Hungry and crammed in a stuffy backseat on a long road trip through Mississippi, 13-year-old JoJo experiences the ghosts, both past and present, of America’s long and complicated history of race in Jesmyn Ward’s newest novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”
JoJo is on a road trip with his drug-addicted mother and her similarly addicted friend as well as his toddler sister to Parchman Farm, a Mississippi state penitentiary, to pick up his father, a white man whose family has a dark history with JoJo’s. Along the way, JoJo encounters abuse, death, drug culture, police violence and ghosts. Yes, ghosts.
In writing “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward faced the pressure of high expectations, considering her last novel, “Salvage the Bones,” won a National Book Award. Ward delivers.
Critics have noticed. Already, the book has made the short list in fiction for the 2017 National Book Awards.
Like Ward’s other writings, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is set in Mississippi, and it dwells on Southern black manhood and the social injustices so long imposed on those men. The narrative is woven with the alternating voices of JoJo and his mother, Leonie, offering different perspectives to what is happening on their journey.
Amid the ugliness and fraught relationships, the pure love between JoJo and his little sister, Kayla, shines through the muck. Kayla is one of JoJo’s points of hope and connection, and in the final pages, the readers are clued in as to how strong their ties are.
With an imprisoned father, a drug addict for a mother and a dying grandmother, the two kids cling to each other. JoJo serves as the girl’s father figure — providing food and a shoulder to sleep against while she brings focus to JoJo’s chaotic world.
The other stable presence in JoJo’s and Kayla’s lives are their maternal grandparents, Pop and Mam. While Mam is dying of cancer and mostly bedridden, Pop does his best to guide JoJo into manhood while still coping with a tragedy during his prison stay decades before.
Then there are the ghosts.
Ghosts, sometimes literal, of the past tag along as JoJo, Leonie and Kayla navigate their way down a Mississippi highway and at their stops along the road.
Ward’s writing is visceral. I felt JoJo’s thirst and hunger inside Leonie’s hot car as the group drove through the humid Mississippi countryside and tasted the salty marsh air of southern Mississippi’s Gulf coast.
Ward digs at the subtle and not-so-subtle way that racism has long played into the American narrative, whether it’s her portrayals of the criminal justice system or one family’s refusal to accept interracial children.
The most heartbreaking part of Ward’s story is that its themes are old and current. Like those ghosts lingering in JoJo’s world, racism has never left us.
