Getting Mother's Body

Starred review from May 19, 2003
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)Forecast:Few playwrights enjoy the kind of success Parks has at such a young age (she was born in 1964), and few make such a seamless transition to fiction. Her reputation and the quality of this novel should fuel impressive sales. 8-city author tour.

March 15, 2003
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.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2003
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)