"My grandma on Daddy's side always said I didn't act like a girl at all, and I ought to stay home learning how to keep a garden and shell peas and do women's work. Grandma would lean forward in her rocker, look at me with no love in her gooey eyes, and say, 'Sue Ellen, how you gonna get a husband you can't cook or clean worth a flip, and don't never do your hair up?"'
Sue Ellen remembers her grandmother's warnings about propriety, but she has always disregarded them. She has a fairly healthy relationship to authority. When Sue Ellen feels convicted by something an authority figure tells her, she will act upon it. Otherwise she will listen, consider, and dismiss respectfully. She's a force to be reckoned with.
“I sat on the shore and looked at May Lynn’s body. It was gathering flies and starting to smell and all I could think of was how she was always clean and pretty, and this wasn’t anything that should have happened to her. It wasn’t like in the books I had read, and the times I had been to the picture show and people died. They always looked pretty much like they were when they were alive, except sleepy. I saw now that’s not how things were. It wasn’t any different for a dead person than a shot-dead squirrel or a hog with a cut throat hanging over the scalding pot.”
Sue Ellen's very personal encounter with the death of her friend leads her to reconsider death. She realizes that death is gross and ugly and inevitable. May Lynn's body, which used to house a beautiful, ambitious soul, now rots the same way a dead animal does.
"Mama, if you had a friend got drowned, and you found her body, and she always wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star, would it be wrong to dig her up after she was buried, burn her to ashes, take them down to Gladewater in a jar, catch a bus, and take her out to Hollywood?"
Sue Ellen is blunt person. When she needs advice, she asks her mom plainly. This sort of unnecessarily shocking outburst is how she invites her mom to join the adventure.
"It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch fo hypocrites across the back of the head."
In a community where the adults abnegate responsibility and hold fast to prejudices, the children appear surprisingly discerning. Sue Ellen clearly understands both love and loyalty as she adamantly defends her friends against the various insults hurled at them by adults they meet along their journey. The violence she describes here is probably also a product of the culture in which she was raised. In fact Sue Ellen herself is intimately familiar with violence as she's watched her father abuse her mother on more than one occasion.
