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(More customer reviews)Buryin' Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest is a worthy offering in the University Press of Missisippi "Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography" series.
The careful arrangement of everyday events and detailed recounting of specific conversations build what could have been just an autobiographical memoir of growing up in a small Southern town into a compelling mystery. Using the title as a clue, it is apparent that the friction between the author and her father is leading somewhere. The reader is moved through the multicultural universe of this small, Southern town, each ethnic group pulling and tugging on the loyalty of the author.
The Lebanese (really Syrian) enclave came down the Mississippi River in the early 1900's, peddling small wares house to house. Some members stopped in Vicksburg while others moved up the Yazoo River to the thriving river port town. By Nicholas' generation they have become a substantial element in the relatively large Catholic Church and part and parcel of the business community, owning the town's primary car dealership and Main Street grocery and dry goods stores.
Members of the original group marry outside their Lebanese community and the addition of Southern Baptist small farmers from Yazoo County and non-Lebanese, though Catholic, members create some of the tensions that permeate the life of the author. The school integrates and attitudes toward the black community enter the mix.
However, the primary friction arises when the author's mother insists her growing family must leave the grandparent's sheltering home on Grand Avenue (the reader can tell the kind of home by the name of the street) and have a home of their own. The father's discipline appears capricious after the grandparent's benign leadership. He apparently is not as financially successful as his father and the author sees the family denied essential creature comforts.
The separateness of the author, in spite of a plethora of relatives who are always about, is palpable. Tension is exaggerated as the author takes on what she perceives are the problems her father creates for her mother. We get blunt, unvarnished descriptions of unpleasant surroundings in the author's life.
Father dies unexpectedly in the first third of the book. The rest of the short narrative is a nuanced, compelling story of getting away, first to an eastern college then to success in New York in the publishing world. Continual visits home mature the author, who emotionally is firmly tied to this family and this town. She comes to grips with the death of her younger brother through sorting through memories of him with others who loved him also. She is required to accept the beloved grandmother's dementia. Most importantly, she learns many facts about her grandfather and especially her father.
Burying Daddy is a process, along with coming to grips with her harassing memories.
The book takes on the universal experience of maturing. The power of the book makes us realize that we, too, grew up with tunnel vision, only partially knowing and understanding our parents and our world. Forgiveness is sometimes the only answer.
The minutiae of everyday conversations is relieved by lyrical passages describing Yazoo City and the Mississippi Delta that it borders. They remind the reader of the series namesake Yazoo author Willie Morris who also responded to the beauty of that region.
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A descendant of Lebanese Catholic immigrants on her father's side and Baptist sharecroppers on her mother's, Teresa Nicholas recounts in Buryin' Daddya southern upbringing with an unusual inflection. As the book opens, the author recalls her charmed early childhood in the late 1950s, when she and her family live with her grandparents in a graceful old bungalow in Yazoo City, Mississippi. But when the author is five, her eccentric father-secretive, penurious, autocratic, hoarding-moves his growing family into a condemned duplex nearby. Separated from her beloved grandmother and chafing under her father's erratic discipline, the girl longs to flee from the awful decrepit house. When she's a teenager, she and her father find themselves on conflicting sides of the civil rights movement and their arguments grow more painful, until a scholarship to a northeastern college provides the means of her escape.
Two decades later, Nicholas has built a successful career in book publishing in New York. When her father dies suddenly, she returns to Mississippi for the funeral and to spend a month in the hated duplex as her mother comes to terms with her husband's passing. But as she sorts through the strange detritus of her father's life, the author comes to understand that he was far more complex than the angry man she thought she knew. And as she draws closer to her surprisingly resilient mother, affected by stroke but full of blunt country talk, she finds that her mother is also far from the naïve, helpless creature she remembers. Through a series of surprising and oddly humorous discoveries, the author and her mother will begin to unravel her father's poignant secrets together in this graceful and generous exploration of the intermingling of shame and love that lie at the heart of family life.
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