Introduction

LULU is a fascinating heroine based on the equally fascinating life of her creator. Come take the journey with LULU as she grows from a precocious child in Charleston, S.C. into a co-ed at a college in the North. A journey that comes with all of the heartbreak of first love, motherly rivalry , brotherly caring and parental betrayal. With a literary voice in the grand tradition of the great southern writers, one of America's best-selling non-fiction authors Nancy Friday, has in LULU, created a fascinating first work of fiction.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

1946

The house was pink, the shutters blue and the lovely thing looked to grow right out of the sidewalk along with all the other houses, each a different pastel than the one before, marching like a rainbow into the near distance. “Follow,” it said, and follow she did, pointing her Mary Janes towards the rainbow’s end, which is how Lulu began her new life in the fairy tale place to which they had driven for three days from the dark, sad city up north.

Only nine-year-old Harry saw Lulu leave the car they were unpacking, carrying suitcases and packages into the pink house, lovely enough through the open door but not as magnetic as the rainbow of houses.

“Where are you going, Lulu? Come back!” he called, then gave it up, no more anxious than she in this fairy tale place.

In the fullest comfort ever known in her four years, she felt the place put an arm around her. “Walk the rainbow,” it said and she had got out of the car, assured that nothing bad could happen if she walked past the blue house, turned the corner at the yellow or entered the dusty grocery store where a gentle dark-skinned man behind the counter took her nickel for a Milky Way.

“You all right, chile?” he asked, smiling and looking down at the little girl, all legs and arms, her dark hair pulled tightly into braids, the gold rimmed glasses slipping off her nose, and the sash of her wrinkled dress untied so that its ends dragged behind her.

“Oh, yes,” Lulu replied, staring at his gold tooth and his skin the color of her mother’s pocketbook. She told him they had been driving for three days and, because he was so interested in her story, Lulu decided to eat her Milky Way in the store. She said they had seen little children his color when they stopped for gas and that the man at the pump had told her, “That’s Gullah they talkin.’ Toss ‘em some pennies and they go away.” Which is what Lulu had done, prompting the children to offer a song and dance, giving her such a nice feeling indeed.

At this point in her story, Lulu patted the pocket of her dress where she kept the tiny change purse embroidered with flowers, a pretty thing she had admired on her grandmother’s dressing table. “You keep it,” Grandy had said, putting a few coins in it just before they had left the Dark City up north. “You’re never too young to learn respect for money.” Four years of watching her mother handle money with deep sighs that said, “Oh, I really don’t like touching this,” had taught Lulu that money must be “powerful medicine,” as Tonto said to The Lone Ranger. Very well, Lulu had concluded, if Grandy is “made of money”—a phrase Lulu had overheard, leaving her with dream sleep images of her grandmother stuffed like a bank with coins—then I shall be like her. Which is how Lulu came to be a saver of pennies. Life was teaching her that it was better to be like her grandmother who was “made of money,” than her mother who sighed when she handled it.

The candy bar eaten, Lulu stopped outside the screen door and once again the pretty picture of the place into which they had fallen, like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” filled her with pleasure. Then she recited the route she had walked away from the pink house. Take a right and then another right, memory said, which she did with the seasoned traveler’s assurance. Thus did she stake her claim, marking Charleston her own, an instinctual homing device that would return her to the pink house for the rest of her life. Sure enough, there was her brother Harry, standing on the sidewalk, watching her now with his sweet smile, though he shook his head as if to say, “What am I going to do with you?”

Beside Harry stood a large woman, the same color as the man in the store, though she was much bigger around and her hair was tied up in a bright scarf that matched her dress over which was a white apron wide as a tablecloth. The big woman looked from Lulu to Harry. “That’s Lulu,” he said and the woman’s anxious face creased into smiles. She opened her arms and Lulu happily walked into them. “Where you been, chile? You no sooner in a strange place, you go walkin’ here, there, everywhere?” The woman scooped her up and pressed her head against her soft bosom the size of two bolster pillows. “How you find your way to buy candy bars ‘n this a new city?” On she scolded, all the love in the world in her voice as she carried her “baby girl” into the pink house, straightening Lulu’s pigtails with one hand.

On their way to the kitchen, Lulu could hear her mother’s exhausted voice upstairs, arguing with Harry, who didn’t want to have his bedroom on the same floor as his mother's, but was insisting his room be on the third floor, down the hall from Lulu’s. As much as she wanted to see the rest of this mysterious house with its high ceilings and long shadows reaching through the slats in the shutters closed against the afternoon sun, Lulu decided to stay with her safe harbor whose name was Evangeline. “But you call me Vangie, honey.”

In the kitchen, Vangie was taking food out of the refrigerator, down from the cupboard shelves, and talking to Lulu all the while. “I been sent a list a food you like but I got somethin’ special Vangie brung for you.” She handed Lulu a little box. “Peach leather. Go on, eat some.” Lulu put the lovely sticky orange-colored strips into her mouth and said appreciatively, “Yum, yum!” making Vangie laugh.

“Will you sleep here, too?” Lulu asked climbing onto a chair and from there to the counter where she sat watching Vangie peel shrimp and prepare rice.

“Most time I sleep here. My room next to you. Maybe sometime I sleep home. Now, honey girl…” She picked up Lulu in her enormous arms. “Now it time to nap.” Vangie carried Lulu up two flights of stairs. Harry had already claimed the room at the top, leaving the two far rooms for Lulu and Vangie, who put Lulu on the bed, took off her shoes, and laid a light blanket over her. “I leave the door to my room open, honey, and I be right here when you wake up.”

Thus did gratitude to a place and its people begin reparations, relaxing little shoulders. Can a town lost in time do so much good, so quickly? For the first time in four years, Lulu was convinced that everything would be all right. “You are home now,” the place promised, and she took it at its word.

From down the hall that night came the sound of Harry’s radio, a wailing horn playing the blues in the night, a lullaby heard from the beginning of her time. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1) It is important to me as the author that you as the reader understand Lulu's motivation throughout the novel. I often have wondered how many people who read Lulu recognize, possibly within themselves, Lulu's buried feelings of loss, humiliation and betrayal? How many of you within your Reading Group have felt these emotions, and if you haven't, were you still able to relate to Lulu?

2) Did members in your Reading Group like the relationship between Lulu and March? What about between Lulu and her brother Harry?

3) Regarding Lulu's mother Penelope - did you find anything in her emotional make-up that is redeeming? What about Grandy? Is she too contemptuous of her daughter Penelope, or does Penelope deserve her mother's complete disdain?

Weblinks

»	Author Nancy Friday's web site
»	About the Author

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