“There’s so many,” Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. “So many of us,” he says. “Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.”
It seems unfair that in attempting to describe what is so unique in Jesmyn Ward's writing, all I can think to do is to compare her to others – to the Southern Gothic style of William Faulkner, to the particular magical realism of Toni Morrison, to the cycling of cultural history in Colson Whitehead – but perhaps what does make Ward so unique is that she melds all of these styles in a voice utterly her own, making Sing, Unburied, Sing a beautiful, if brutal, examination of race and class and family in today's rural Mississippi. This is my first experience with Jesmyn Ward, and although I have some small quibbles with this book ( I'd say four stars is a rounding up), I am looking forward to spending time with her again in the future.
Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and I wake up and it ain't changed none. It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.I had a lump of anxiety in my chest, a surge of protectiveness, throughout this read due to one of the central characters, Jojo: A just-turned-thirteen-year-old mixed-race boy, decent, upright, and responsible in the care of his baby sister, whose meth-cooking white Daddy's about to be released from prison; whose self-centered, meth-addicted black Mama is determined to bring her kids along on a peril-filled drive up to fetch her man; whose hard-working Pop has stories that make his hands shake from his own time as a railroaded youth at that same Parchman Prison Farm; and whose Mam – the steady well of affection from which Jojo draws comfort – is rotting away from cancer in her bed. If anything is going to get to me, it's a good and still innocent kid experiencing injustice and adult pressures before his time.
Add to this poverty (hunger, want, and shame), prejudice (including white grandparents who want nothing to do with Jojo or his sister, Kayla), the rural drug crisis (Jojo's father was a decent guy until he survived the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leaving him with PTSD and unable to do that kind of work anymore), and the kind of systemic racism that saw children sent to prison in another age and children put in handcuffs in our own (or put another way, that saw lynchings in another age and “hunting accidents” in ours) – all of this is ready-made, realistic tension and drama. By adding supernatural elements – including ghosts that can interact with some characters – Ward is able to both soften the edges and focus the centres of these issues: who better to comment on how little has changed over the years than the earth-bound spirit of a boy who lives in a stream of “all times are present in the now”? When the climax of the plot came – with a dramatic and menacing confrontation between the living and the dead – it was the relatable humanity of the moment that overwhelmed me and I was in tears; it was completely over the top, and totally worked for me. (The denouement and eventual resolution were less satisfying for me, but that's all the complaining I'll do.)
I liked that the POV shifted between Jojo, his mother, Leonie, and eventually, the ghost boy, Richie. And as much as I loved Jojo, and as much as Leonie is not a very sympathetic character – it's hard to like someone who takes such poor care of her kids, who lives with her aging parents and expects them to take care of everything – seeing things from her own perspective (and especially seeing how her children turn to each other for comfort and never to her) brings a bit of understanding. Most especially, I just loved Ward's way with words, whether describing the uncomfortable:
Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there's nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama's feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.Or the sublime:
Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I've seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I'm already home.Despite the persistent lump of anxiety in my chest and some ugly events that I was asked to witness, I inhaled this book quickly. I think that Jesmyn Ward is a masterful writer and a necessary voice; can't wait to get to the rest of her work.
