Cooking with Grease
Brazile, Donna & Wycliff, Don
son that casket companies produce inexpensive caskets in rather unflattering finishes. If they looked too good, people might buy them [emphasis added]. This is most important because it is in the...
...The problem is their voters understood their rights...
...Not only did she want it...
...Yet for all the pain and nostalgia, Barry always in-fuses his narrative with such earthy spirituality and wry humor—usually of the self-deprecating variety—that he keeps you rooting for the hero, and convinced that the payoff will be worth the effort...
...Barry, now a columnist for the New York Times, recognized this trap early in his career, while working at a small news-paper in Connecticut...
...There is much to mine here, starting with Barry's evocation of the other side of suburbia, of the daily struggle to survive rather than the Cheeveresque anomie that often characterizes the "suburban novel...
...She carried that enthusiasm with her to Louisiana State University, where she broke down racial barriers social and political and made friendships that have stood her in good stead in politics ever since...
...I chose to listen to Grandma in-stead of Jean's mama...
...An undertaker with reasonable impulses can probably provide you with an acceptable casket for something under $1,000, or under $500 if you don't care much about appearance...
...Pre-need planning is a must, but the consensus is to avoid preneed contracts, which tend to enrich the funeral director and rarely protect the consumer from the escalation of prices...
...To find your local branch, contact the FCA headquarters (www.funerals.org or phone 800-765-0107...
...But GrandCORBETTma "told me it was natural to be dark and reminded me that many of her thirteen children, including my father, were dark...
...Lionel was a Korean War veteran who made his living as a construction worker until an accident left him unable to do it any longer...
...Cooking with Grease is about the lessons of Brazile's own quite remarkable life, which began on December 15, 1959, in Charity Hospital in New Orleans...
...Hospitals and some funeral homes have refrigerating facilities...
...This will occur perhaps a half-hour be-fore the vigil so that very few people will have any chance to see whether the casket looks cheap or expensive...
...The title quotes the plea of Barry's mother, Noreen, to her eldest son as she lay dying...
...The difference was that his campaign, through his brother the governor and the Republican Party power structure in Florida, controlled the system, including access to the polls...
...These figures do not include the cost of the casket...
...I did not spend one day hating him or anyone around him...
...Else-where, she writes, "There was a lot of confusion about busing in the black community of Kenner, and it wasn't welcomed as a remedy for generations of segregation in the separate-and-unequal school systems...
...We have since then and will never forget the bitter and tragic lessons of Florida...
...There is no disputing that Brazile's Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman won the popular vote in 2000...
...3. After the funeral, the casket will be wheeled from the sanctuary to the front of the church, where the priest will conclude the funeral rite, the pall will be re-moved, and the casket will be placed in the hearse...
...In 1971, however, as Donna was entering seventh grade, the "push for equality moved into the Jefferson Parish Public Schools...
...She was the third of an eventual nine children in the black Catholic family of Lionel and Jean Brazile of Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans...
...About twelve years ago my wife Helen and I purchased two beautiful pine coffins, with rope handles, for $400 apiece from James Casey in Newport, Rhode Island (401-847-5573...
...A great many Americans have never made peace with that result...
...In-deed, some local officials of the NAACP were driven out of the organization for daring to suggest that blacks were not so psychologically needy as the Brown decision depicted them and might be giving up too much to achieve integration...
...For Catholics, however, one of the en-during pleasures of Pull Me Up may be L Commonweal 3 5 August 13, 2004...
...What is most remarkable about Brazile, at least as she depicts herself, is the fundamental decency that she brings to what looks to have become a cutthroat enterprise...
...Cemeteries, whether owned by towns, churches, or profit-hungry corporations, are a problem...
...I have checked with local funeral homes and found that the charge for these services ranges from $955 without embalming ($1,315 with minimal embalming) to $3,195 ($3,790 with embalming...
...John C. Cort is author of, most recently, Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist (Fordham University Press...
...Now the gods of journalism had granted my re-quest...
...Our local funeral directors charge anywhere from $195 to $29,000...
...There are his father's migraines and grinding commute to Wall Street (until the headaches killed the job and left the family teetering) and his parents' twin crutches of beer and cigarettes that you know, just know, will come back to haunt them...
