Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

• ISBN10: 1501176668
• ISBN13: 9781501176661
• Publish Date: 5 September 2017
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 4 August 2021
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

This was a very difficult book to read. I struggled through pretty much all of it and was desperately waiting for any scrap of happiness that never came. This isn’t to say it’s a bad book, because it isn’t, but it’s definitely not a fun experience.

Content warnings:
- child abuse
- ableism
- racism and anti black racism (in book)
- age gap between the grandparents (met and fell in love when she was 19 and he 30 - just mentioned)
- slavery
- n slur
- fatphobia
- a LOT of violence
- lynching
- emetophobia (there is a LOT of throwing up in this book, and lots of detailed description about it)
- sexual harassment & rape
- cancer

Representation:
- most of the characters in the story are black

Jojo and his young sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop (and sometimes their mother, Leonie) in Mississippi along the Gulf Coast. Mam is dying of cancer, Leonie struggles with drug addiction and visions of her dead brother, and Pop is left trying to raise Jojo, who in turn raises Kayla. When Jojo and Kayla’s father is released from the same prison Pop had once been in, Leonie goes to pick him up along with a friend and the kids. The trip reveals the horrors of life on the penitentiary, the abuse of power, but also the strength of family bonds.

I’m going to be honest (though you probably got this from my rating): I didn’t enjoy this book very much. I have the feeling this isn’t a book to be enjoyed in any case, but I almost wish I had quit reading every time I got the impulse to stop. Not because I don’t believe what’s talked about isn’t important, but because the book is misery added upon misery and because the book has no main drive. I’m not even sure what the central story problem is; is it the ghosts and their need for resolution? Then what are we doing mostly in Jojo and Leonie’s PoVs for, dealing with their immediate road trip problems rather than the ghosts and their stories?

The child abuse also made it very, very difficult for me to read this, as a survivor of abuse myself. Especially being in the abusive mother’s PoV and reading her excuses. Reading her justify her behavior. Especially reading how, at the end, Jojo himself has inclinations where he feels like lashing out at his little sister as well. Where he sympathizes with his mother. I basically had an emotional breakdown at that point (once again wishing books had content warnings inside the covers before the actual novel somewhere so this wouldn't happen …).

I know this is a pretty incomplete review. Maybe I’ll be able to write more about it later. I know this book has a lot of awards and even more five-star reviews and enthusiastic fans, but it was too much for me. Too much vomit, description of that vomit, and too much going nowhere with no drive.

"Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward was an incredible read!

A skillfully crafted magical realism ghost story about a southern African American family and their haunting lives. This character driven story is primarily told by a young woman, her adolescent son, and a ghost from their ancestral past. It's a deeply profound and heartbreaking tale of death, addiction, racism and poverty that will squeeze your heart raw.

While the plot is an emotionally driven one with saddening injustice and excessively flawed characters, the narrative successfully instills empathy at the same time.

"Sing, Unburied, Sing" is a dark and beautiful tale that deserves every bit of the hype. You won't forget this book!

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[gmcgregor]

Evil stepmothers are a common enough trope, but literary examples of bad biological mothers are harder to find. Which makes Leonie, in Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award-winning Sing, Unburied, Sing, a relatively rare character. In her late 20s, she is the mother of two children, adolescent Jojo and toddler Kayla, with her longtime boyfriend Michael. Leonie is also an addict, with a special fondness for the meth that's sent Michael to prison. The kids have been mostly raised by her parents in rural southern Mississippi, though their other grandparents have never even met them...you see, Leonie is black, Michael is white, and his parents are racists who helped cover up the murder of Leonie's brother Given when they were in high school, by one of Michael's cousins.

When she finds out Michael is due to be released early, Leonie loads her kids in the car and drives to Parchman to get him. It's the same prison where her own father, River, once served time in his youth, and his past there becomes important because Michael isn't the only passenger they pick up: they're also joined by the ghost of a teenager named Richie. Only Jojo and Kayla can see Richie, who Jojo's heard about in his grandfather's stories, and when the family arrives back home, Jojo agrees to confront his grandfather to find out how Richie died.

There's a lot more to it, and that's actually one of the highlights of this novel: it is rich in atmosphere. Ward deftly weaves together the stark realities of poverty, drug addiction, how parents and children can fail each other, and the way the justice system works for the white power structure and against people of color. She brings certain threads to the forefront at times, then others, but never loses track of any of them. She also does beautiful work of characterization, making Jojo an incredibly sympathetic and compelling protagonist, showing Leonie's selfishness and the damage it causes but depicting her as a deeply flawed human rather than a one-note villain, conveying the decency and strength of River and his wife Philomene, doing their best in a world that has not done right by them.

But though it does some things incredibly well, it stumbled hard (at least, for me) in other ways. The most pronounced was that it sets itself in the literary tradition of Beloved...and then doesn't measure up to the incredibly high bar of Toni Morrison's masterpiece. You can't write a story about the stain of institutionalized racism that prominently features ghosts and the mysterious death of a child without knowing that you're going to be compared to Beloved, and if you're going to go there, you better bring it. It wasn't brought. Ward's choice to use Richie as the most prominent ghost in the narrative rather than Given (who Leonie sees only when high), an actual member of the family whose perspective could have been used to give more context to Leonie's youth, is inexplicable to me. I never got invested in Richie, which meant that when Ward brought her threads together for a set of final climactic scenes that are supposed to pack a huge emotional punch, it felt overwrought and unearned rather than profound and cathartic. It has merit, and it's worth reading, but if you haven't read Beloved, read that and skip this.

[luddite]

I may have to re-read this book to understand why it received so much praise.

To me, it felt scattered and the surrealistic elements put me off. The prose was quite good, though. And some complex, intriguing characters.

[rohshey]

Sing, Unburied, Sing, begins with a young boy, Jojo, making a bold claim: “I like to think I know what death is.” It’s his 13th birthday and he’s helping his grandfather, Pop, slaughter the goat that they’ll barbecue for dinner. Jojo tries to coach himself not to flinch when, Pop slits the goat’s throat or to slip on the bloodied ground as they peel the skin back from muscle.

Soon the youngster is throwing up in the grass. Not much later he’ll be eating the goat’s liver in a plate full of gravy.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it’s representing the slow apocalypse being experienced by black America.

Even though the book didn't really grip me in the way that I was expecting. It does give a good view of life as a black person in the southern states which is always helpful to be reminded about.

In Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi, one must grow accustom to the rituals of killing and butchering animals for sustenance. Exhausted women beat their children in public. Men of good character do unspeakable things out of necessity, and the bad men do far worse. And there, just as in the real world, caring about people like Jojo and Leonie is not a matter of looking past these grim possibilities, but rather consenting to step into them and be affected.


Jojo, fierce and tender, is the endearing heart of the novel. The ruinous journey at its spine and Ward’s rendering of the Mississippi’s dark geologies and histories are more potent than her awkward stage-managing of spirits and apparitions in the second half.

Still, for all its occasional mis- and oversteps,The world of Sing, Unburied, Sing is very much like our own, haunted and alive with horrors. Some of Ward’s characters can’t see the ghosts, just as many of our contemporaries remain blind to racial injustices.