She makes grief sing
JESMYN Ward’s melancholic third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing ,is haunted by a beauty so grim and staggering that it makes something catch in your throat.
It portrays poverty, addiction and the astonishing cruelties inflicted because of race in the American South, yet it does so with power and generosity.
Its 13-year-old narrator, Jojo, is unusually sensitive to the world around him. He and his baby sister Kayla have been raised in backwoods Mississippi by their black grandparents, strict Pop and sickly Mam, whose grasp of voodoo cannot save her from cancer.
Leonie, Jojo and Kayla’s wreck of a mother, is a drug addict consumed by her disastrous love for their white father Michael.
When Michael is released after a three-year stint in the infamous Parchman Prison, she decides to take her children and drive across the state to get him.
But what seems to be a straightforward road trip proves fraught with crises: the baby is sick, there are drugs to hide and ghosts come along for the ride.
These ghosts include Leonie’s teenage brother Given, who was killed by Michael’s cousin in a so-called hunting accident, as well as a boy called Richie, who was incarcerated in Parchman alongside a 15-year-old Pop. Pop got out; Richie did not. Now he manifests to Jojo, seeking the truth of how he died.
The novel is set in modern-day Mississippi, although it moves back in time to the 1940s and also has its eye on the spectrum of African-American history.
These temporal shifts show that race relations in the United States have ostensibly come a long way, yet in some ways, have got nowhere.
In the 1940s, Richie is 12 when he is sent to Parchman for stealing meat and sentenced to forced labour in the fields, whipped when he slackens – slavery in all but name.
Cut to the present day and a policeman puts a gun to Jojo’s head as he cuffs the unarmed boy during a traffic stop. “Sometimes I think it done changed,” Richie’s ghost tells Jojo.
“And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”
Ward’s writing has a Faulknerian grandeur, but it is the revenant of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) that she most clearly evokes.
Like Morrison, she fleshes out the complexities of a relationship between a quiet, awkward child and a mother who has become a walking wound.
Leonie is a neglectful, borderline abusive parent, yet we can also see the deep well of grief into which she has sunk, as well as the bursts of stricken love she experiences for her children.
Ward presents the struggle of a people to live with a past that will not stay past, with the dead who will not stay buried.
She takes all that grief and makes it sing.