In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.
For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.
And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.
The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.
A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?
Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.