Getting Mother's Body (27 page)

We didn't get all what we thought we'd get. Aunt June got her leg, though. She walked her first steps the same day as her first grandbaby did.

Folks take after they folks. That's the law of nature. The thing about not watching my mother get old is that I wasn't never sure what I was gonna get, cause if you don't got yr folks to look at, if all you got is a little picture of a woman standing beside a cactus, a picture took by a man who weren't even your daddy, then you don't got a good idea really of where yr headed. When I seen her bones I knew what we all knew, that we's all gonna end up in a grave someday, but there's stops in between there and now. Right now I got my first child running around in the yard and another one on the way. Five years from now Laz gives me Mother's diamond ring back. He'd never sold it in Dallas. The money he brought back was from his savings. Dill's hog farm is going pretty good. Uncle Teddy's got another church. There's lots of things between now and them bones.

Riding back to Lincoln, looking at my ring, I could feel the baby inside me. I hadn't never really thought of a name for it, but riding home I felt like I could. Not pick out a name though, just let one come to me without thinking. Like it had a name already, and if it had a name already then it already was. And if it already was then it was always gonna be.

My belly sat in front of me. In front of my belly, beyond the hood of the truck, was the back of Laz's hearse with Mother's body riding inside and the road unrolling out ahead.

Going back home we made good time. I think we did all right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S
UZAN
-L
ORI
P
ARKS
is a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and screenwriter. She was the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play
Topdog/Underdog,
as well as a 2001 MacArthur “genius grant.” Her other plays include
Fucking A, In the Blood, The America Play, Venus,
and
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.
Her first feature film,
Girl 6,
was directed by Spike Lee. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied with James Baldwin, she has taught creative writing in universities across the country, including at the Yale School of Drama, and she heads the Dramatic Writing Program at CalArts. She is currently writing an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel
Paradise
for Oprah Winfrey, and the musical
Hoopz
for Disney. She lives in Venice Beach, California, with her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, and their pit bull, Lambchop.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2003 by Suzan-Lori Parks

Songs copyright © 2003 by Mama's Helper Music

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parks, Suzan-Lori.

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

                           p. cm.

                  1. African American families—Fiction. 2. Treasure trove—Fiction.

         3. Poor families—Fiction. 4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

         PS3566.A736 G4 2003

         813′.54—dc21                  2002031762

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-300-8

v3.0