Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
After I finished this book, I realized that it is part of a 3 book series….and this is book 2.
😑
While I WISH I would have known that so I could have read them in order, this is definitely a novel that can stand alone on it’s own.
So much so that I had NO IDEA it was even PART of a series until I was looking up info about it.
This book takes place in Southern Mississippi, and the setting was SO vivid to me.
While the town in the story is fictional, the author based it upon her own Mississippi hometown of DeLisle…which is only about a half hour or so away from MY Southern Louisiana hometown of Slidell.
So much of the vivid descriptions of the weather and scenery sparked all kinds of memories in my head…I could feel the humidity in the air and the heat rising off the road…I could smell the trees and the moss and the grass right after a springtime rainshower…I could see the roads, the neighborhoods, the towns, the highways.
It was powerful imagery for me.
Some of that had to do with the familiarity of the surroundings described…but I think a lot of it had to do with the beautiful, haunting and unique way Ms Ward writes.
Her words read like lyrics or like spoken poetry…weaving together to form sounds and descriptions and dialogue in a way that transports you and sweeps you right into the entire story.
“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
“It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.”
“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart.”
“I stand until there is no sun. I stand until I smell pine through the salt and sulfur. I stand until the moon rises and their mouths close and they are a murder of silver crows. I stand until the forest is a black-knuckled multitude.”
“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
This book is beautifully written…but it is NOT a light, breezy read by ANY means.
There are multiple narrators telling the story of a Black family in Mississippi.
This is their own story about family, generational trauma, finding healing, discovering yourself, and reconciling with the past.
It is a story of love, heartbreak, connection and loss interlaced with racism, poverty, systemic injustice, addiction and mass incarcaration.
This is a story of harsh realities mixed with supernatural abilities and occurences….certain family members have special “sight”, gifts with nature and ancestors appear to them to teach, to warn and to protect.
This is a book that when finished has you sitting in silence for a bit…just reflecting on all that you took in from the pages.
The words, the characters, the events stay heavy on your heart and heavy on your mind.
I tend to read a lot of books that linger that way….and I think that is just what the authors WANT them to do.
Because even though this is fictional work, there is a whole LOT of extremely tough reality and very real lived pain in these pages.
Reading stories like these are important to listen and learn, to honor and remember.
Definitely recommend.
(I am for sure going to read the other two books in this series, even though it bugs me to no end that I am going out of order. 🤦♀️)