"Sing, Unburied, Sing," by Jesmyn Ward

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” (Scribner, 2017), by Jesmyn Ward, is a powerful dirge, relentless and deeply sad, yet with a spark of hope and life in its midst. It tells the story of the fateful road trip of 13-year-old Jojo and his black family traveling through rural Mississippi to pick his white father Michael up from prison at the end of his sentence. Jojo lives in a very rural area with his unreliable mother Leonie, torn by her own history and addictions, as well as with his almost saintly, loving grandparents. His grandparents are both great inspirations to Jojo and provide a rock solid loving foundation for him, but the grandfather has his own demons, and the grandmother is painfully dying of cancer. Jojo is also the one who takes care of his little sister Kayla, a child being a rock for a still younger child. The family burden, besides a history of discrimination and pain, is the loss of Leonie’s brother Given to a senseless shooting. The road trip is dogged by unhappy events, but ultimately achieves its goal. Back home, despite a deep love between them, there is still strife between Leonie and Michael, made worse by the fact that Michael’s father cannot accept that Michael loves and has children with a black woman. Throughout the story, Jojo is visited by the ghost of his uncle Given, as well as by the ghost of a young man, really almost a child, Richie, whom Jojo’s grandfather had tried to save when the two of them were in the same prison where Michael was later; these two are the unsettled, unhappy, still questing, “unburied” of the title, although the titles resonates in other ways as well. It turns out that several members of the family have intuitive qualities and can see and hear ghosts. With the presence of ghosts, and the structure of the road trip, there is a mythic quality to this story. It is hard to exaggerate the power and compelling qualities of this novel. Of course there is no such thing as one “rural Southern African-American experience,” but this novel gives readers a riveting look at one family in Mississippi whose story combines the details of everyday life and the mythic in one potent package. Ward is a passionate, gifted writer, whose also-powerful memoir “Men We Reaped” I posted about here on 1/24/14. Having been moved and shaken by these two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, I will definitely seek out her other work, past and future.