Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A MemoirThe poignant, often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months in the rural town he'd fled as a young man. During a series of visits with her father to the South he'd escaped as a young black man, Lise Funderburg, the mixed-race author of the acclaimed Black, White, Other, comes to understand his rich and difficult background and the conflicting choices he has had to make throughout his life. Lise Funderburg is a child of the '60s, a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. As a child, she couldn't imagine what had made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive; about his past she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then, just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer -- an event that leads father and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father's escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught society -- and the extraordinary food -- of his childhood. In succulent, evocative, and sometimes tart prose, the author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves, family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She chronicles small-town relationships that span generations, the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does and doesn't matter, and the quiet segregation that persists to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of warmth, humor, and disarming candor. In one of his last grand actsFunderburg's father recruits his children, neighbors, and friends to throw a pig roast -- an unforgettable meal that caps an unforgettable portrait of a man enjoying his life and loved ones right up through his final days. Pig Candy takes readers on a stunning journey that becomes a universal investigation of identity and a celebration of the human will, familial love, and, ultimately, life itself. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 13 | |
La Caja China | 33 |
iF it iS HuMan it Will Err | 53 |
BACk STORY PoWElton | 67 |
labEl boy | 81 |
Klan SnEaK | 95 |
tHE Sun HitS itS HigH MarK | 115 |
crEEP crEEP | 183 |
Maundy tHurSday | 203 |
BACk STORY 3517 HaMilton StrEEt | 215 |
JoSEPHS coat | 221 |
dEbt SErvicE | 229 |
rEgular rHytHM | 233 |
tHE trutH iS to livE | 257 |
FrEEdoM ridEr | 275 |
Other editions - View all
Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir Lise Funderburg Limited preview - 2008 |
Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home: A Memoir Lise Funderburg No preview available - 2009 |
Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir Lise Funderburg No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
Battaglia Ben Tillman Bubba Caja China can’t Carolyn catfish chair chemo chemotherapy Claudia close comes cook Dad says Dad’s daughter Dave’s Deep Throat Diane didn’t doctor doesn’t door Dorothy drive driveway Eddie farm father father’s feel fish Funderburg garage Georgia granddaddy grandfather hand he’d he’ll he’s Holsey hospital Howard I’ve Isuzu Jackie Jackie Robinson Jasper County Jerry Goldin John keep kitchen lamb Lawson leave Leesee Lise Funderburg Lois Lois’s look Margaret Marshall Monticello morning mother Muirfield never okay once one’s park pasture peaches pecans Phoebe pick Pig Candy pond pull riding side sisters sits stand stay stop sunroom talk tell there’s Tillman tion told town trip Troy says Troy’s truck turn twins vancomycin waiting walk watch Waverly week weekend what’s who’s