Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight,” says thirteen-year-old Jojo, and by the end of the story, he and the reader have come full circle. With richly drawn characters, Ward links an iconic, multi-generational, present-day story of addiction, shame and guilt drawn with the inherited burden of American history. Alternating between Jojo, his drug addicted mother Leonie, and occasionally the ghost of Richie, a young boy from Pop’s incarcerated past, Jesmyn Ward’s lyrical prose transcends the reader’s expectations of first-person point-of-view authenticity into a haunting and magical work of art.

No spoilers. . . but seriously, I cried audibly because of the power of this book and the stories here. Road trip. Ghost story. Family trauma. Addiction. Incarceration. But also hope and beauty, deep love and profound richness.

I cannot recommend this book enough for everyone, but especially people who carve the stories of family that are not perfect or curated. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

If you are a fan of Isabelle Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Toni Morrison you’ll love this book. Wards use of language and her insight into the complexities of race and family dynamics make this a novel that will stick with you long after turning the last page.

Well, damn. I went into this book with high expectations, and for me it was rather a letdown. With the amount of praise it received, winning the National Book Award and being one of the top 10 best books of the New York Times in 2017, I was expecting to be blown away by this book. In other words, Sing, Unburied, Sing just wasn’t for me.

The novel is about a poverty-stricken family living in Mississippi, rampart with racism and discrimination. Thirteen year old Jojo having to take care of his three-year old little sister Kayla, since her birth, even with his Mam and Pop living with them. His mother is Leonie, a drug addict and troubled woman, who he calls by her first name, not mom, because she is nothing like a mother. Their father, Michael, is in Parchman prison, about to be released.

Leonie packs her children into the car to go on a road trip to get Michael from prison, leaving behind the two figures the children see more of as parental figures than their own mother, and with her own Mam dying with cancer. This trip is riddled with danger and destruction, drawing out the ghosts each character faces along the way. We witness not only a physical journey through the state to get their father/boyfriend but also a spiritual one.

Early on it’s clear Jojo takes on the responsibility and hardships of an adult but can also hear and see things others cannot. His mother, Leonie, can also see and hear her dead brother, Given, while under the influence of drugs.

Anyone else hearing the little boy from the movie “The Sixth Sense” saying, “I see dead people?” These scenes throughout the novel where they bring in voices of ghosts and dead relatives really through me through a loop. I guess they really didn’t make sense to me and the narratives between the characters and when they see and/or speak with the dead were very confusing.

The angst and sorrow this family goes through was difficult for me to get through as well. As a white, young, female I had difficulties understanding the language at times and the cultural divide was a bit too much. Ward’s use of Southern writing style was haunting in a way that captivated me as a reader, but also confused me.

The raw and emotional toll each character faces, from racism, drug addiction, abuse, poverty and grief in one way or another really left an impact on me. And because I’ve dealt with some of the major issues faced in this book (drug addiction, abuse and grief), this might explain why I was so put off by it.

I’m now going to be very blunt in saying, I feel this book is difficult to get into if you’re not an African-American. From use of language and culture, to even racism and discrimination, I had a hard time connecting to certain aspects. But on the other hand, from poverty, drug abuse, and grief I could relate on a personal level.

I had to put this book down a couple of times and try to pick it back up. I’m not one for not, not finishing a book, and this was for a book club. Either which way, I was finishing this book. While I didn’t love it, there were parts I found captivating and haunting on a personal level, but overall, I certainly had way too high of an expectation of this novel going into it.

