Slow apocalypse of black America - a review of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
This awardwinning portrait of a Mississippi family blighted by drugs and prison is a fierce critique of US history
Sing, Unburied, Sing begins as it mostly means to go on: in blackness. A teenager named Jojo finds himself in a place of dirt and mud and slime and blood. His grandfather is showing him how to kill a goat: how to slit its throat, how to slice its stomach and reach in for its intestines. There are terrible bleating and gurgling sounds. The smell “overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit”. Buzzards hover above. Soon the youngster is throwing up in the grass. Not much later he’ll be eating the goat’s liver in a plate full of gravy.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it’s representing the slow apocalypse being experienced by black America. Jesmyn Ward’s gnarly, freighted novel is a portrait of a broken family living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. This family is headed by Leonie, a mother at 17, hooked on drugs, married to a white man named Michael whose cousin killed her brother and who is himself completing a jail sentence. Their son Jojo acts as a bridge between grandparents Pop and Mama (the former afflicted by memories; the latter dying of cancer) and his toddler sister.
Hearing that Michael is about to be released from prison, Leonie, her children and her equally substance-addicted white friend Misty embark on a long trip north to meet him. It’s a road journey without epic or transcendent qualities: an often amusingly banal odyssey full of gas station ennui, dodgy drug deals, kids who teeter between nausea and ravenous hunger. On the return leg, when a police officer stops their car – with its motley crew of ex-cons and crystal meth fans – it seems probable that one of them will be gunned down. Later, Michael starts headbutting his father. In turn, he is broom-beaten by his mother.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is most effective as a poetic critique of US history. The landscapes it describes with forensic ferocity are toxic. One of its characters, a 12-year-old who is caught stealing salted meat, is sentenced to three years at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm (the eerie blues and spirituals of some of its inmates were recorded between 1947 and 1959 by folklorist Alan Lomax). He enters a world where the division between plantation, labour camp and penal colony is blurred as prisoners spend their days planting, weeding and harvesting crops. It’s a brutal place, “a place for the dead”, one that has three cemeteries on site.
The division between carceral and civilian life is also porous. For Ward, Mississippi poisons bodies and imaginations alike. Leonie, who grew up there, believes it taught her that “after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants”. In her laugh, Jojo hears “no happiness; just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow”. The ground they walk on, the air they breathe, the food they ingest: it’s all contamination.
The novel is set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and haunted by the unspoken spectre of the great Mississippi flood of 1927. It frequently invokes water, both as liberation and as part of the problem. Mama, who had a rich cosmology of voodoo-istic spirits, liked to call on a goddess of the ocean and of salt water, honouring “all the life-giving waters of the world”. Equally, characters are often dry-throated or parched. Michael, who used to work on an offshore oil rig, sobbingly apologises to the water for taking a job that may have killed off pods of dolphins.
Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book award for fiction in the US. In many ways, though, it’s not as strong as Ward’s previous work, including her 2011 novel Salvage the Bones and her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped. Its dense lyricism is often heavy handed. In drawing on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying – both in its multiple first-person narratives and its story of a poor rural family that embarks on a wagon trek to Mississippi – it comes across as self-consciously literary.
Jojo, fierce and tender, is the endearing heart of the novel; other characters, including Leonie, are fitfully ventriloquised and remain rather distant. The ramshackle journey at its spine and Ward’s rendering of the region’s dark geologies and histories are more potent than her awkward stage-managing of spirits and apparitions in the second half. Still, for all its occasional misand oversteps, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a brooding, pained meditation on the proposition, spelled out by Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad, that “America is a ghost in the darkness”.