Getting mother's body: a novel
Suzan-Lori Parks

Author: Parks, Suzan-Lori

Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.


New York: Random House, 2003, 288 p.

Booklist Review: /*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.
(Reviewed May 1, 2003) -- Vanessa Bush

Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ 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 "bulldagger, 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. (May)
— Staff (Reviewed May 19, 2003) (Publishers Weekly, vol 250, issue 20, p54)

Library Journal Review: Billy Beede is a girl with troubles. Unmarried, pregnant by a married man, and needing a lot of money fast, Billy decides to travel from Texas to Arizona to retrieve her dead mother's body, hoping to find a small fortune in jewels presumably buried in the grave. But when you're black and poor in early Sixties Texas, every trip is hazardous—and even more so when your mother's lover is chasing you. Parks, who won a Pulitzer Prize in drama for Topdog/Underdog, has ably transferred her talent for character and dialog from the stage to the pages of her first novel, a series of monologs by a close-knit group of characters who include the late Willa Mae Beede, singing from the grave. Parks lets the reader travel along as a welcome passenger as Billy and her family journey on dusty roads through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, past whites-only diners and redneck jails, to an unexpected treasure. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]—Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis–Marion Cty. P.L. (Reviewed March 15, 2003) (Library Journal, vol 128, issue 5, p116)

Kirkus Reviews Faulkner gets an African-American rewrite in this first novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (Topdog/Underdog, etc.).

It's July 1963. Sixteen-year-old Billy Beede has been living in Lincoln, Texas, with her Uncle Roosevelt and Aunt June for six years, ever since her reckless, high-living mother Willa Mae died in Arizona. Willa Mae's lesbian lover, Dill Smiles, claims to have buried her with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring, and the grave is about to be plowed up and paved over by a supermarket developer. When pregnant Billy discovers that her lover is married, she heads for Arizona to unearth the jewelry to pay for an abortion. The angry teenager professes to have no feelings for her "liar and cheat" of a mother, but, as she employs Willa Mae's con-artist tricks to make her way west, Billy begins uncovering a deeper meaning in what Willa Mae called "The Hole," a quality that she identified in people only so "she'd know how to take them." All the characters here have Holes: Roosevelt has lost his church and his vocation as a minister; he and June can't have children; Dill endured Willa Mae cheating on her with men; neighbor Laz Jackson watches his beloved Billy dally with a smooth-talking adulterer; Roosevelt's widowed cousin Star struggles with bill collectors and the shame of not being able to keep son Homer in college. Playing to her strengths as a dramatist, Parks constructs the narrative as a series of first-person monologues, including several blues-drenched soliloquies by the defunct Willa Mae. Echoes of As I Lay Dying, the characters' concerns swirl around their relationships with a dead woman whose decayed body offers an uncomfortable reminder of what awaits them all. The muted happy ending doesn't have Faulkner's biblical grandeur, but we're glad to see Parks's hard-pressed men and women get a break.

More conventional in form and less excitingly engaged with American history than her plays, but good enough to cause hope that more may come.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2003)



Other related features:

1. Awards (Best Fiction) - Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> New York Times Notable Books -> Fiction and Poetry -> 2003


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
1400060222
0739302973 : CD - Audio
081296800X : Paperback


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