This book critique presented below depicts the essence of the ‘Nine Years Under’ by Sheri Booker, how the protagonist of the story was influenced by events that occurred to her for nine years, and what is the modern value of the book. The author of ‘Nine Years Under’ Sheri Booker learned about misfortune quite prematurely, in her teens. She was only under 15 when she had to witness the workers from nursing home passing through their small and cozy family house in Baltimore. The reason for such inconvenience and change of lifestyle was Mary, the girl’s Aunt, who had an inoperable tumor and was slowly dying from cancer. Young and unprepared for such trials from fate, Sheri was not able to do anything and just helplessly observed how the closest person in her world, her cherished friend and companion perished. After the death of Aunt Mary, the life of the little girl as she knew it was utterly ruined. Sheri Booker described that moment of her life in her book: “After Aunt Mary died, the ground beneath me shifted. I expected the world to pause for my grief — and it didn’t, not even for a moment of silence” (Booker, 2013, p. 132).
While still recovering from the death of Aunt Mary and shaking from the grief that surrounded her, Sheri experienced more unexpected changes in her life. One Sunday afternoon she was at the church when suddenly a regional funeral chief Al Wylie bumped into her around the corner. Al was a man of prominence and charisma, as well as an important representative of a church aggregation. He was fond of expensive suits, gleaming cars, and marvelous women, and his path was ‘one of undiluted confidence’. Al Wylie was none other than an owner of a funeral house, where Sheri’s parents were arranging a funeral of Aunt Mary just a couple of days before. The meeting of Sheri and Al was entirely unexpected; so, when Wylie asked the little girl what she had planned to do during summer, her reply gave him pause. She expressed an intention of working in his funeral parlor, at first as a polite joke, but then her objectives became stronger. At last, Sheri received the consent from her parents and started her job at the Albert Wylie Funeral House. She was just 15 years old and intended to work at the funeral home for one summer; instead, she stayed an employee of Albert Wylie for nine long years.
With the help of her book, Sheri Booker takes her readers on a trip around her amusing life as a worker in a funeral home. It shows the transformation of a girl: “Soon I would become one of those people, an insider in a world foreign to the most of humankind, a world that you cannot quite prepare yourself for, a world so mysterious that you can’t envision it in your dreams” (Booker, 2013, p. 67). Her story is riddled with charm, humor, and gloom; though she was forced to constrain her tears, as it was not allowed to weep in Wylie Funeral House. Sheri enables the reader to follow her from the very beginning of her journey. We accompany the girl from her mishandled first week at work, when she had to pick up the phones and sort out the register system and applications.
Sheri tells the reader all kinds of stories that are both funny and shivery. From the first moments as a new employee, Sheri had to walk in the footsteps of Ms. Angela, who was an impudent and brassy office manager. The young and inexperienced girl had to interact awkwardly with frail relatives of the deceased, enraged spouses, and menacing band members. Sheri invites us into the dark and cold basement of the funeral house, where she confronts the dead body of an adult for the first time. We experience the struggle and grief with her as she carefully covers a corpse of an infant with a robe in the changing room. Readers feel the girl’s embarrassment and remorse while she was driving by a McDonald’s window with a dead body in the back of her hearse; as Sheri falls in love with the son of Al Wylie, we endure the warm feeling with her. At last, the readers witness her revelations and openings of feeling after years of being stressed and pressured by her employer.
As an opposing side of all horrifying things that impact the central character of the story come safe and serene surrounding of her home, which is situated across town. When coming home to her parents – a policeman and a school administrator – Sheri allowed herself to forget about harsh streets, disturbance, rampages and tenacious surroundings of the funeral house:
Grit and grime tend to avoid the corner of Gilmor Street and Harlem Avenue, where the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home stands shining like an opaque jewel in the rough. The brick brownstone stretches three stories high above the cellar. Dope fiends linger in the adjacent park waiting on a fix while the neighborhood drug dealers protect their territory on the opposite street corner. The fiends are sometimes rolled through the wide basement door, packaged in a body bag, after overindulging in their indiscretions. The dealers, too, have been known to send business up the block when their turf has been threatened. They press their ears to the streets to try to hear the tiptoeing of the enemy so they won’t find themselves stretched out in chalk on the aged concrete. In a way, both groups are providing a service to the community — a steady yet unnatural way to keep the small funeral home thriving. (Booker, 2013, p. 35)
Watching her mother and father work hard for her and her little sister, Sheri realized that quitting her job for Albert Wylie Funeral House was not an option. As the events evolve throughout the book, so does the main character. Sheri finds herself withdrawing from the image of a good girl and becoming deeply involved in her new ethereal world. Her adventures and misfortunes turned her from a little girl into a stimulated worker and an exceptional skillful journalist. The story by Sheri Booker is full with vivid details, personality depictions, conversations and exposé of private misjudgments; thus making ‘Nine Years Under’ extremely amusing and, at the same time, tough to read. The book, however, is not a flawless narration, as “the weight of too many similes can feel like a 600-pound man in a cardboard coffin” (Booker, 2013, p. 71). Nonetheless, the inner story achieves inspiring and turning a peek into a dark side of life into glistening concedes of compassion.
To my opinion, ‘Nine Years Under’ is a book that is not about the funeral business or deceased people; it is the living ones that allow the story to exist and develop. Throughout the story Booker does not hide anything from the readers; she acknowledges everything that had happened to her. This attitude allows the book to become one of the most impressing compositions of the genre. Jeff Johnson (2013), the author of ‘Everything I’m Not Made Me Everything I Am’, says:
In Nine Years Under, Booker poetically infiltrates the private world of black funeral home culture. The book serves as a magic intersection of this mysterious mortuary milieu, the black church and middle class black Baltimore to spin a story that Booker is uniquely positioned to set to prose. You will laugh and cry; be horrified and hopeful. But at the end of a dark ride through valleys of suppressed emotion, every reader will realize that at the end of the darkest and most violent of rainless thunderstorms, our own tears can set up rainbows of promise. (par. 6)
As a conclusion, it is necessary to say that ‘Nine Years Under’ is a story that reveals the darkest aspects of life; however, even they can be turned into exceptional experience. We watch as the main character develops her personality, turns the grief for her beloved Aunt Mary into an ability to confront her feelings while she was very young. Moreover, Sheri builds a strong and affectionate relationship with Albert Wylie, whom he disliked at first; nonetheless, the Funeral Home became her second family. The book is a wonderful guide through a prohibited subject, where very few people are able to describe and illustrate the living on the other side of life.
References
Booker, S. (2013). Nine years under: Coming of age in an inner-city funeral home. London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books.
Johnson, J. (2013). Nine years under review. Web.