obsessed with becoming adept with the three-card
monte con game. With meager family ties, little
education, and limited employment opportunities,
the brothers act out their misfortunes, each search-
ing for ways to succeed. Performed to great critical
acclaim on Broadway and in theaters throughout
the United States and Europe, Parks’s comic drama
was acknowledged by critics as “profoundly mov-
ing.” It was an extraordinary new departure for
Parks, whose work more closely resembles RALPH
ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN in its generally more inte-
grationist perspective.
Parks has also written screenplays. Her credits
include Anemone Me (1990); Girl 6 (1996), di-
rected by SPIKE LEE; Gal, for Universal Pictures;
God’s Country, for Jodie Foster and Egg Pictures;
and THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (2005), an
Oprah Winfrey Harpo Production of ZORA NEALE
HURSTON’s classic novel.
Parks received widespread acclaim for her
debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body (2003). Told
from a series of first-person narratives and draw-
ing comparisons to ZORA NEALE HURSTON and
William Faulkner, two of Parks’s literary influ-
ences, the novel traces the survivors of Willa Mae
Beade as they travel to Arizona to exhume her
body to find the jewels that were supposedly bur-
ied in her coffin. However, pursued by Willa Mae’s
former lover, who is committed to having the jew-
els remain with the body as he had promised, they
are unsuccessful.
Parks has received numerous grants and awards
from such organizations as the National Endow-
ment for the Arts (1990, 1991), the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York
State Council on the Arts, the New York Founda-
tion for the Arts, the TCG-PEW Charitable Trusts,
and the Guggenheim Foundation; she also won
the PEN-Laura Pels Award. She was twice awarded
the Obie for Best New American Play, for Imper-
ceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990)
and Ve n u s (1996). Additional awards include the
Whiting Writers’ Award (1992), the W. Alton Jones
Grant Kennedy Center Fund for New American
Plays, the Kennedy Center Fund for New Ameri-
can Plays (1994), Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest
Award (1995), a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts
(Drama) (1996), a MacArthur Foundation “Ge-
nius” Award (2001), and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama
for Topdog/Underdog (2002). Parks holds honorary
doctor of fine arts degrees from Mount Holyoke
College (2001) and Spelman College (2005).
Hailed by The New York Times as the “year’s
most promising playwright” in 1989, Parks has
become one of America’s leading, most innovative
and provocative theater artists. Like such contem-
poraries as LORRAINE HANSBERRY, Anna Deavere
Smith, NTOZAKE SHANGE, ADRIENNE KENNEDY,
PEARL CLEAGE, Kia Corthron, Cassandra Medley,
Lynn Nottage, Karen Jones-Meadows, Marian X
(Marian Washington), and Cheryl L. West, she
brings a powerful African-American female per-
spective to contemporary avant-garde theater, re-
inventing it as a site of “transformation, healing,
and regeneration” (Mahone, 11).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mahone, Sydné. “The Sista Masses (1970s–1990s): Af-
rican American Women Playwrights.” In Women
Playwrights of Diversity, edited by Jane T. Peter-
son and Suzanne Bennett, 11. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1997.
Solomon, Alisa. “Signifying on the Signifyin’: The
Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks.” Theater 21, no. 3
(1990): 73–80.
Loretta G. WoodardPaul D
Paul D, “the last of the Sweet Home men” and the
youngest of three brothers, is a protagonist in TONI
MORRISON’s BELOVED (1987). Beloved is equally the
story of his life in bondage and in freedom as it
is SETHE’s, the heroine’s. Readers follow their dif-
ferent efforts to beat back the ever-present and
painful past that, despite their every effort to “dis-
remember,” seems to dominate their lives as they
search for meaning and wholeness through their
shared history, stories, (re)memory, and love.
Although Mr. Garner, a somewhat benevolent
master, had treated Paul D and his other male slaves408 Paul D