Books: Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing.’
The setting and even a few characters’ cameo appearances in “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Jesmyn Ward’s poetic and moving new novel, recall Ward’s exceptional “Salvage the Bones” (2011).
But this new novel’s meditation on what it means to be black — and particularly a black male — in contemporary America is more apt to remind readers of “Men We Reaped” (2013), Ward’s devastating memoir of her brother and four other black men she’s known who all died too young.
A murdered brother named Given haunts the pages of “Sing,” in which ghosts of the many thousands gone are all around the beleaguered family of cancer-ridden Mam and husband Pop, parents to Leonie and Given and surrogate parents to Leonie’s children: 13-year-old Jojo and 3-year-old Kayla.
Michael, the children’s white father, is a meth addict; Leonie, one of three first-person narrators in “Sing,” has long since joined him. Grieving for her brother, she admits she “cannot bear the world.” She gets numb because she feels too much.
Like her children, Leonie sees ghosts; drugs dull the pain while muddying the visions and stories she might have otherwise told. She’s a version of the woman Ward — who tells us in her memoir that she drank to forget — might have become. For all the bad things Leonie does in this book, she is presented with remarkable love and empathy.
Leonie’s sensitive son does what Leonie herself cannot. Able to talk to animals from age 9 and in dialogue through much of this novel with a boy named Richie who’d died at his age, Jojo tells stories struggling to make sense of the past while nevertheless moving toward the future.
Many of them get told during a journey north with Leonie and Kayla to Parchman, the notorious Mississippi prison farm that holds Jojo’s father and which — long ago — had been home to Pop and young Richie, jailed there in the 1940s. Parchman was “mass murder,” Pop tells Jojo. It’s “a place for the dead,” Michael writes Leonie.
Richie, who joins Jojo and Leonie as a narrator, is a hungry ghost, “pulling all the weight of history behind him” and unable to fly free. Every time he tries to take flight and leave behind the world where he’d died young for the crime of being black, “memory” winds up “pulling me to earth.”
As with Leonie, that history threatens to engulf Jojo as well. He’s conscious of the similarities between his and Richie’s life. But he’s also his formidable grandfather’s strong offspring; he knows Richie had it worse, and he’s fiercely determined to make something better for himself and his sister.
He does so with the soul of a poet; as in everything she writes, Ward’s gorgeous evocation of the burden of history reminds me of Mississippi’s most famous writer, in a novel with more than a trace of “As I Lay Dying.”
As with Faulkner, the past in Ward’s world is never dead. It isn’t even past. “We all here at once,” Mam says to Jojo. “The branches are full . . . with ghosts,” Jojo tells us. “All the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves.” How might one live in a world so choked with death? That’s the urgent question Ward asks in everything she writes; the answer, time and again, involves the healing stories that can make us whole.
“The story of me and Parchman,” Richie tells us at one point, “is a moth-eaten shirt, nibbled to threads: the shape is right, but the details have been erased. I could patch those holes. Make that shirt hang new, except for the tails. The end.”
The ending, Ward suggests, is up to us. “Salvage the Bones” ends by celebrating beginnings; this new novel ends in song that joins the living and the dead. Always clear-eyed, Ward knows history is a nightmare. But she insists all the same that we might yet awake and sing.