...The fact is that many black children were derailed educationally by being uprooted from familiar surroundings and thrust into hostile ones...
...she did it...
...Here you go, they had said—asshole...
...Organ donation is a consideration for many people...
...Busing," she writes, "was one of the worst public-policy decisions ever made...
...The question then remains: How do Cooking with Grease Slit] ine the Pots in :1merican Politics Donna hrrrrilc Don Wyeliff ome people grow up wanting to be firemen...
...His mother falls ill with terminal cancer, and a few monthsafter her death he is diagnosed with a tumor on his trachea...
...making ends meet often was...
...His moment of insight came when a young newsroom colleague was murdered...
...It is...
...Not Brazile...
...These coffins also make excellent blanket boxes and/or window seats...
...Up to now I have proceeded on the assumption that you, like the Catholic Church and about 75 percent of the American people, prefer the traditional burial of the deceased in a casket rather than cremation...
...2. You instruct the undertaker to de-liver the body in the casket to the church of your choice, where six able-bodied men or women—relatives or friends—will carry the casket into the church...
...Rather than closing his eyes to it all, however, Barry explores the tragedy of illness, bravely turning his keen journalistic lens on him-self to produce a memoir that is riveting, moving, and not the least bit cheap...
...After all, what is a stranger's death to a reporter but material for a solemn yam that explores, yet again, the fragility of our existence...
...He then became a short-order cook, often working one or two other jobs...
...Donna was darker than all but one of her siblings, and her other grandmother—"Jean's mama"—always made much ado about this...
...That allows us to cluck and memorialize and find cheap context...
...All those afternoons and nights spent in the newsroom, waiting for the telephone to ring with a good story—a good murder, as reporters like to say—so that I could find diversion from my petty woes," Barry writes in Pull Me Up, his poignant new memoir...
...It is that decency that allows her to say she harbors no ill will toward George W. Bush...
...I never blamed George W. Bush for the outcome of the election in Florida," Brazile writes...
...I could barely breathe...
...This is most important because it is in the purchase of caskets, dear reader, that you find the major source of prof-it to the undertaker and financial loss to those less affluent families who cannot afford a casket that does not look cheap...
...The cremated remains may also be present at a funeral ceremony in church and buried in a cemetery, of course...
...Brazile had become immersed in politics even while in grade school, helping a black community activist campaign for improved recreation facilities for black children in Kenner...
...They got out their vote, so did we...
...And, if you want to help others beside yourself, join your local society/alliance...
...She persuaded the Democratic National Committee to create—and she now directs—a Voting Rights Institute, BREAKING BARRIERS Commonweal 3 3 August 13, 2004 whose purpose is to educate poor and minority voters—the ones who were intimidated out of their franchise in Florida in 2000—to know and assert their rights...
...This avoids any need for embalming, which, contrary to popular opinion, is not required by law...
...Don Wycliff, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is public editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...Since 1963 the church, some-what reluctantly, has permitted cremation, and the percentage of those who choose it is rising every year...
...The stories Barry tells are often graphic, especially when he recounts his mother's death and his own brutal course of treatment...
...She taught her all those life lessons that come with age and that wise old heads used to impart to young ones in the course of daily living—before we all became separate atoms spinning in our own orbits, distant from one another...
...She graduated from Grace King High CPtMPPrI &N RBU1ThL MGR Commonweal 34 August 13, 2004 A REPORTER'S STORY School, an all-girls public school where she thrived academically and socially, becoming close for the first time with one of her older sisters and making her first close white friend, who remains a friend to this day...
...After a period during which she lost her straight As, she found her footing and began to enjoy the success for which she seemed destined from the beginning...
...The episode seems to shock Barry into an awareness of the nearness of death...
...Sure, the children succeed, but at what cost...
...Supreme Court, a decision that gave Florida's bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated election to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney...
...We [black children] were bused past schools within walking distance of our homes, miles away into neighbor-hoods where we weren't welcomed, weren't liked, and often were inaccessible by public transportation...
...Being a hopeless traditionalist, I share the church's reluctance...
...Jean, Brazile's mother, was a domestic worker for a wealthy whitefamily in New Orleans...
...Grandma"—Lionel's mother—lived with the family and became Donna's best friend and counselor...
