Pig Candy: Taking My Father South Taking My Father Home: A Memoir

The poignant often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months in the rural town hed fled as a young man.. During a series of visits with her father to the South hed 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 couldnt 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 fathers 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 doesnt 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 actsFunderburgs 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.