‘SING, UNBURIED, SING’: JESMYN WARD’S NOVEL RESONATES BOOKS,
A redemptive chorus of living and dead voices in Jesmyn Ward’s latest
Jesmyn Ward fans will recognize the thematic and geographical terrain of her gorgeous new novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”
Like her first and second novels, “Where the Line Bleeds” and the National Book Award-winning “Salvage the Bones,” Ms. Ward’s latest book takes place on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and unflinchingly explores the bonds of young black siblings surrounded by strife, but anchored in strength.
Thirteen-year-old Jojo takes care of his toddler sister Kayla while his mother, Leonie, goes on drug benders and his deadbeat father, Michael, serves prison time in Parchman. Pop, Jojo’s loving grandfather, also did a stint at Parchman, although his sentence came down for nothing more than being the brother of a bar brawler and being black.
When Michael is released, Leonie drags Jojo and Kayla on a road trip to bring their father home. Ghosts haunt the family, including that of Leonie’s murdered brother and Richie, a young boy Pop took under his wing in prison. Mam, Pop’s wife, has one foot in the spirit world herself as cancer ravages her body.
Ms. Ward has mastered a lyrical and urgent blend of past and present here, conjuring the unrestful spirits of black men murdered by white men, and never shying away from the blatant brutality of white supremacy.
But even as violence breaks out in these pages, Jojo rises up as the picture of grace and hope. He’s a young man wise beyond his years who suffers through a precarious coming-of-age but does not falter when it comes to his sister’s care and his own trajectory toward kindness and a better life.
Both Jojo and Leonie see dead people, and Ms. Ward makes the smart authorial move of alternating the first-person point of view between son and mother.
Richie’s point of view is favored in some chapters, an effective choice that allows readers to shift their sympathies from the living to the dead.
The unburied of the book’s title demand an audience, so letting one of them have a significant stab at telling the story from his point of view feels just and compelling.
Ms. Ward’s musical language is the stuff of formidable novelists, and never has it been more finely tuned.
Animals, spirits, drug addicts, and confused adolescents all sing their truths here, and the result is an ultimately redemptive chorus that resonates long after the last page is turned.