Getting Mother’s Body / Suzan-Lori Parks

Warning: my discussion of the book contains a little more than minor spoilers. Stop reading now if that bothers you.

My goal during my last trip to the library (around Thanksgiving) was to pick up fiction by writers of color. Specifically, novels. The last one I got from the library and attempted was Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters. Normally, every book I start gets an entry here. But I could get barely 10 pages into it, so I didn’t bother. I just didn’t get the writing style at all. Anyway, the most recent trip I picked up three books, and Getting Mother’s Body is the first in the queue.

It’s set in rural Texas in the early 1960s, and stars the Beede (pronounced bead) family, poor blacks who don’t have big dreams. Billy Beede is knocked up by a traveling coffin salesman who tells her he’ll marry her if she’ll come to Texhoma where he lives. She shows up there only to find out he’s already married. Billy decides to take care of her problem to get back at him, but that requires money she doesn’t have. Her ultimate solution is to road trip to LaJunta Arizona where her mother is buried, to exhume the body and retrieve Willa Mae Beede’s rumored treasure.

At first, I had a hard time getting into the story. I’m not exactly sure what blocked me, but I suspect it was how poor the characters are. I had similar issues with the uneducated poor people in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. The white middle-class me is screaming inside at them to start making better choices!

I settled in to the road novel second half though, and quite enjoyed it. Parks’ narrative touches, but doesn’t dwell, on a number of race and class issues. Billy Beede’s cousin Homer and her uncle Roosevelt encounter white rural Texas cops due to speeding, for instance.

But one of the most powerful scenes for me was was when Billy, Roosevelt and June first stop at Homer and his mother Estelle’s house along the way. Estelle looks down on her poorer relatives attempting to dig up a body for treasure as acting like niggers¹ without class, though she stops herself from saying it halfway through. They catch Estelle’s gaffe and attitude and finish the statement for her. In real life, I’ve listened to teens accuse other teens of acting black for behaving in ways they consider low-class.

That conflict has to be painful for everyone involved, in a way that I doubt I’ll ever experience. Our culture expects people of color to differentiate themselves from other members of their race who act poorly or stereotypically. Sometimes they take that on themselves, as the characters in the book do. Estelle doesn’t want the low-class to rub off on her. That’s admirable. That she sees that behavior attached intrinsically at all to her own race is tragic. I’ve never felt a need to distance myself from David Duke or Charles Manson. No one else has ever expected that from me (that they’ve told me at least). That’s a privilege from growing up white in Seattle.

Parks’ writing here reads a lot like a play. I’m not sure what the qualities are that made me feel like that, but her background as a playwright sure felt like it came through. It’s a little heavier on dialogue than a lot of other books, and that talking is central to the story. This isn’t annoying in the the characters just sit around talking way. Most of it accompanies actions the characters take. Each short chapter is told from the perspective of a difference character, and a lot of the characters get a chapter or two. The reader really gets to get inside heads a lot. I liked that. And while it has a lot of substance that is just below the story’s surface, it never feels didactic or preachy.

Good reading to start off the year.

Title: Getting Mother’s Body
Author: Suzan-Lori Parks
Cover creator: Tamaye Perry (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 257 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-4000-6022-2