Book Review

Book Review

Daddy Was an Undertaker

by McDill McCown Gassman

     Those of you fortunate enough to be possessed by a sense of morbid curiosity, take note. Daddy Was an Undertaker by McDill McCown Gassman may be a book for you. This short and easy book has some dark themes which come across as even darker when keeping in mind that it was written for young adults or children.

     The story is autobiographical. Dill is a little girl whose father owns and operates a funeral parlor; the family lives in the apartment on the second floor. The secondary theme of this book is her love and admiration for her father, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who brought his family to Huntsville, Alabama where he set up his trade. Through a series of anecdotes, we learn how the family, and especially Dill, are outsiders in the community. Her father is well-respected but kept at an arm’s length by most people while Dill gets teased and bullied at school. The presence of death is felt in most of the stories. Many chapters have interesting themes; along the way, Dill gets to see a dead body leaking brains and blood after a car crash, the family goes on vacation in a horse-drawn hearse, a man commits suicide at his brother’s funeral, and Dill almost gets trampled to death by a bull. The simple writing style somehow illuminates these grim mini-narratives with the sunshiny joy and playfulness of childhood. The gloom of her neurosis gets balanced by her curiosity and wonder at the good-natured aspects of her life.

     To make it even more interesting, the narrator is a chronic vomiter. Ever time she gets excited about something, her stomach churns and she loses her lunch for all to see. Dill pukes at school, ralphs over the side of a horse-cart, and barfs while watching the fireworks explode during the the 4^th of July. I kept expecting her to upchuck at church or hurl during a funeral ceremony but those events never came to pass.

     The family’s relationship with the African-American community is interesting too. In one passage, Dill and her sister are preparing their ghost costumes for Halloween. They hear a car pull up outside and run out to see who it is. There are two African-American men outside who are immediately frightened and quickly drive away. Obviously, but without saying it directly, this is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. You may think this scene is cruel at first but as the book goes on, it becomes obvious that the author had a great amount of respect for the African-American people. Her father defends them when people put them down, she writes with admiration about a 90 year old ex-slave who tells her stories and sings for her, and her father even helps a young Black man escape from a lynch mob. Some of this is patronizing to African-American people by today’s standards but this book mostly takes place in Alabama during the 1920s; this literature would have been both progressive and controversial in that decade so a little historical perspective can go a long way.

     Another interesting thing about this book is the artwork. Each chapter has an illustration with a caption taken from the narrative and written along the bottom. Some of the better one, especially when taken out of context, look similar to the art of Raymond Pettibon. One shows Dill hugging her father’s knees while he holds a pair of handcuffs and a pistol. The caption reads, “I flung myself at Daddy’s knees...’Don’t go,’ I implored, ‘Oh, Daddy – don’t go!’”

     Not all of the writing is great and the few passages that make no reference to death or anxiety are not especially interesting but Daddy Was an Undertaker is still worth being hunted down and read. It could even be interpreted as a young adult version of the Southern Gothic style even though that probably was not the author’s intention. McCown Gassman has written the kind of book that could inspire Tom Waits to write a song. It could inspire John Waters to make a movie. It is a weird book and that is why it should be read.

McCown Gassman, McDill. Daddy Was an Undertaker. Vantage Press Inc., New York: 1952.