Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing begins as a quiet hum and ends as a soaring chorus. Ward lyrically captures the fluidity of time in the lives of her characters and brilliantly shows how the atrocities perpetrated by white Americans on African Americans still haunt families today. How could they not? 

The book opens with River teaching his young grandson, JoJo, in gruesome detai,l the way to kill a goat, foreshadowing a greater horror to come. We soon meet Leonie, Rivers daughter, and the mother of JoJo and Kayla. Leonie has never recovered from her brother's murder by white kids and turns to drugs to ease her pain.  Leonie and her best friend, Misty, are driving JoJo and Kayla to Parchman State Penitentiary in northern Mississippi to pick up, Michael, the father of Leonie’s children. Though Leonie neglects and abuses her children, Jojo and Kayla survive due to the love of their grandparents, a glimmer of hope in an otherwise grim novel.  

On one level the book is about the car ride to and from the state prison, but the story is also about the ways in which African Americans are trapped in the white world, on a ride not of their choosing.    On the way back from the prison, a ghost named Richie, sneaks into the car. Richie embodies all the horror and denigration experienced by African Americans from slavery to the present.  Richie knew River when they were both unjustly imprisoned at Parchment Penitentiary.  Since River’s release, he has been haunted by the compassionate “Sophie’s Choice” decision he made that involved Richie. 

Singing is the opposite of what these folk’s lives are about.  Their present lives seem to be dirges of drugs and poverty, pain, and prejudice. The knowledge of what their ancestors endured lingers and lives within them. River’s wife says, “Because we don’t walk no straight lines.  It’s all happening at once.  All of it.  We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” This makes sense to me. How could they forget the horrors that were inflicted on family members that came before them? They were burned, hung and skinned alive by mobs of white people. These atrocities defy comprehension and elicit horror and should haunt us all.  To add insult to injury, African Americans were denied their humanity even in death, often denied the decency of a burial.  It is no wonder that all the characters are “pulling the weight of history behind them.” 

Jesmyn Ward’s novel is a tour de force. Her use of magical realism adds a wonderful dimension to the novel.  Ward is able to capture the difficult day-to-day lives of her characters in the present while also capturing the dead relatives and unburied ancestors of their past. Her lyrical language, appreciation of nature and deep spirituality make this book a beautiful and heartbreaking read.  At the end of the novel, Richie says, “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”  In our current milieu, this quote says it all.