Read more of my review here: https://bit.ly/2Sm1nbw

Thanks to NetGalley and to Scribner for providing me with an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
Sometimes, I’d try to write them down, but they were just bad poems, limping down the page: Training a horse. The next line. Cut with the knees.
It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.
I would throw up everything. All of it: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this…
“Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We are all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. “My son.”
Both of us bow together as Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t. There…
“Let’s go,” I say. Knowing that tree is there makes the skin on my back burn, like hundreds of ants are crawling up my spine, seeking tenderness between the bones to bit. I know the boy is there, watching, waving like grass in water.
I decided to start with some quotes (and I would happily quote the whole book, but there would be no point) because I know I could not make its language justice. This is a book about a family, three generations of an African-American family in the South and it has been compared to works by Morrison and Faulkner, and that was what made me request the book as they are among my favourite authors. And then, I kept reading about it and, well, in my opinion, they are not wrong. We have incredible descriptions of life in the South for this rural family (smells, touch, sound, sight, taste, and even the sixth sense too), we have a nightmarish road trip to a prison, with some detours, we have characters that we get to know intimately in their beauty and ugliness, and we have their story and that of many others whose lives have been touched by them.
There are two main narrators, Leonie, a young woman, mother of two children, whose life seems to be on a downward spiral. Her white partner is in prison for cooking Amphetamines, she does drugs as often as she can and lives with her parents, who look after her children, and seems to live denying her true nature and her feelings. Her son, Jojo, is a teenager who has become the main support of the family, looking after his kid sister, Michaela, or Kayla, helping his grandfather and grandmother, rebellious and more grown-up and responsible than his mother and father. Oh, and he hears and understands what animals say, and later on, can also see and communicate with ghosts. His grandmother is also a healer and knows things, although she is riddled with cancer, and his baby sister also seems to have the gift. The third narrator is one of the ghosts, Richie, who before he makes his physical (ghostly?) appearance has been the subject of a story Jojo’s grandfather has been telling him, without ever quite finishing it, seemingly waiting for the right moment to tell him what really happened. When we get to that point, the story is devastating, but so are most of the stories in the novel. Fathers who physically fight with their sons because they love an African-American woman, young men killed because it was not right that a black man win a bet, men imprisoned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and for being the wrong race… The stories pile up and even the ghosts fight with each other to try and gain a sense of self, to try to belong.
This is magic realism at its best. As I said, the descriptions of the characters, the locations, and the family relationships are compelling and detailed. But there are elements that break the boundaries of realism (yes, the ghosts, and the style of the narration, where we follow interrupted stories, stream of consciousness, and where the living and those who are not really there are given equal weight), and that might make the novel not suitable for everybody. As beautiful as the language is, it is also harsh and raw at times, and incredibly moving.
Although it is short and, for me at least, a page turner, this is not a light read and I’d recommend approaching it with caution if you are particularly sensitive to abuse, violence, drug use, or if you prefer your stories straight, with no otherworldly interferences. Otherwise, check a sample, and do yourselves a favour. Read it. I hadn’t read any of this author’s books before, but I’ll be on the lookout and I’ll try and catch up on her previous work. She is going places.

I love this author. She takes you into a story in a way that I was taken into a story when I was a child. That’s hard work to parse out, and I am not going to try. Ward’s Salvage the Bones was the best novel I had read in a long time. This, too, is very good.

A thirteen-year-old learning what it takes to be a man. A mother wanting to hide away from the pain. Together they learn you cannot run from the ghosts of the past… literally.

Jojo, loves his family, especially his Pop, Mam, and younger sister, Kayla. He learns quickly that they need to stick together given the color of their skin, even though his father is white. His mother, Leonie, struggles with the loss of her brother and gets high in order to keep him close. So, when Michael, Jojo’s father, is released from Parchman prison farm, Leonie packs the kids up to travel north to pick him up. Throughout the journey of Mississippi, both Jojo and Leonie learn you have to face the past in order to move towards the future.

In Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” the reader is taken inside the minds of Jojo and Leonie. This process allows the reader to “feel” all the emotions the character is going through. One can cringe along with Jojo every time he thinks he’s going to get hit, or cry with Leonie as her brother fades away again, or even feel warm inside when Mam holds their hands.

Take caution, though, as there are numerous triggers from physical abuse (including adults hitting kids), lynching, racism, abuse of power, rape, drug addiction, and cancer, in this story. There is also a multitude of profanity. However, the profanity was not enough to distract the reader from the story, which is why this book gets 4 out of 5 stars.

Jesmyn Ward writes an interesting story of history that brings the emotional aspect to the forefront. An excellent read for anyone wanting to understand the nuances of the past.

I thought, since this book was supposed to be the second in a series, I would find out what happened to the characters in Salvage The Bones, but Skeetah and Esch are only briefly mentioned in passing. Sing, Unburied, Sing is about a thirteen-year-old boy named Jojo and his poor but gifted family. His mother, Leonie, sees ghosts but doesn’t have what it takes to be a mother, so JoJo is brother and mother to his younger sister, Kayla. When the three of them embark on a road trip to retrieve Jojo and Kayla’s father, Michael, from prison, they also pick up Richie, another thirteen-year-old boy who is a ghost searching for answers to his violent death. As only Jesmyn Ward can, this story delivers a raw and emotional journey into southern life, death, and everything in between.

** spoiler alert ** To be honest, I really don’t know what to make of “Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward. I read her previous book, “Salvage the Bones” and was both intrigued and repelled by Ward’s gritty realism, her in-your-face verisimilitude, and her sheer skill as a writer. I am pleased that she has toned down her use of similes, metaphors, and analogies since her initial forays into fiction. Not that she isn’t good at them, she’s a marvel at apt comparisons. It’s just that too much of a good thing is, well, a bad thing. Using these literary devices less frequently allows their raw power to stand out more. And it’s certainly less distracting for the reader.

The story revolves around an extended family as dysfunctional as they come. The dying grandmother and the patient grandfather have raised their grandchildren while the mother was off getting high and the father was in prison. With the grandmother bed-ridden, the burden of caring for a toddler falls on a thirteen year old boy, who does a commendable job of it but is far too young for such responsibility. Now the father is being released and the mother piles her neglected children into the car to go get him, with stops along the way to highlight her poor decision making skills. The rift between mother and son is exacerbated by the mother’s guilt and the son’s resentment. To make matters worse, the toddler gets sick, the heat is intense, and the friend along for the ride is obnoxious.Toss in a few ghosts from the past to highlight the systemic racism and injustice of America in general and the deep south in particular, add a scene with an overzealous and racist policeman making a traffic stop and you have the makings of the road trip from hell.

