
His voice is low and deep, almost a bark—“the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.” Usually, he echoes words he overhears, but occasionally says something that seems like original thought. He startles Irene Tassenbaum by swearing, a skill he learned from Eddie, and charms the Calla-folken when he introduces himself by standing on his hind legs, making the ritual foot-forward bow, holding his fr
ont paws palms up and saying, “Oy! Eld! Thankee!”
Good bumblers are supposed to be good luck. They were once very tame but not useful for much other than amusing children and hunting rats. They are faithful, but not as loyal as dogs. In the wild, they are scavengers. “Not dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”
Oy displays emotion and can follow complex commands, such as waking Jake when the moon rises. He emulates some human gestures, like shrugging, but cannot master winking. Jake thinks that Oy can sometimes read his mind. Oy cries when he thinks he’s going to be left behind in the Doorway Cave when the others go through the UNFOUND door.
Some bumblers can add, and Oy can count, as he demonstrates outside Tick-Tock Man’s lair. He’s also capable of independent thought. For example, he knows Jake will be interested to see Ben Slightman and Andy skulking around late at night and brings it to his friend’s attention.
He’s a true member of the tet and proves his courage on several occasions. In the Dixie Pig, he tackles the scuttling black bugs under the table. Callahan believes Oy was bred for this, like a terrier. Susannah, who calls him an idiot savant, says he would have been worthy of the title gunslinger had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. He switches minds with Jake to get past the mind trap, though he has to struggle to maintain Jake’s body’s balance.
After Roland buries Jake, he leaves it up to Oy to either stay at Jake’s graveside and die of starvation or continue the quest. His work with Roland and Susannah isn’t finished; he returns to Roland’s side after a brief period of mourning. Jake gave him instructions just before he died, and Oy abides by his friend’s deathbed wish. He tries to repeat the message to Roland but words fail him. Roland can hear Jake’s voice, though, when he performs a ritual reminiscent of a Vulcan mind meld.
