As the survivor of domestic abuse perpetrated by my, if you had asked me before reading the novel if it was OK to imbue humor into the discourse surrounding domestic abuse, I would have said, “Hell no.” But Casale doesn’t make light of violence; instead, she uses humor as an advocacy tool to illuminate a grim truth: Too often, the legal system rather than abusers. To stay safe and out of prison, women frequently have to (green thumb or not) take matters into their own hands.

If that’s too dark a thought, Casale gets it. “People don’t want to hear about the grim reality of male violence against women and girls,” she writes in her author’s note. “This novel is an attempt to use humor to cut through people’s reluctance to engage.” If readers giggle along as Sally covers her husband’s body in cat litter to dry it out, sprinkling on some rice for good measure—“just like our wedding day!”—then they’re not looking away from domestic abuse. And that’s the whole point.

The Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club never had the pandemic luxury of baking sourdough or tie-dyeing tees. If their common bond was a love of Agatha Christie mysteries—rather than surviving abuse—they might have met in a virtual book club, cementing their friendship over wine-induced theories on how to get away with murder. Instead, they’re tasked with something much more difficult: figuring out how to avoid prison.

Women who claim self-defense against their abusers are than men who shoot strangers under. The law is more willing to side with a man who fires a gun at a nonviolent burglar than a woman who fights back against a husband who’s abused her for (as in Sally’s case) 20 years. That means Sally’s likely at fault, legally, when her husband, Jim, “punishes” her for making his tea too light—by pouring boiling water over her hand—and she reaches for her granny’s skillet to defend herself.

“There is a practical side of self-defense that can be empowering,” says Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of UltraViolet, a feminist advocacy organization. “But the concept is often grounded in a misogynistic idea that women who are harmed are and are solely responsible for their own safety regardless of the circumstances.”

In Sally’s case, the “circumstances” seem pretty clear-cut: Jim attacked her, and she defended herself, accidentally killing him in the process. But “self-defense law was not created with women or victims of abuse in mind,” says Elizabeth Flock, author of . Flock, an Emmy Award–winning journalist whose book examines what happens when, says the “” was “created by and for property-owning white men to protect their so-called ‘castles.’”

If that sounds disgustingly patriarchal,, and outdated, that’s because it is. The law allows deadly force to protect your home but “doesn’t account for women who defend themselves and their bodies against abusers who reside in their home and often have wielded violence for years,” Flock says. The result? “Women claiming self-defense often get convicted of murder or manslaughter, or take and end up spending years in prison.”

������Ƶ years, in fact, than men who kill their female partners. Abusive men who kill women face in prison, while women who kill men——are sentenced to an average of. Unsurprisingly, prisons are filled with .

After Sally fights back, instead of calling the police, she eats some cake. Jim’s rotting on her kitchen floor, no longer capable of telling her she’s too fat or undeserving of treats. So she pours herself a glass of wine, grabs a bag of chips, and takes a bubble bath. The sense of relief and possibility Sally feels in Jim’s absence is overwhelming, so she makes a “be happy” list to extend her serotonin boost (bake! rescue a cat! get a job!). Then her “get rid of Jim” list takes precedence, because if she waited this long to call the police, would anyone really believe she acted in self-defense?

“In a court of law, a woman can put her hand on a bible and swear to tell the whole truth, but if her word isn’t valued, the whole truth may not be heard,” domestic violence court advocate Tonya GJ Prince says. Prince can still remember the haunting screams that pierced the courtroom 20 years ago when a survivor she was assisting played a recording of her violent attack. 

She was seeking a restraining order, but knew that without proof of violence, her request was likely to be denied. Her abuser was—as is often the case—seen publicly as a “nice guy.”

“When the recording ended, no one in the courtroom moved,” Prince recalls. “It was one of those moments where you had to remind yourself to breathe.”

The judge granted the woman’s request for a restraining order, but not without chastising her “dramatic and over-the-top” screams. If that sounds familiar—and sickening—you may remember that Amber Heard’s of was seen not as but of her.

The inherent in our is why an NYPD detective told my mom in the ’90s that the law couldn’t protect us from my father and that our only options were for my mom to either kill him or go into hiding with my sister and me. (She chose the latter, and if this sounds like a Lifetime Movie, it.)

New York didn’t have any stalking laws at the time, so my father—and the hit man he hired—was free to hunt and terrorize us. Unless it became a murder case, there was nothing the cops could do. 

Before we escaped our home in Canada and fled to New York, my father attacked my mom outside his office in Michigan and threw her into oncoming traffic. He spent a single night in jail, and the felony assault case against him was dismissed in less than 30 minutes. Despite my horror-fueled objections, I was forced by court order to visit him. If my mom refused to hand me over, she would be held in contempt and possibly jailed.

Too often, the law protects abusive men and abused women, and the media aids and abets this abuse. Recently, The New York Times when it wrote—then seemingly—that O.J. Simpson’s “world was ruined” after being charged with killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Yet problematic language remains in the paper’s of Simpson’s obituary, which briefly mentions that he Brown Simpson—whom prosecutors said he —yet calls him “congenial” and his marriage “stormy.” The way the press has while is eerily reminiscent of the that failed Brown Simpson—and continues to fail domestic violence survivors 30 years later.

In the U.S. legal system, only dead women—who can’t speak up or defend themselves—are considered. My mom, thankfully, was not a perfect victim. Neither were Amber Heard or any of the members of fictional Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club. These women didn’t only fight back; they survived.

