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Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied Sing, is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, near the Mississippi River delta, and “. . .stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat. […] It’s the smell of death” (Ward 6). The protagonists Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy from a mixed-race family, and his little sister Kayla live with their maternal grandparents. Their grandmother, Mam, is dying of cancer and their grandfather, Pop, is afflicted by memories of his past, a past tied to the Parchman prison that the children and their mother set out to visit. Jojo’s father, Michael, is serving a three-year sentence at this prison, soon to be released. Leonie, the children’s hardly there and drug-addicted mother, wants to take her children on a road trip up to Parchman prison to visit her husband.
During this trip across the state, Jojo learns things about himself and the unjust, racist, and violent world from which his family has tried to hide him. As Richie puts it, “When I was thirteen, I knew much more than him. I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin. I knew that leather could split flesh like butter. I knew that hunger could hurt, could scoop me hollow as a gourd. . .” (Ward 185). Throughout the novel this theme is present, Jojo has no comprehension of the true world but the ghosts of the past do. Sing, Unburied Sing shows that suffering and injustice can never simply be confined to the past. They haunt the present and should never be forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant.
In the opening scene of the novel, it is Jojo’s thirteenth birthday. Pop asks for his help outside and Jojo says, “ I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that's how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I've earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody” (Ward 1). With an absent father figure and a mostly absent and drug-addicted mother, Jojo has built a strong relationship with his grandparents, calling them Mam and Pop instead of by their first names, as he does with his mother. Jojo looks up to Pop and wants to show him that he is ready to be a real man and can look death in the face and not flinch.
Pop knows that Jojo does not have the stomach for it, so he says that he thinks he heard Kayla cry out in the house. Jojo goes back and finds that Pop must’ve misheard, for Kayla was sound asleep. He swats a fly off Kayla’s knee and remembers how Leonie used to tell him “. . . flies eat shit” (Ward 7). Jojo thinks back to that time with a sort of fondness but also contempt. He says “That was when there was more good than bad, when she'd push me on the swing Pop hung from one of the pecan trees in the front yard, or when she'd sit next to me on the sofa and watch TV with me, rubbing my head. Before she was more gone than here. Before she started snorting crushed pills. Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee. Back then I still called Michael Pop. That was when he lived with us before he moved back in with Big Joseph. Before the police took him away three years ago, before Kayla was born” (Ward 7). Jojo is old enough to still recall such memories of the good times with his mother and father and while he remembers the good with some fondness, he also can recall all the fighting between Michael and Leonie. He recalls the day Michael left. Jojo was still too young to understand the complexity of the situation, “How, at that moment, [he] didn’t matter” (Ward 10-11). Michael comes from a white and racist family. However, Michael himself is not racist, even having Jojo’s name, Joseph, tattooed on him. Jojo doesn’t understand why Big Joseph doesn’t acknowledge him, failing to understand the generational legacy of systemic racism, failing to understand that for years, Michael’s family has held racist views. While Big Joseph may not be physically violent, his racist cruelty still drives the family apart, pulling Michael away from his children.
Further along in the novel, we begin to see how Jojo and Kayla are perceived as black, rather than biracial, within Michael’s family and within the public eye. This is a result of the legacy of the “one-drop rule.” This rule was a form of racial categorization developed under slavery which stated that having just one black ancestor was all that was needed to be considered black. Slaveholders developed this rule in order to enslave the descendants of parents of different races. Big Joseph holds this ideology and it is evident when Leonie, Michael, Jojo, and Kayla show up at their house once Michael is released from prison. Big Joseph says, “Hell, they half of her. All bad blood. Fuck the skin” (Ward 207). He doesn’t care that the children are lighter skinned due to his son’s lineage, his blind racist mind doesn’t see that, it only sees black children of black women with whom his son has made the mistake of having relations.
Throughout the entire novel, the past shines through into the present in many ways. The stories Pop tells Jojo about his time at Parchman are presented through fragments. Through these stories, Pop passes on his traumatic past to Jojo, along with some of the pain. This contributes to Jojo’s identity and helps his transition from an innocent child at the beginning to an adult by the end of the novel. The opening lines of the book, compared to the final pages, illustrate this transition: “I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight. […] I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I’ve earned these thirteen years” ( Ward 1). Yet, when confronted with a goat being killed, he is unable to keep his composure and must run outside to throw up. By the end of the book, Jojo has a better grasp of the world. After resenting his mother for years, feeling like she was a bad mother, he realizes she has her own traumas she was struggling to overcome: “Sometimes, late at night, […] I think I understand Leonie. I think I know something about what she feels. That maybe I know a little bit about why she left” (Ward 279). Though Jojo’s mother’s actions have influenced him, he comes to understand that the past continually influences the present. He has seen Given, his uncle, and the ghost that haunts his mother, and he realizes the burden Leonie has lived with. The personification of this transgenerational trauma in the form of ghosts, the people that the characters carry with them all the time, are finally given some relief when Kayla sings to them, as previously mentioned. Kayla represents the confrontation of trauma, being the embodiment of all family members in the way she resembles them all: “Her eyes Michael’s, her nose Leonie’s, the set of her shoulders Pop’s, and the way she looks upward, like she is measuring the tree, all Mam. But something about the way she stands, the way she takes all the pieces of everybody and holds them together, is all her. Kayla” (Ward 284). When the collective confronts history, it can start to heal from trauma. On their journey, Jojo and Kayla encounter ghosts of the past, Given and Richie included, and gain insight into not only their sufferings but the continued sufferings around them. No one has acknowledged that while Parchman has advanced, it still resembles the plantation prison from years ago. It takes Michael years to confront Big Joseph and his issues with Leonie and the children. However, Jojo has heard the voices of the ghosts, seen their traumas, and now, as Richie tells him, “Now you understand life. Now you know. Death” (Ward 282).
Jojo’s story teaches us that the past continually influences the present. That our ancestors influence future generations’ views, ideologies, etcetera. However, it also shows that when one confronts the past and its injustices, one can move forward from it. That when systemic racism and the trauma caused by it are confronted, solutions can be found, better systems of justice can be developed, and ingrained racial prejudices can start to be broken down.
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