Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

[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.