Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel

The United States has been blessed with many outstanding writers from the South, particularly writers from the State of Mississippi. Among the most recent of these writers is Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977), the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant together with National Book Awards in 2011 and 2017. I enjoyed Ward's 2011 National Book Award winner "Salvage the Bones" and I enjoyed this 2017 book, "Sing, Unburied, Sing" even more. "Sing, Buried Sing" is beautifully written, poetic, with many characters and multiple layers of meaning from the gritty and realistic to the metaphysical. Without minimizing the disappointments of life and the long effect of slavery and racial discrimination in Mississippi, the novel shows great understanding of people and a sense of hope. It celebrates song, time, and place.Set in rural Mississippi on the Gulf and on a lengthy ride north to Mississippi's notorious Parchman Prison, the novel tells the story of a poor inter-racial family recounted in the first person by three alternating characters. The first narrator, Jojo, 13, is the son of Leonie, an African American woman and Michael, her long term boyfriend, white with racist parents. The second narrator is Leonie, 29. She and Michael have had two children, Jojo and Kayla, 3. Both Leonie and Michael are heavy drug users, and Michael has spent the three years before the novel begins at Parchman Prison for manufacturing and selling. Leonie loves but pays little attention to her children, with the burden of raising Kayla falling on Jojo. Leonie's parents are Pop, who did time at Parchman when young, and Mam, the "saltwater woman", dying of cancer and a healer who is able to communicate with the dead.The third narrator is a ghost, Richie, who did time at Parchman with Pop and who begins haunting Jojo as he accompanies Leonie and her white friend, Misty, to Parchman to bring Michael home from prison. Ghosts and spirits and the dead play a large role in the novel. In addition to Richie, the ghost of Leonie's beloved older brother, Given, who had been murdered 15 years earlier, appears to play a prominent role in the book. Spirits and ghosts appear in this novel when their lives have been troubled and have come to bad and premature ends. They wander and haunt others in search of closure and peace.The novel begins with a heavily gritty scene with Pop and Jojo slaughtering a goat to cook for Jojo's 13th birthday. Ward has a sharp eye for the details of rural Mississippi life. Much of the story involves the brutality of Parchman Prison, described in part through Michael's experiences but much more fully through the earlier experience of Pop. When he was committed to Parchman at 15 Pop, (whose name is River) befriended the 12-year old inmate Richie and tried to comfort him after a terrible whipping. Richie's ghost comes to Jojo because it wants to learn the fate that cost him his life and to be able to sing a song of peace and to rest. In addition to the terrors of Parchman, the history of racial relations in Mississippi plays a large role in part through Michael's father, big Joseph, an unrepentant and virulent racist. And the book has many graphic scenes of lynchings, burnings, and police with an itchy trigger finger. Drug use plays a large role in the book as well through Michael, Misty, Leonie, and several other characters. The religious, metaphysical aspects of the novel come to the forefront in Richie's story, and in Richie's poetic speech and in the story of the dying Mam, with her clairvoyance and with the haunting by Given.In part, this novel is a coming of age story for Jojo and a road novel, with the lengthy treatment of the drive to Parchman and back, but it is much more. The book is rooted in place and character. Ward loves the places she describes and the people, with all their difficulties. She develops the brutal aspects of her story, in terms of the racism from Mississippi's past in a way that comes out from her characters and their lives. The " ghosts" from the racist past and present come through without destroying the people, and the search for hope and a better life. A spirit of love, forgiveness and mystical religion underlie this book more than a sense of condemnation.Many parts of this story suggest the spiritual aspects of life, intertwined with some dreadfulness, particularly in the voice of Richie. The ghost observes, when he comes to haunt Jojo, of the difficulty of understanding the nature of time and evil particularly growing out of Richie's experience when alive at Parchman."I didn't understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?"Then again, late in the novel Richie's ghost speaks of returning to his spiritual home at peace with himself at last and aware of the physical beauty and variety of the world and its people:"There are yurts and adobe dwellings and teepees and longhouses and villas. Some of the homes are clustered together in small villages, graceful gatherings of round, steady huts with doomed roofs. And there are cities, cities that harbor plazas and canals and buildings bearing minarets and hip and gable roofs and crouching beasts and massive skyscrapers that look as if they should collapse, so weirdly they flower into the sky. Yet they do not."Ward's story begins with roots in a particular place. expands to uncover the place's ghosts and tragic events, and expands still further and transcendentally to a vision of hope. Early in the novel, Pap passes on to Jojo a teaching from his own great-grandfather about the spirituality and unity of all life that Ward's entire novel works to expand: "there's spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals, Said the sun is most important, gave it a name, Aba. But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything to have balance. So the crops will grow, the animals breed and get fat for food." The book encourages careful reading and extensive reflection. "Sing, Unburied, Sing" is an extraordinary novel.Robin Friedman

My book club's March pick was Jesmyn Ward's novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing", a 2017 National Book Award winner and the story of a mixed family living in Mississippi facing the realities and consequences of racism.Ward's novel tells the story from multiple points of view: Jojo, a racially mixed thirteen year old boy primarily raised by his grandparents; Leonie, Jojo's mother, a young black woman working and addicted to meth while her boyfriend and children's father is serving his sentence in the nearby prison of Parchman; and Richie, the ghost of a young, black boy who died while serving his own sentence in Parchman and knew Jojo's grandfather, Riv (River). Jojo's father, Michael, is set to be released, so Leonie takes Jojo, Michaela - Jojo's toddler sister, and her friend - Misty, on a short road trip to pick him up (Misty is visiting her own significant other in Parchman). Ward's novel is masterful at interweaving multiple archetypes: coming of age, confronting ghosts (literally!) of the past, caring for a dying parent and other complicated familial relationships, confronting racism in the heart of the South and the topical subject of police brutality against young black men. Ward certainly packed a lot into "Sing, Unburied, Sing".I enjoyed the rich detail of Ward's writing and the raw confrontation of social issues that have plagued this country since its foundation. Through the eyes of children, both of today and of the past, the harsh realities of racism and drug abuse are seen and I had difficulty reading certain moments even though I could anticipate what was to come. I would recommend "Sing, Unburied, Sing" to anyone interested in a meaningful contemporary novel depicting the American South and confronts its stereotypes.Happy Reading!

Jesmyn Ward is one of the best writers ever. Maybe the best. This book is the second in the Bois series and tells the story of a family dealing with pain and grief, often in ways that are hurtful despite the deep love holding the family together. Ward's prose fills the reader with a sense of time and place with beautiful and evocative phrases. Her characters will live in your head long after you've finished reading.