Home
Afro Sexual Health
African American Books | African American Authors | African American History
Amazon.com Like a country quilt, Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's spellbinding first novel,
Getting Mother's Body , is pieced together from rags: short and slanted
scraps of narrative recounted by various friends and members of the
hard-luck Beede clan of Ector County, Texas. These sad, wily, bickering
voices tell the story of Billy Beede--poor, unmarried, and pregnant--and her
dead mother, the "hot and wild" blues singer, Willa Mae Beede, who may or
may not have been laid to rest with a fortune of diamonds and pearls in her
coffin. When a letter arrives announcing that a supermarket is being built
on the ground where Willa Mae was buried, Billy determines to dig her up and
get the jewels. But Willa Mae's embittered female lover, Dill Smiles, is
just as intent on keeping the corpse in the ground. Deeper and richer than a
typical quest novel, Getting Mother's Body is also the story of an
African-American family, of beauty winding like bright thread through
long-held grudges, hopelessness, and greed. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly Parks, winner of the 2002
Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog, puts her dramatic skills to
good use in this fluid, assured debut novel, the story of a sweaty road trip
from Texas to Arizona in July 1963. When stubborn 16-year-old Billy Beede
gets knocked up and jilted by her sweet-talking, coffin-salesman lover, she
needs money for an abortion. Her wild mother, Willa Mae, died when Billy was
10, and Billy lives with her "childless churchless minister Uncle and
one-legged church-hopping Aunt" in a mobile home behind their rural Texas
gas station. Billy's only hope for serious cash is to dig up her mother's
body from its grave in LaJunta, Ariz., where Willa Mae was buried wearing a
diamond ring and a pearl necklace. That, at least, is the story told by
Willa Mae's one-time lover, Dill, a six-foot-tall "bull dagger, dyke, lezzy,
what-have-you." Billy steals Dill's truck and, together with her aunt and
uncle, embarks on a trip to Arizona to find her mother's body, her mother's
treasure and her mother's memory. With disgruntled Dill in hot pursuit
(chauffeured by Billy's dogged suitor, Laz, misfit son of the local funeral
parlor owner), the three travel through the racist Southwest, meeting up
with relatives, friends and foes. Parks narrates her brief chapters from the
point of view of different characters, giving each a distinctive voice;
blues songs are interwoven with the text. Parks's influences are
evident-among them Zora Neale Hurston and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying-but the
novel's easy grace and infectious rhythms are all her own. Fueled by
irresistible, infectious talk and prose that swings like speech, this novel
begs (no surprise) to be read aloud.
From Booklist *Starred Review* The Beedes are
a hard-luck family living in a small Texas town in the 1960s, operating a
gas station on a month-to-month contract with a stingy white man. Billy, 16
years old, is pregnant by a coffin salesman, whom she later discovers is
married. She gets it in her head to go to LaJunta, Arizona, where her
mother, Willa Mae, is buried with jewelry expensive enough to get Billy out
of trouble. Willa Mae was a wild woman and a hustler who cheated most folks,
including her daughter and her lover, Dill Smiles, a mannish woman who
prefers to live as a male. Billy's uncle Teddy, a former minister who has
lost his calling, and her aunt June, who lost a leg as a young woman,
accompany Billy on her journey. Hot on their trail is Dill, whose truck
Billy has "borrowed" for the trip. Pulitzer-winning playwright Parks offers
a collection of exuberantly loony characters, longing for better lives and a
means of realizing their meager dreams. Told from the perspective of each of
the different characters, including the dead Willa Mae, this is a thoroughly
riveting novel of love, family, and redemption. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description Billy Beede, the teenage
daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae,
comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae’s
burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a
supermarket.
Getting Mother’s Body takes its place in the company of
the classic works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. But when it comes
to an ingenious, uproarious knack for depicting the trifling, hard-luck,
down-and-out souls who need a little singing and laughing and lying and
praying to get through the day, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no
one.
From the Back Cover “Suzan-Lori Parks is a terrific
writer whose characters don’t so much talk to us as sing, full-throated, of
their joys and miseries.” —Richard Russo , author of Empire
Falls Pearl Cleage ,
author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
About the Author Suzan-Lori Parks is a novelist,
playwright, songwriter, and screenwriter. She was the recipient of the 2002
Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/ Underdog, as well as a 2001
MacArthur “genius grant.” Her other plays include _______ A, In the Blood,
The America Play, Venus, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole
Entire World. Her first feature film, Girl 6, was directed by Spike Lee. A
graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied with James Baldwin, she
has taught creative writing in universities across the country, including at
the Yale School of Drama, and she heads the Dramatic Writing Program at
CalArts. She is currently writing an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel
Paradise for Oprah Winfrey, and the musical Hoopz for Disney. She lives in
Venice Beach, California, with her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, and
their pit bull, Lambchop.
Return Home
08/13/03
