"Pig Candy": Father-daughter journey proves bittersweet
"Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home — a Memoir"
by Lise Funderburg
Free Press, 303 pp., $24
Lise Funderburg, an award-winning journalist and author of "Black, White, Other," has penned an enduring, poignant and at times laugh-out-loud narrative about her father, George Newton Funderburg, in her memoir, "Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home."
The story begins with the author's first trip in March 2004 to 354 Fellowship Road, the address of the farm her father bought 20 years before in Monticello, a small town in Jasper County, Ga., where he grew up. It was his childhood dream to purchase the farm, which has become his second/vacation home. This is where most of the book takes place, as the two travel back and forth over the course of two years from Philadelphia.
Her father had recently learned he was dying from prostate cancer, which had been in remission for 15 years, and the first thing on their agenda for that trip was to roast a pig and get some chemo. The author writes, "My father read a newspaper article that chronicled the author's experiment with cooking a 70-pound pig in a Cuban-American-designed roasting box called La Caja China ... a simple plywood cart lined with metal and designed to suspend coals above rather than below the meat. The outcome, sweet and savory, succulent and crisp, earned the paradoxical moniker 'pig candy.' Pig candy? Dad ordered the largest model Caja from its Miami manufacturer and had it sent to the farm."
The author, who describes herself as a white-looking mixed-race woman, had always found her black father a bit of a mystery. When she was a child, her father was distant and hard to understand, more absorbed in his work than his family, yet she and her sisters were to uphold his high standards even to the end: "There was a right way to sweep the sidewalk, to stand up straight, to blow one's nose, to breathe."
She also writes about the often-fragile reality of their father-daughter union.
"This is the thing about my father. He's a study in fractions. He is various parts sharp and funny and kind and generous and playful. And he's cruel and baiting and grudge-holding and bitter and broken, broken, broken. I love parts of him. I hate parts of him. I forgive much of him, who he is and what he's done. And no matter how hard I try, I can't get past wanting him to turn on me a gaze of absolute, unfettered love."
Through their time spent on the farm, her father becomes less of a mystery as she learns more about his endearing quirks and about his childhood in Monticello — something he never talked about. Stories from his childhood friends and friends of the family gave her a glimpse of the way race relations in the South had played out and molded her father.
In the end, the author draws the reader into the most intimate details of her life, that of her father and of her family. While the ending is obvious, "Pig Candy" is a lesson about love coming full circle.
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posted by atiedesandy @ 19:13
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