Paige, Mary Lib, Libby, Joan, Sheri, and Saran met via Zoom to discuss Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward’s books share themes of poor, Black families who struggle against catastrophes and injustices and of voices of the dead that sing to them across ‘the sea of time.’ These themes reflect Ward’s own childhood; individuals who are silenced, misunderstood, underestimated, and scarred simply by being Black. The only certainties in life are danger, death, and decay. In contrast to this bleakness, we all found Ward’s prose lyrical and lush, gorgeous and evocative.
Our discussion of Sing, Unburied, Sing focused on the complexities of its characters, the circumstances of their lives and their histories, and the deeper issues of slavery and racism.
Ward is unflinchingly honest about her characters. Thirteen-year-old Jojo cares for his little sister Kayla; both are of mixed race. Jojo’s father is in the notorious Parchman prison: his mother Leonie is a drug addict. JoJo and Kayla live with their grandparents: Pop, who is upright and dignified although consumed by his past, and Mam who is dried up and hollowed out by cancer.
Jojo is, in many ways, the center of this novel. We watch him throughout the book as he changes or adjusts, coming of age prematurely. He shows deep responsibilities to Pop – to be tough and capable – and to Kayla – to be her parent and guardian. The kindness between JoJo and Kayla is nearly heartbreaking.
We asked, though, about the consequences of being knocked down as repeatedly as JoJo was? Would he turn in to Leonie in a few years? A consistent theme throughout the book is that Jojo and Kayla are starving, deprived of food and drink while Leonie feeds herself. Toward the end of the book, Mam tells JoJo that “she ain’t never going to feed you.” Does Leonie’s behavior reflect her own past? What do JoJo’s circumstances bode for his future?
In Leonie, we all found a character difficult to understand or appreciate. She unfailingly makes the wrong choices. Libby felt that Leonie yearned for a family, but withheld tenderness from both of her children. Is she paralyzed by her own past? Or a victim of her current circumstances? Or, likely, both? Sheri found both Leonie and Michael to be complex characters – capable of love, yet brutal to their children and outright abusive in many ways. Like his offspring, Pop emerged from a difficult past, haunted by racial prejudice and injustice. He carries with him the ghost of Richie. As an adult, Pop is nourishing, strong, and steady, a reminder that family members subjected to same trials respond differently. We also meet Given, as a ghost from a terrible death, Michael’s racist family, and Kayla, who is too young to see ghosts yet successfully banishes them in the end.
Collecting Michael from prison, this makeshift family returns home with an unburied spirit and the narrative takes a more supernatural turn. We meet Richie, learn about his association with Pop. We learn the beginnings of their story in Parchman; but not until Richie ‘returns’ with Leonie from Parchman do we learn the end. Richie claims he can’t leave until his story is resolved. Given is another ghost, ever in Leonie’s company. By Mam’s death, several ghosts sit in the trees. With revelations (Richie) and acceptance (? Given), they are finally shooed away by Kayla – someone yet to ‘see’ the spirits, but they are obviously with her.
The circumstances of this story are common to Ward’s writing. Modern Mississippi “means addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism.” What are the consequences? Leonie chose Michael, knowing that his cousin killed her brother. In Post-Obama America, Paige suggested, Blacks lost all hope, reverting to and succumbing to their pasts. In regions of our country, individuals lack the tools or the endurance to achieve and so revert to decay and decline, previous fears, despair, and the spiritualism or mysticism evidenced by the ghosts in this book. There may be no other way to cope in Mississippi. No matter what you achieve, you are still Black and deprived.
Joan encouraged discussion of deeper issues, some mentioned above. What is the effect of constant hunger, generation after generation? Or of constant neglect? Or of constant despair? How can individuals with few options overcome these challenges? Jojo stole food in order to survive . Will he carry this behavior in to his future? Will he learn skills from Pop, or from Leonie? Does he have any options? Ward addresses the question of hope for these individuals, asking whether it is an intelligent hope or a necessary hope? It is the latter that she attributes to her ancestors and her characters - it wasn’t an intelligent hope that they had for freedom or that their children might live different lives than they did, they had to hope to keep going.
Another deeper issue is whether Black Americans would be treated so poorly today had we not enslaved them? After considering racism in other societies, we ended with the worrisome thought that engrained prejudice against ‘the other’ is a fundamental (an evolutionary?) character that all humans share. It is perhaps an inevitable derivative of tribalism - the need to protect our ‘own,’ and to see others as threats.
