Primeros reseñadoresSheri Booker

Sheri Booker was only 15 years old when she started working for Wylie’s Funeral Home on a hot summer day in West Baltimore. She’d just lost her beloved great-aunt, a woman who acted as a second mother to her. For a young girl, confronting death for the first time turned it into an all-consuming fascination. What began as a simple summer job turned into nine years of immersion into a hidden world she’d never expected to find. At the funeral home, Sheri was privy to the most intimate and complicated moments in a family’s life: when they come together to bury one of their own. She saw wives throw themselves on the caskets of their dead husband and families rip each other apart over money. She heard the chilling screams of mothers who lost their children. She prepared the body of a teen suicide victim who’d tattooed his arm with instructions addressed to the funeral director he’d never meet. She even dressed an infant the size of a Cabbage Patch doll in a diaper and onesie for viewing. Sometimes life working for Mr. Wylie felt straight out of an episode on The Wire. The funeral home was never short on business—AIDS and gang violence threatened to wipe out an entire generation of black men in Baltimore. Sheri couldn’t help but feel she was helping to plan the funerals of men who were being directly subtracted from her dating pool. But for as much sadness, heartbreak, and despair Sheri encountered, life at a funeral home also had its fair share of dark humor. Fights often broke out between mistresses and widows over the arrangements. Long-winded preachers whooped and hollered, but forgot the names of the deceased person they were honoring. A 600-pound man had to be fork lifted out of his window and buried in two grave plots. Sheri learned to expect the unexpected, and even though she never quite got over the terror of the basement—where the embalmings took place--she got comfortable in the company of stiffs. But most of all she learned never, ever to cry. Through it all Sheri embraces her evolving roll as referee, therapist, negotiator, saleswoman, lawyer, confidant, and friend. She becomes a prized employee, and surrogate daughter to Mr. Wylie, her boss and a former-street-hustler-turned-funeral- director who she begins to idolize. She learns how to run a business from Mr. Wylie and she starts to take on his swagger. But as Sheri’s status within his business begins to grow, so does her addiction to the emotional highs and lows of the work and its power. Nine Years Under offers an unbelievable glimpse into the trade secrets of the funeral industry: the skill involved using makeup to revive the dead, the way backs of suit jackets are cut to dress the bodies, the key to making dead person’s hair manageable, and how to make money. It is a look at an urban funeral culture where funeral-goers shed traditional suits and ties and opt instead for photo-screened memorial t-shirts to memorialize their loved ones. Where, after a wake, Sheri would find little trinkets placed inside the casket by a family member: a locket, a photo, a marijuana joint, or a fifth of cognac. This dazzling, debut memoir takes us inside a secret, taboo world—a world we can’t turn away from--filled with caskets, corpses, hearses, and the colorful cast of characters who earn their living preparing the dead. It is a coming-of-age story like no other.