Sing, Unburied, Sing
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.
My introduction to the author Jesmyn Ward was through reading her memoir, Men We Reaped, and then The Fire This Time, a collection of essays she edited. Ward just recently published an incredibly moving piece about the death of her husband in Vanity Fair’s special September issue, The Great Fire, edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, titled “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic.” Her novel Salvage the Bones is next on my list.
This interview with her addresses the need for more representations of people of color in literature -- exactly the reason why my friend Delia and I started our project, Good Trouble For Kids! Ward, like Toni Morrison before her, and contemporary Black writers like Coates, Colson Whitehead, Natasha Tretheway, Kiese Laymon, Edward P. Jones, to name just a few, are creating bodies of work that need to be included in the literary canon, and, I believe, should be regularly taught and used in writing workshops.
Ward, like Faulkner did in the early 20th century, is drawing a picture of Mississippi life, but through the distinctly different lens of a Black woman. Like Faulkner, Ward’s language is poetic, and playful with form. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward also ventures into the world of the magical, and introduces ghost characters who make their presences very known. In this, perhaps, she is most reminiscent of Toni Morrison (who can forget the living ghosts of Beloved?), and I also found myself thinking of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, with its gallery of speaking ghosts.
The story is told from the perspective of different characters: Jojo, a 13-year-old; his mother, Leonie; and Richie, the ghost of another 13-year old boy, once an inmate with his grandfather at Parchman Farm (the Mississippi State Penitentiary). It is worth exploring the terrible history of Parchman, described here by the Innocence Project, as the “prison modeled after a slave plantation.” The article cites this staggering statistic: “Black Mississippians account for 70% of Parchman’s incarcerated population, while making up 37% of the state’s population.” In Ward’s book, Parchman becomes a space for readers to begin reckoning with the weighted history of slavery up until the present day.
The power of Sing, Unburied, Sing lies in the poetry of Ward’s language, in the images one is left with. Very early on, there is the story of Jojo watching his grandfather kill the goat. I could not help but think of the symbolism of the scapegoat in the Bible. After the goat is killed, Jojo says, “That eye: still wet. Looking at me like I was the one who cut its neck, like I was the one bleeding it out, turning its whole face red with blood” (4). There is martyrdom here, something bearing witness to its own death. It is hard, in light of the evidence of police brutality being brought to light by Black Lives Matter and other activists, not to think of the Black community having to watch its sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, being killed in front of them over and over again. And all of us, as American citizens, bear witness. Social media has insured that deaths like George Floyd’s can no longer be hidden.
Ward’s choosing to have Jojo be a mixed-race child (his father is white) allows for a narrator who has insight (and bears witness) into two experiences of race in America. There will be more and more stories that need to be told from a perspective like Jojo’s in the 21st century, especially as demographics here significantly change. As the mother of a mixed-race daughter, I am deeply aware of the complexity of holding multiple identities in the US. It is particularly hard when one is consistently “read” as one race, or moves in a world dominated by one race. Jojo’s father, Michael, is one of the minority whites held at Parchman, and the roles of the other white characters (Leonie’s friend, Misty; Michael’s lawyer, who also does drugs with him, etc.) capture how profound the issue of race is to America’s construct of itself, and significantly, how often white people do not have a racialized vision of themselves as “white.” The encounter Leonie and her children have with Michael’s family is a terribly disturbing one, but it vividly captures how deeply racism has stained this country. And, as Faulkner showed in so much of his work, (I am thinking especially of Absalom! Absalom!), how the fears of miscegenation and the viciousness of racism, lead people to reject their own blood relatives.
There is a moment in Ward’s depiction of Michael’s and Leonie’s reunion, and the passion that exists between them, that made me think of the Molly chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it is turned on its head in Ward’s exquisite American English, and it is all the more powerful that Ward’s capture of this erotic and tender moment is from Leonie’s perspective, and her description of Michael below as praying captures both the spiritual and sensual. It is pure poetry.
He is all eyes and hands and teeth and tongue. His forehead against mine: his head down. He is praying, too low for me to hear, and then I feel it. ‘Leonie, Loni, Oni, Oh,’ he says, his voice there and then nothing. His fingers there and then nothing and then there again, and my skin itches and tingles and burns and sears. So long since I had this. My chest is hollow and then full, now a ditch dusty dry, now rushing with water after a sudden, heavy spring rain. A flood. There are no words. All around me, then through me, a man praying, and silent, praying and silent, a man who is more than man,a man with a shining shock of hair and clear eyes, a man who is all fire, fire in his mouth, flames his hand, smoldering coals the V of his hips. Fire and water. Drowned clean. Born up. Blessed. Like that, yes. Like that. Yes. (149)
Ward is just as powerful in capturing the love between Jojo and his sister, Kayla. Their love for each other is profound; in different ways, they are each aware that they constitute “home” for one another, especially in light of both Michael’s and Leonie’s deficiencies as parents. And yet, one feels that Ward has compassion for all her characters, even when they are failing. Leonie’s brother’s death at a young age haunts her, and his ghost shows up when she is under the influence of drugs, when her guard is most let down. Parenting does not come naturally to her, and Jojo and Kayla would have struggled all the more had their grandparents not been there for them. Leonie’s pain causes her to forsake her children, and Leonie herself recognizes this by the book’s end. “I cannot bear the world” (274), she heartbreakingly says. I believe Ward succeeds in having readers feel deeply saddened, and even greatly angered, by Leonie’s failures at parenting, but to also have compassion for her as well. We see that she has suffered one too many losses, and is broken.
There is far more I could say about Sing, Unburied, Sing but I will turn it over now to other readers to share their impressions of this book. Hopefully some of the questions below will spur some comments. I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think.
questions:
§ So many inmates in prison are also parents, and this obviously takes a huge toll on all family members, both inside and outside prison walls. How does Ward’s book amplify the need for prison reform in this country?
§ Sing, Unburied, Sing also addresses drug addiction. Think of the various characters who take drugs in this novel in order to escape. Why do so many feel that their lives have become unbearable and there is no other way out? Why does Given only appear to Leonie when she is high?
§ This is a novel about grief and loss in so many different ways and is a meditation on time, aging and death. The final scene of Leonie’s mother dying is quite haunting. What do you think Ward is trying to say here about the veil between the living and the dead? How is this a novel about mortality? What is your tether between this world and the next?
§ When Pop finally tells Jojo the whole story about Richard, he offers a monologue reminiscent of Shakespeare, that begins, “I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out” (256). Write about the guilt you have that you cannot let go of. Jojo ultimately gives Pop some peace. Write about what gives you some peace over what you cannot change, or let go of.
§ What do you think this novel is saying about how we define family? (Motherhood, fatherhood, etc.)
§ This novel begins with the death of the goat and ends with the death of Jojo’s grandmother. Wards writes on page 5, “the goat is inside out,” and then Leonie describes the room where her mother is dying as smelling like “Mama has been turned inside out.” What is the symbolic connection between these two deaths?
action:
Please consider making a donation to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), founded by Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy. EJI is doing extraordinary work on criminal justice reform, and is based in Montgomery, Alabama.
links to further discussion of Jesmyn Ward & Sing, Unburied, Sing
NYT Book Review by Tracy K. Smith
Some more questions from the NYT Book Group, Now Read This