In Freedom Day Show, her second novel, twenty years in the writing, Pulitzer-, Tony-, and MacArthur-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks orchestrates an entire American world-the Black community of Valentine, Texas-across a single luminous, Bicentennial-summer day.
Like the best jazz, like Juneteenth itself, this extraordinary novel is a celebration that contains everything: comedy, heartbreak, ambition, stubborn love, the weight of history, and, finally, the profound possibility-no, the profound necessity-of joy.
Sixteen-year-old Penny Jones has come south from Vermont to spend the week with her grandmother Almeda Durham, the indomitable matriarch of Valentine, whose family has devoted more than a hundred years-through eleven failed attempts, floods, deaths, sabotage, and catastrophic bad luck-to bringing The Freedom Day Show to life. The show is a community history pageant celebrating the moment when the news of Emancipation first reached Texas on June 19, 1865. Almeda's convinced this will be the year that the show finally makes it onto the stage with Penny set to star. But Penny has plans of her own and is not interested in her grandmother's small-town pageant. She wants something bigger than Valentine. The rest of Valentine's populace swirls vibrantly around them, their hopes and histories and humor brilliantly brought to life as they prepare themselves for the show's first-ever production-or its fated collapse.
Over the course of one extraordinary Juneteenth day in 1976, Parks gives us Valentine in its full, magnificent particularity: the radio station broadcasting across the prairie; the pool hall where teenagers gather and deals are made; the used-car lot secretly working to derail the show; the beauty shop, the diner, the empty field where an old pumpjack stands rusting over what might yet be oil. Told in a rich chorus of the town's voices, we discover a fictional community as fully realized as Winesburg, Ohio, or like some totally original, thrilling mash-up of August Wilson, Lincoln in the Bardo, and a Black Our Town.
Suzan-Lori Parks is one of our greatest living playwrights, and Freedom Day Show is that rarest of things: a great and serious novel that is also playful and genuinely fun to read. It is an American original, just like its author.