...And not only did she do it, but in the minds and hearts of many, she did it victoriously...
...This review has barely scratched the surface of a huge subject...
...There have been times in the last fifty years when Brazile would have been drummed out of the ranks of polite black society for saying such things...
...As soon as she came home from work, she forced all of us inside the house....She made it clear that we could not 'afford to get sick.— The family had no extra money for doctor bills...
...One of the most important of Grand-ma's lessons to the young Donna was to be comfortable and at peace in her own dark skin...
...The private lives of journalists are strewn with sad testimony to that cultivated habit of avoidance...
...Frankly, and with all due respect to Brazile, the difference between her campaign's voters and those of the Bush campaign was not that his knew their rights and hers didn't...
...Heck, someone has to remind us that the Yankees used to be losers...
...They were located in our neighborhoods...
...They still declare that George W. Bush "isn't my president" and vow they'll run him out of the White House in November...
...And there is the coming-of-age angle, a story bursting with equal parts ambition and insecurity, and the triumph of romance despite it all...
...After college, Brazile headed straight for Washington, D.C., where, she was convinced, the action was...
...Casey now makes them from cherry and the price is $785 plus delivery (about $1 per mile...
...Donna and the other Brazile children attended public schools in Kenner, which meant, in the early years of her education anyway, attending segregated schools...
...Poverty," Brazile writes, "affected nearly every part of my childhood, even my mother's attitudes about playtime...
...Brazile's judgment about busing is interesting now, in view of the discussions going on among black civil-rights movement veterans and others in this fiftieth anniversary year of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision...
...There is the durable immigrant saga, the abandonment of the Old Sod for the promise of the New World, only to find the dream so much cheap tinsel...
...Suggestion: talk to your local "memorial society," which may well have changed its name to the Funeral Consumers Alliance...
...Bitter though the defeat was, Brazile has chosen not to get mad, but to get even...
...Cremation reduces the cost of dying, since the casket is a major expense and for cremation a plain rigid container, wood and/or other material, is sufficient...
...In 2000 we did not teach our voters their rights...
...Donna Brazile is the only person I've ever heard of who grew up wanting to be the campaign manager for a presidential candidate...
...It lost the Electoral College vote—and thus the presidency—by virtue of a 5-4 vote of the U.S...
...Plots can be expensive, and you may be required to purchase an outer burial container, an additional expense...
...you find an undertaker who has reason-able impulses...
...The teachers knew our parents and they lived in the community...
...Once initiated into the art of political organizing, she was hooked...
...The latter half of Cooking with Grease recounts her progress up the ladder of Democratic political organizing—first in the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and culminating in the Gore-Lieberman race of 2000...
...More in-formation is available from the FCA...
...When sickness did strike, Donna and her siblings were treated with one of their grandmother's home remedies...
...One recommended procedure: 1. You ask the undertaker to pick up the body at the hospital or the home and refrigerate it...
...4. The driver will deliver the casket to the cemetery...
...We loved our local schools...
...Come voting time this November, I hope that if Donna Brazile is serious about winning, she'll have not just an educated corps of voters, but a batch of election lawyers who are mean as junk-yard dogs...
...Wealth was never a concern for the Braziles...
...ow let us consider the comparative advantages of a vigil in the church...
...It will be immediately covered by a cloth pall and wheeled up to the sanctuary...
...then life does the rest...
...Pull Me Up ~A Memoir l_)nrr Poi rii David Gibson ike many of us in the journalism dodge, Dan Barry has spent much of his career piecing together the shards of wrecked lives, sidling up to tragedy and then retailing it to the rest of the world, as if such casual intimacy with mortality would somehow inoculate us against its inevitable toll...
...No amount of knowledge of one's voting rights will trump such control and the will to use it...
...And as Barry, who is the About New York columnist for the Times, moves back in time, his recollections of a sub-urban Long Island boyhood emerge as tactile and vivid experiences, especially so for those of us who are also veterans of a 1960s suburban upbringing...
...Yet the more reporters learn about others, the less it seems we know about ourselves, or perhaps the less we want to know...
...Some want to be doctors, or astronauts, or lawyers, or journalists, or even president of the United States...
Vol. 131 • August 2004 • No. 14
