Perhaps I have just read over it, but I don’t recall an explicit mention of (calendar) time in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The best I could come up with is about 2014, and that being based on Michael having been present at the Deepwater Horizon explosion which occurred in April, 2010, and it seems to have been not so long after, traumatised and unable to find work in the region, that he falls into drug addiction and related criminal activities presumably leading to a conviction and interment in Parchman. Kayla doesn’t seem to have been born when he leaves, so given that she is now three, this seems a reasonable enough guess.
Which of course got me thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage and how it may have changed between Salvage the Bones, defined by Katrina in 2005, and the time in which Sing, Unburied, Sing is set. It seems to me, a lot can happen in what must be almost a decade, both to people and to place, and especially in a a very special fictional world that has evolved out of a very real one. Now of course even if I wasn’t wondering madly over this, Ward sort of invites one to do so with a neatly placed reference as they drive back into Bois at journey’s end, the road journey anyway. Leonie narrates:
Two people walk in the distance …a man, short and muscled…[leading] a black dog… next to him, a skinny little woman with …cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies…Skeetah and Eschelle…The siblings walk in sync…Esch says something and Skeetah laughs…
“Sing, Unburied, Sing” Bloomsbury paperback ed. p.197
To be deduced: Esch and Skeetah are in their mid-twenties now, and they are in Bois where we left them immediately after Katrina; with Esch awaiting a child, and Skeet still unreconciled to the loss of China. One wonders about the extended Batiste family, Daddy and the kids and their friends: who has gone and who has stayed? are they well enough? I hope so, for how I loved this chaotic troupe, and Leonie’s envious reaction “…jealousy twins with anger…”(ending with Kayla being severely slapped and a vague imagining of how different it may have been for her had Given lived) seems to suggest at least these two are doing okay. For Skeet, what times – good and bad – lay between that radiant white China and this black beast now on parade? Does the colour tell a story? Esch’s baby would now be almost ten (a Jason or a Rose?), and I dare to imagine, armed with Medea and the love of family, that she salvaged some good out of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, and that her fine, kind mind has been given the chance it deserved to bloom, that she is a good mother, and all the fathers Big Henry promised were there for her. Wearing still, and proudly, her wild crown atop her head makes me happy and gives me hope. (While Leonie’s maternal failures may more than irritate, that she sees a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” where others would see a “dishevelled mop” says much.)
Somethings we do know. The prevalence of cannabis and cocaine has been superseded by the scourge of crystal meth, oxycontin and god alone knows what else. White privilege spares not – just ask Michael or Misty. Prosperity is there alongside the desperate, and race defines as ever; in ways subtle and not so, and boundaries drawn accordingly – you can be up the Kill (where white folk live) or in the Pit (where the Batistes lived); transgress at your own peril.
Bois Sauvage has survived; not capitulating to the most powerful forces that Nature could muster, nor to the deprivations formented through mortal weakness and depravity. Against all laws of Nature, the Delta draws sustenance from the vast river of human waste salvaged as it flows from its history into each moment.