Nine Years Under
Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore
Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business.
As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Booker guides readers through the inner workings of a funeral home in an African American neighborhood in Baltimore the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home, where she was employed for nine years, beginning when she was only 15. Initially accepting the job as a teenager, Booker first establishes for herself a professional dress code and phone manner, then gradually learns important details of the funeral business like why her employer only used black ink pens, and finally overcoming her fear of "the basement," where she assists her boss in the embalming room. Details specific to African-American funerary preparations, including styling black women's hair, give the reader an intimate understanding of the importance of funeral homes in the African-American community. Adding another layer to the narrative is Booker's own struggle coming to terms with the cancer diagnoses of both her mother and her Aunt Mary. Booker's coming-of-age story set against the business of death is filled with both tragedy and humor, and is wholly compelling in its humanity.
