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Rebecca Wanzo
Parker, Gwendolyn M. (1950– )
Gwendolyn Parker was born into a middle-class
family on June 9, 1950, in Durham, North Carolina.
Her father, “Yip” Judson Garrett Parker, a pharma-
cist, owned a drugstore. Her mother, Arona Moore
McDougald Parker, a mathematician, taught at
North Carolina Central. Aaron McDuffie Moore,
her great-grandfather, was cofounder of the North
Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company; he
was also the founder of the Mechanics and Farm-
ers Bank and North Carolina Central University.
Feeling confined in the South, her father relocated
the family to Mount Vernon, New York, in the late
1950s. In an interview with Susan McHenry, a
former Radcliffe classmate, Parker disclosed that
“her father wanted his children to be part of the
whole world,” a place where they would have more
“options than that of a college president of a his-
torically black college or a black-owned business”
(McHenry, 34). Taught by her parents and grand-
parents that education and achievement were the
pinnacles of success, Parker attended Kent Prep
School, Radcliffe College, and New York University
School of Law before going to work in corporate
America for 10 years as an international tax at-
torney and a marketing manager at the American
Express Company. Later, while working in the Of-
fice of Strategic Planning, she received the Black
Achiever in Industry Award.
In 1986, after 10 years of battling stereotypes
on Wall Street, and after adhering to her family’s
message: “work hard at something that will bring
you assured success” (Carroll, 197), Parker left the
corporate world to pursue her first love, a career
in writing. According to Parker, from the time she
was five writing was her passion, though “Writ-
ing for a living was a dream that I had, but...
[it] never seemed a realistic option as I was grow-
ing up” (Carroll, 197). However, she confesses,
“Once I started writing, the happiness I felt was
overwhelming... [as writing] allow[ed] me to
follow my own natural rhythms” (Carroll, 201).
Influenced by such writers as Willa Cather, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, and TONI MORRISON, and following
her “natural rhythms,” Parker published her first
novel, These Same Long Bones (1994).
Rich in striking metaphors, These Same Long
Bones is set in the Durham of Parker’s childhood,
on the eve of integration. It captures the experi-
ences of a middle-class couple, Sirus and Aileen
McDougald, as they struggle to come to terms
with the tragic death of their daughter Mattie and
with their own fears and suspicions about how
she died. While critics praise the novel’s “vivid
multiplicity of detail... [and] exquisitely drawn
characters” (Johnson, 102), Parker’s forte in this
novel is her ability to dramatize the growing ten-
sions between the black and white communities
during an era when the segregated South was
poised for change. While detailing several injus-
tices in a racist South, Parker explores the dehu-
manizing consequences of historical slavery on a
“close-knit, thriving, and nurturing” black com-
munity, and offers a new literary landscape for its
survival. In the New York Times Book Review, Jose-
phine Humphreys observes that the novel “shows
a life ‘both blessed and hard,’ sustained by human
resilience” (19).
In her ambitious first novel, Parker introduces
and develops a vast terrain of themes, including
fear, hatred, racism, loss, grief and reconciliation,
friendship, the coming of grace, materialism, lone-
liness and community, community failure, com-
munity responsibility, and a loss of community.
Like many of her contemporaries, such as MARITA
GOLDEN, she probes each theme and often chal-
lenges her characters and her readers to test their
own resilience.
Three years after publishing her first novel,
Parker published her memoir, Trespassing: My So-
journ in the Halls of Privilege (1997), chronicling
her childhood in Durham, her personal journey
in corporate America, and her decision to leave it
and become a writer. More specifically, as the titleParker, Gwendolyn M. 403