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[H]is lips meet mine, and I am opening all over again. Losing language, losing words. Losing myself in that feeling, that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled, all the while marveling that the one doing it is the one that wants, that needs, that touches, that sees.
This quotation comes from the scene in which Leonie and Michael, both high on drugs, begin kissing and quickly progress to having sex on the sofa in Al’s house. Leonie’s identity changes depending on whom she’s with; she’s sullen and resentful with her parents, and strict and sharp with Jojo and Kayla. When she is with Michael, however, the “closed” parts of her can “open” again. She says here that when she is engaging with him sexually she feels herself “losing language, losing words,” as though Michael can understand her without even needing to speak with her. Jojo, previously to this, had suggested that when Michael was around his mother seemed to disappear. She’s so focused on her romantic and sexual relationship—as we see here—that when Michael’s there “that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled” replaces everything else. Leonie was already pretty emotionally absent from her children’s lives when Michael was just a voice on the phone in prison. When he’s a physical presence, his desires, and his thoughts totally blot out her own.
How can Big Joseph see Pop, see how stonelike he is, like Pop’s taken all the hardship of the world into him and let it calcify him inch by inch till he’s like one of them petrified trees, and see anything but a man?
In this passage Jojo is listening to Michael’s father spew racist bile at his family, demonstrating that how white racists see Black men has little to do with who they really are. Jojo has the thought quoted above when he hears Big Joseph repeatedly calling his Pop a “boy.” A common form of systemic oppression that was (and is) employed against Black people is infantilization. Grown men and women are referred to as “boys” and “girls,” in a way that’s intentionally demeaning and disrespectful. Pop is a very mature and adult figure, especially to a child-like Jojo. To Jojo, Pop has “taken all the hardship of the world” into himself and allowed it to harden him. He struggles to talk about himself and to express emotions because all the traumatic experiences he’s been through have turned him to stone, “inch by inch” until he’s like a “petrified tree.” When Big Joseph calls Pop a “boy” he is dismissing all of these experiences and all the wisdom that Pop has accrued. To Jojo, Pop is the opposite of a “boy,” because Jojo sees him as a person. To Big Joseph, however, Black men are not “men” in the same way that he and Michael are. He twists Pop’s identity with this casual act of bigotry.
Michael is an animal on the other end of the telephone behind a fortress of concrete and bars, his voice traveling over miles of wire and listing, sun-bleached power poles. I know what he is saying, like the birds I hear honking and flying south in the winter, like any other animal. I’m coming home.
Although in general it’s Black bodies that are negatively associated with animals in this novel, in this passage Jojo thinks about his white father’s imprisoned body being trapped and controlled like an animal’s might. Michael calling them from Parchman feels unnatural, as though the correct order of things has been disrupted. He’s still Jojo’s dad, but he’s also “an animal on the other end of the telephone.” In a sense, Michael is also not a person to Jojo and Kayla while he’s in prison, but mostly a “voice” that can travel. Jojo has a complicated mix of emotions surrounding Michael’s impending return home. He’s relieved that his father will be escaping from “the “fortress of concrete and bars” that he’s been trapped in for three years, but also worried about how distracted Leonie will be by his presence. Everyone’s identity is changed by everyone else’s presence in this book; Leonie is a different person when Michael is around.