In “Salvage the Bones” Ward was obsessed with describing sweat. In “Sing”, she has switched to graphically painting us a picture of vomit, over and over and over and . . . well, it’s just a little much. (I feel the same way about movies. Why, oh why, do directors insist on showing us every slimy, stringy, chunky bit of vomit coming out of an actor’s mouth, all in vivid color?) She also gives us a lot of detail on snot as well. Poor JoJo. Kayla uses him as a nose-rag throughout much of the novel, making me want to reach through the pages with a washcloth and just clean those two up. As mentioned, Ward’s ability to plunk us down in the gritty, realistic middle of her stories is unmatched, but in my mind, we could do without the repetitive gory details.

Leonie, the mother of JoJo and Kayla, and one of the principle narrators of the book, is a train wreck of a human being with no redeeming qualities that I can see. She’s an indifferent daughter, a lousy mother, a careless friend, and rotten wife. She’s selfish, frequently mean, ignoble, and if there is any mitigating motive for her self-absorbed steamroll through life, I must have missed it. Her irresponsibility is a burden on her parents and a trauma for her children. The only good thing I can say about her is that she ends up leaving her kids in the care of others most of the time, which is certainly best for the children. Ward seems to try to semi-excuse Leonie’s drug addiction because she only sees her dead brother when she’s high, but by the end of the story, Given, not Given (and this name is vastly overused) is gone for good and Leonie is still getting high. When her husband, newly parolled Michael, feebly tries to refuse to do drugs with her, Leonie whines her way into getting him back into drugs as well. Ward leaves Leonie in this depressing one-dimensional state, only partially developing the one good quality she has, which is her ability to recognize and use herbs for healing. I think this is a huge mistake on Ward’s part. All main characters, good and bad, deserve to be fully realized, if only so that the reader will have some shred of sympathy for them. Ward did the same thing with the father in “Salvage the Bones”, made him unremittingly unlikable. It seems to be a pattern. Perhaps Ward has some unresolved issues with parents she needs to work out before she is able to write them as fully realized characters.

Michael, Leonie’s husband, isn’t much better. Early on, in a flashback to when he left the family, before he goes to prison, he is portrayed as violent. Within a couple of days of him getting out of prison and being reunited with his children, he is hitting Kayla. Granted, his years in prison surely contribute to his lack of parenting skills, but still, is there no grace period granted to a toddler? His relationship with his vehemently racist father by all rights should have been ended when the father refused to accept Leonie and the children into the family. Instead, Michael goes to see his parents immediately after getting back to his home town, resulting in an ugly scene played out in front of his children. What sort of parent would subject their children to that? The weakness of his character is solidified when he allows Leonie to lead him back to a life of addiction, neglecting his children completely.

JoJo is by far the most sympathetic character. His tenderness and love for his little sister is palpable. You just know he’s going to grow up to be the sort of man who will win respect and admiration from his children and grandchildren for generations to come. His bitterness toward his mother gives him an edge which could easily turn him into a judgmental person, unforgiving to those who fail to meet his expectations but it has the advantage of making him the only fully three dimensional character in the book. His good points and bad points are on full display and we care about him as a result. With a mother like Leonie, how could he not have a harsh side? We sympathize. We really do, especially since Leonie is so unlikable. Like so many characters in this book, he sees dead people. His, indeed everyone’s, unquestioning acceptance of the presence of ghosts gives the book a magical realism aspect.

In no way am I trying to undercut the importance of this book or the skill of Ward. She is a phenomenal writer who grabs readers by the scruff of their necks and drags them into the story, refusing to let go until the last ounce of gross bodily fluid is described and the final metaphor is delivered. Her words have power, her stories impact your psyche like a sledgehammer. She doesn’t sugarcoat the realities, past and present, of being poor and black in America. There is little to celebrate or be hopeful about in anyone’s life, save the love they have for each other and even that is too often tinged with bitterness, regret, and melancholy. The injustices they are forced to endure are worse than the consequences of their own poor decisions and the reader is left wondering if there is any way out of the miasma of their problems.

Ward’s work is not escapism. Her books will not leave you feeling good about the world at large. Her happy endings are just respites from the massive weight of injustice and poverty each of her characters lives with. Yet I believe her words will live on in the annals of important literary books. We will see them taught in schools and colleges, alongside writers like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. When I read Ward’s work this quote from Ezra Pound comes to mind: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” Ward’s writing has so many layers, each sentence imbued with so many meanings that it would take a much finer literary mind than mine to unravel them all. There’s another quote which fits Ward’s writing. “To define is to limit”. Oscar Wilde. Spending too much time trying to define Ward’s work is pointless. Read this book. Read all her books. Like me, you may not understand them, but you won’t regret reading them.

Hard to put down.