Edgy Texas romp stars Motley Crew

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2003 by Story, Rosalyn

"If you write simply, the larger themes will come," said Suzan-Lori Parks about her play Topdog/Underdog, which in the spring of 2002 garnered her rave reviews on Broadway opening night, and the next day made her the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Though referring to the deceptively simple, but deeply existential tale of sibling rivalry between two abandoned brothers living by their wits, the same could be said of her first novel, Getting Mother's Body. Speaking on public radio, Topdog/Underdog director George C. Wolfe said Parks' play is about family and history - two components which can bind and restrict or liberate and empower us. In her novel, similar themes play out. Notions of family and history make simple themes complex and lend extraordinary boldness to ordinary lives.

Stretching her talent to fit different forms is not new for the 39-year-old Mount Holyoke alum and protege of James Baldwin. In 20 years of storytelling in one form or another, Parks has written screenplays (Spike Lee's Girl 6) and more than a dozen stage plays (two of which won Obie awards), and she is working on a musical for Disney based on the Harlem Globetrotters.

Now Parks turns to the novel to tell a tall, Texas romp of a tale. Set at the dust-bowl fringes of rural Texas in 1963, Getting Mother's Body is the story of engaging down-and-outs who break from their humdrum lives to pursue a rumored treasure that looms above the story like a Texas summer sky, and with time and imagination, grows as fast as a tumbleweed rolling along the plains.

At the center of the story is Billy Beede, a poor 16-year-old would-be hairdresser (living with her aunt and uncle since her mother's death) who finds herself pregnant with her betrothed's child. As Billy's relentless hard luck would have it, he's already married, so Billy sets her sights on an abortion, which she can no more afford than the useless white wedding dress she's used her cunning to acquire. But when she gets word that her mother Willa Mae's body, buried in Arizona, is in need of re-interment to make way for a supermarket, she's reminded of the cache of jewels buried with her. Billy and a crew of relatives and hangers-on set out in a truck stolen from her mother's lesbian lover to recover the jewels, start new lives with the "fortune" and give Willa Mae a new resting place. Little do they know that trouble awaits, and "getting mother's body" may be possible only over their own dead ones.

Told in a string of monologues advancing the plot through various characters' points of view, the story is spiced with the comic, edgy and sometimes sad commentaries of simple folk whose eccentricities and peculiarities are matched only by their lousy luck.

There is June, who lost her leg while a teenager, then married Billy's preacher uncle Roosevelt with the hopes that God would "grow it back." There is Roosevelt, who makes his living selling gas and Cokes to road-weary travelers after losing his tumbledown church to the ravages of time and demolition.

Dill, Billy's mother's lover, is a frustrated "bulldagger" passing for a man ("The luck of Dill Smiles ain't no luck at all," she says of her misfortune), and the naive, decent-hearted Laz Jackson pines for Billy's elusive affections and envies Dill her "manhood." And there is Willa Mae, dead from a botched abortion of her own, who sings her side of the story from the grave through gritty Texas blues.

Billy had little love for her bawdy, loose-living mother - "I ain't no Willa Mae," she claims - but has inherited her shrewdness born of desperation and talent for finding what she calls the "Hole" in people. It's the trick of finding the Hole, that inevitable soft spot of human frailty, that offsets the ill turns of fate, and sets this tale of hapless (but not hopeless) people in motion.

In Getting Mother's Body, there is wit, pathos and earthy wisdom, but Parks' penchant for drama gives her characters dimension, presence and voice that endear them to the reader's heart, even in their sometimes pitiable pursuits.

With many plays to her credit (including The America Play, Venus and In the Blood), a MacArthur "genius" grant, an academic position as head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at CalArts in Valencia, Ca., and a new project adapting Toni Morrison's novel Paradise for Oprah Winfrey's production company, Parks artfully dodges labels and pigeonholes. Of her own mutifaceted opus, she has said, "Who knows who I am, really? I'm someone who listens; you throw me the ball, and I'll see what I can do with it."

Rosalyn Story is a Dallas-based writer.