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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2003, 272 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2004, 288 pages
'Though I've read countless novels, I had never read one like this ... told in a chorus of completely unexpected voices, as befits the first novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter' - Washington Post.
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.
As Willa Mae's only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother's substantial but unconfirmed fortune—a cache of jewels that Willa Mae's lover, Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Dirt poor, living in a trailer with her Aunt June and Uncle Roosevelt behind a gas station in a tumbleweedy Texas town, and pregnant with an illegitimate child, Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she steals Dill's pickup truck and, with her aunt and uncle in tow, heads for Arizona with Dill in hot pursuit. While everyone agrees it's only polite to speak of getting mother's body and moving her to a proper resting place, it's well understood that digging up Willa Mae's diamonds and pearls will make the whole trip a lot more worthwhile.
The enormously accomplished fiction debut from Suzan-Lori Parks, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 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.
BILLY BEEDE
"Where my panties at?" I asks him.
Snipes don't say nothing. He don't like to talk when he's in the middle of it.
"I think I lost my panties," I says but Snipes ain't hearing. He got his eyes closed, his mouth smiling, his face wet with sweat. In the middle of it, up there on top of me, going in and out. Not on top of me really, more like on top of the side of me cause he didn't want my baby-belly getting in his way. He didn't say so, he ain't said nothing bout the baby yet, but I seen him looking at my belly and I know he's thinking about it, somewhere in his mind. We're in the backseat of his Galaxie. A Ford. Bright lemon colored outside, inside the color of new butter. My head taps against the door handle as he goes at it.
"Huh. Huh. Huh," Snipes goes.
In a minute my head's gonna hurt. But it don't hurt yet.
"Where—" I go but he draws his finger down over my lips, hushing them so I don't finish, then he...
Pearl Cleage - author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
... a story whose characters are as mysterious and sexy as lace curtains billowing at the bedroom window. Richard Russo - author of Empire Falls
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.
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