The Public Theater in lower Manhattan makes an apt setting for a conversation with Suzan-Lori Parks. It housed the original production of her Pulitzer Prize—winning drama Topdog/Underdog, and her incendiary reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, a musical play provocatively titled Fucking A, ran here in early spring. The Public's downtown, multicultural ambience suits the personal style of a writer known for avant-garde works that refract American history, especially the African-American experience, through a complex prism of poetry, imagery, music and metaphor. Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, her dreadlocks tumbling out of a knit cap to fall well below her shoulders, the soon-to-be-40-year-old author is casual, friendly and relaxed. Random House will publish her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, this month, and she's already at work on a second one, but her demeanor is more theatrical than literary. Her speech has the same colloquial yet lyrical quality as her plays' dialogue, its cadences rising and falling dramatically as she jumps impressionistically from point to point, frequently using repetition for emphasis.
Asked what made her decide to write a novel, she replies, "I know, I know, I know! I started out writing a novel when I was a kid, like in fourth grade, then before I was a playwright I wrote songs about everything, and I also wrote short stories; that's how I got to take a class with Mr. Baldwin. [Parks studied at Mount Holyoke with James Baldwin.] And I love novels; I love Virginia Woolf and Faulkner and Toni Morrison and Henry James. It's another kind of writing, and it allows me to do things that are best done in a novel. You can travel along the interior of the characters' minds in a novel in a way you really can't do as effectively in a play. You can have a soliloquy—in all of Hamlet's monologues you can see his mind working—but in a novel you can do it all the time, and that's really one of the things I enjoyed doing in Getting Mother's Body."
Set in July 1963, Parks's novel chronicles the journey of 16-year-old Billy Beede, who travels from Lincoln, Tex., where she lives with her aunt and uncle, to La Junta, Ariz., where her mother's body lies in ground soon to be paved over for a supermarket. Rumor has it that Willa Mae Beede was buried with a pearl necklace and diamond ring she'd acquired during her career as a roving con woman, and Billy might use the jewels to finance the termination of her unwanted pregnancy. The narrative takes the form of first-person monologues by Billy; a local boy who loves her, though he's not the baby's father; Willa Mae's old girlfriend; various relatives; and other characters who reveal their past histories and present dreams as the story unfolds.
"One of the reasons I chose that form," Parks explains, referring to the monologues, "is because I'm a playwright and it seemed a first step into novel writing; it bears a strong resemblance to a play. But of course it also—of course of course of course of course—bears a strong resemblance to As I Lay Dying, which is one of my favorite books."
Echoes of Faulkner's 1930 masterpiece resonate throughout Parks's text: in its structure of interlocking monologues, including some by a dead woman; in its subject of a road trip centered around a corpse; in its deeper theme of people struggling to understand and resolve their relationships with the dead and the living. To those who might be surprised to hear an African-American writer expressing admiration for a novel by a white Southerner from an aristocratic background, Parks replies, "Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, with Dilsey [the black servant whose dignity and compassion point up her white employers' selfishness], and he came through in that chapter. It's brilliant. And in Light in August, he came through on Joe Christmas, who was what we today would call a biracial person who didn't know where he stood in the world. I look at Faulkner's African-American characters and I appreciate them.
"The great thing is not to get too caught up in a person's biography," she continues. "Shakespeare could have been a real racist, misogynist dog for all we know; we don't know, so we take him at face value, which is the faces of his characters. We know him as the man who wrote Othello and Lear, who had compassion for all kinds of people. I learned how to deal with writing by reading Shakespeare, not by reading Shakespeare's biography. So when I think of Faulkner, who I love and value and think is a great, great writer, I read his work, and from that I know him."
Her particular sense of kinship with As I Lay Dying, she admits with a laugh, stemmed partly from the fact that "long before I read Faulkner, a lot of my characters were dead! Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, the characters were dead; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, the main character is freshly dead and confused, and the other characters have been dead for a long time. I keep going back to the dead speaking from the grave. After about three years of working on the novel, when I figured out the title, Getting Mother's Body, then I knew: oh, that's where they're going, that's what I've been fighting against. I don't want to go to the grave, but that's where they have to go."
