Ugly Ways: A Novel

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993. 1st. Fine. Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as they gather in their mother's house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to rest. Mudear Lovejoy was the kind of mother who ruled her house and raised her daughters with an iron hand even after her "change." Betty is her oldest daughter, big-boned and strong, the only one who remembers what Mudear was like before The Change. Emily is the middle child, restless and divorced, the one who every one assumed would be the first after Mudear to crack. The youngest is wild Annie Ruth, a TV anchorwoman who is pregnant out of wedlock and plagued by visions of menacing cats. Ernest, their father, is a kaolin mine worker who is so overwhelmed by all the females around him that sometimes he just wants to yell out, "Womens taking over my house!" As the sisters reminisce, they are unaware that even though Mudear's body is laid out in Parkinson Funeral Home, she is not so easily buried. Her spirit refuses to die, and she floats around Mulberry, watching her daughters stretched out on her porch smoking cigarettes, drinking her husband's liquor from her best glasses, and talking about marijuana like "some damn black girl hippies." In alternating voices, each member of the Lovejoy family tells us what preys on his or her mind. As they prepare for the memorial, sit up with the body, and at the funeral itself, each must come to grips with her relationship to Mudear. At the same time, each must define what a mother, a black mother - their mother - is. Hardcover Box 4