“In this moment, after 100 years of erasure, false narratives, and racism built into the country industry, it’s important to shine a light on the Black co-creation of country music—and creation is the correct word, not influence,” Giddens writes. “Black musicians, along with their working-class white counterparts, were active participants and creators, not empty vessels with good rhythm.”

Sometimes these myths have been weaponized violently. Black country veterans, including , Charley Pride, and have shared their experiences performing in country music spaces, including the racial slurs and threats directed at them. For example, in his 1994 memoir, Pride writes about touring the U.S. South in the late 1960s, where some of the concert venues he played received bomb threats.

As both a Black fan and writer of country music criticism, I’ve thought twice about bringing my child to a country music festival or concert with me, out of fear she might witness or be the target of another fan’s violence. But while criticisms of Beyoncé have sometimes gotten ugly (’s dehumanizing comparison of Beyoncé to a dog peeing against a tree to mark her territory is one particularly vivid example), in the wake of Cowboy Carter, listeners who might not have heard their stories told in mainstream country music are into the genre.

Black country artists, including Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Reyna Roberts, Willie Jones, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, and Shaboozey, who all appear on Cowboy Carter, have seen an uptick in and overall listenership on streaming services. Perhaps we could dub this the “Beyoncé Effect,” a wave that lifts all who surround her, but Beyoncé’s impact goes beyond opening the door wider for a handful of Black country artists. 

Cowboy Carter also opens up conversations about Black creativity and imaginative freedom within country music and beyond, planting the seeds for deeper social change. On the album, Beyoncé cites and performs an expansive history of Black musical creativity, while also bringing her own unique energy and style. Throughout the album, Beyoncé channels Ray Charles’ showmanship and swinging reinterpretations that made his 1962 album, “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” a in the country genre.

You can especially hear her power to freshly reinterpret classics on her version of “Jolene.” We get the sunny optimism of Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” on “Bodyguard,” though it’s tweaked for modern times. (She even sings to her lover, “I could be your bodyguard/ Please let me be your Kevlar (Huh)/ Baby, let me be your lifeguard/ Would you let me ride shotgun?”) On “16 Carriages,” Beyoncé tells a story of lost innocence and sacrifice as a young performer, echoing themes present in Allison Russell’s “Night Flyer,” “Persephone,” and other songs about survival that appear on her 2021 album, “Outside Child.”

On her tender lullaby “Protector,” performed with her daughter Rumi, Beyoncé promises to nurture her daughter’s light: “Even though I know someday you’re gonna shine on your own/ I will be your projector.” I hear a resonance with Black country songwriter Alice Randall’s wonderful “My Dream,” performed by Valerie June and included on the 2024 album, “My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall.” 

We get the muscular country rock spirit of Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” (especially of the song) on records like “Ya Ya” and “Texas Hold ‘Em.” (I can imagine these songs as production numbers in the style of Tina Turner and Beyoncé herself, seeing as Beyoncé performed “Proud Mary” with her icon at .)

And might Beyoncé’s flirty duet with Miley Cyrus, “II Most Wanted,” (“Making waves in the wind with my empty hand/ My other hand on you”) be the sequel (or prequel?) to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a sapphic provocation from the shotgun seat, Luke Combs left behind in the dust? “II Most Wanted” is one of several songs on Cowboy Carter that speak to the centrality of stories of finding love and mobility in Black country, blues, and rhythm and blues music. Whether by horse, train, Cadillac, or Starship, Black music is shaped by stories of leaving, returning, and wandering to places known and unknown.

Beyoncé’s crossing and melding, hybridizing and swirling on this album, has everything to do with reclaiming, an artistic action denied just about any Black artist who wants to make it in country music. For earlier Black artists like Bobby Womack, Millie Jackson, and Joe Tex, there has often been a double standard to “stay in your lane,” while white artists have been free to experiment, as Charles L. Hughes makes clear in his 2015 book, .

Cowboy Carter is a provocation, a new chapter, a clapback. It is not so much a rejection of the past as much as a sometimes-neck-popping conversation with that past, and with that, a rethinking of it. As both an improviser and re-interpreter, Beyoncé carries forward the tradition of African American art-making that is deeply invested in the changing same, bringing new energy to past songs. This spirit of circularity, a key African American aesthetic is evoked in the very first lyrics of the album: “Nothing really ends/ For things to stay the same/ They have to change again.”

In that way, we might see her as continuing a legacy of Black innovation in country music, whether it’s because of the ill fit of the instruments she inherited, the countrypolitan storytelling of Linda Martell, or the sex-positive grooves of Millie Jackson and Tanner Adell.

Ultimately, there is a kind of recovery at the heart of this album—a healing of the spirit of Black innovation in a genre that has worked so hard to repress it: “Hello, my old friend/ You change your name but not the ways you play pretend,” Beyoncé sings in “American Requiem.” A requiem is normally a mass for the dead, a ritual of remembrance. In traditional white and western ways of thinking, the purpose of a requiem is to lay souls to rest. But on this album, the purpose is to raise the dead, to animate histories and memories once forgotten, or misnamed.

This is an album meant to lift the lid off of the coffin of music that has grown stagnant. Like the exorcism that it is, this process of challenging old narratives and animating lost stories can be risky, vulnerable work. But perhaps it is time to abandon the old “pretend” narratives of “three chords and the truth” to honor other stories, to conjure in order to set all of us free.