Readers who know Parks's plays will spot other familiar images and metaphors in her novel. The name of Billy's hometown (Lincoln, Tex.) refers to Parks's career-long fascination with Abraham Lincoln, most notably personified in the African-American Lincoln impersonator who makes a living letting people shoot him in both The America Play and Topdog/Underdog. The wedding dress Billy burns in a rage when she learns her lover is married was a key onstage prop in both Devotees in the Garden of Love and In the Blood. "The Great Hole of History" that stands at the center of The America Play undergoes a sea change in Getting Mother's Body to become "the Hole," a soft spot in every person that Willa Mae used to put across her confidence tricks.
"It's like these things I'm obsessed with, that I can't get out of my head," Parks says. "I have no idea why, and that's great. Instead of judging them or rejecting them, I just accept them and keep putting them down, because they're in my head for a reason. There's a fantastic book called Life Work by Donald Hall, who says that certain words or images are hot spots: they're crossroads of something, and you don't have to know what they are, but as a writer you have to know where they are. So Lincoln is a crossroad of something, wedding dresses are a crossroad, the dead... and holes, that's another hot spot: it's the grave, or the portal to infinity, depending on how you look at it."
"The other day I was up at Harvard giving a talk," she continues, making a characteristic intuitive leap whose connection with the subject at hand isn't immediately obvious. "I was talking about how my works are linked—or Lincoln-ed, I said, and we had a big laugh! In The America Play you have the Great Hole of History, and then you have Topdog/Underdog with the Lincoln impersonator who's a con man, and then you have Willa Mae, who talks about the Hole as a way to con. The works give birth to each other, in a way, like those nests of Ukrainian dolls. You don't have to think about it; the words just come to you, and the connection with that source, like when Billy says, 'Words shape theirselves in my mouth, and I start talking without thinking of what I need to say.' Willa Mae uses it as a con, but Billy is actually talking about the Hole in its pure state; you are in the presence of the Spirit... the Holy Spirit!" Parks adds, laughing heartily at yet another play on the word "hole."
It sounds very loose and spontaneous, but no writer as alert as Parks is simply typing words, and she concedes as much, distinguishing between what for her are equally essential but distinct parts of the creative process. "When I talk to my students [she's head of the dramatic writing program at CalArts, near Los Angeles], I tell them there are two kinds of courage as a writer, the courage of writing and the courage of rewriting. When I am writing, I don't have much of a plan; I'm following the spirit. What is the spirit saying? Where are we going? I don't know. I might have a road marker, Fucking A, which is a phrase in the distance and I am wandering around, walking through the desert toward this phrase. For five or six years, writing the play, I didn't know why it was called Fucking A. It was only in the last lap that the whole story came into focus. When you figure it out, the second kind of courage kicks in, which is the rewriting. Then, yes, I have something in mind, because I have to edit, I have to know what to keep in and keep out, how to trim and shape. But for me, they're very separate: writing is a bicep, rewriting is a tricep; they both make the arm work, but they're completely different."
The playwright serves more or less as her own editor in the theater, coming to production with a script that "while it does go through tweaks, changes and cuts in rehearsal, it's pretty much what you see onstage opening night." Ann Godoff, who worked with Parks on Getting Mother's Body before leaving Random House, trusted her to know what editing the novel required. "Ann had tremendous faith in me. She gave me notes, but with the understanding that the bulk of the rewriting came from me reading it aloud in my room and seeing what it needed, talking to my husband [blues musician Paul Oscher], reading it to him, working on it by myself. That's how I work, and the way Ann helped me most was just by believing in me and my process."
A novel, Parks found, "is the work of a community just as much as a play is. I look at the book and see the hand of the editor, the hand of the publishing house, the hand of the wonderful person who did the design, the hand of the copy editor, the hand of everybody. And then it goes into the hands and imagination of the reader, which the whole things depends on."
Leaving her novel in the hands of her publisher and her play at the mercy of the opening-night critics, longtime Brooklyn resident Parks will depart in two days for a new home in Venice, Calif., and a desk heaped with projects. There's a new play, of course, and a second novel and another movie script (she wrote Girl 6 for Spike Lee), but she continues to branch out into new fields: she's writing a musical called Hoops and a teleplay of Toni Morrison's Paradise. "Certain members of the experimental theater community say I've betrayed my roots," she says calmly, "but working with Harpo, Oprah Winfrey's company, to adapt Paradise for ABC, is me being experimental, going into areas I haven't gone into before. Some people said, 'Ooh, you're writing a musical for Disney. Sellout!' To me, working with a corporation like Disney, being a woman and writing something called Hoops about basketball guys is a great challenge. It's not selling out; it's working some muscles that I want to develop. There's not just one way to be experimental."
