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Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel that shows us how close to resurrection the pain of the past remains. On the surface, it’s the story of a Black family in contemporary Mississippi trying to survive in a world filled with prejudice and violence. Beneath that, it’s, a Southern Gothic ghost story, a love story, and an unflinching commentary on the enduring legacy of the American South’s history of slavery and oppression. In this book, the afterlife is as systematic and unbending as the living world. The living world itself, with its hatreds and cruelties, has its claws in some of its inhabitants very deepl, and it is unwilling to let them go no matter how hard they try to escape its clutches.
The novel immediately confronts the reader with a stark depiction of the thin line between living and dying. The scene where Pop and Jojo slaughter a goat together is simultaneously a warm and loving moment of teaching and a brutal lesson in the nitty-gritty nastiness of survival. This scene, like many others in this book, is more than the sum of its practical implications. It’s not just about Jojo becoming a man on his 13th birthday, but also a metaphor for the premature maturity forced on him by his emotionally absent parents, and the harsh lessons awaiting him as a young Black man in the South. In a place where Black bodies have historically been exploited and discriminated against, Jojo believes he has to expose himself to violence in order to avoid and withstand it. He also thinks that he’ll have to be tough to protect his baby sister Kayla and to spare her from experiencing these things herself. Each character in Jojo’s family encounters a world that’s arrayed against them, from Leonie's struggle with addiction to Pop's tragic, paradoxical choice at the end of his time at Parchman farm.
Haunting, both literal and metaphorical, is everywhere. The largest and most frightening specter in this book, however, isn’t the spirit of a person: it’s the hungry, violent spirit of Parchman Farm. This prison, once a working plantation, is a site of such misery and pain that it seems to have powers and a life of its own. It is able to hold onto the souls of those who have died within it, preventing them from moving on to a peaceful afterlife. It’s also not just at Parchman that Black lives lost to violence tend to produce Black ghosts with business to finish. Throughout the novel, stories of lynching and murders, torture, rape, and kidnapping crop up everywhere. The oral tradition that Pop continues by telling the detailed story of his life to Jojo begins many generations before his grandson was born. Pop himself carries stories passed down to him from the times of the Middle Passage, and he tries to bring them into the present for Jojo so he can understand what sort of world is waiting for him when he grows up.
Pop and Mam’s son Given appears regularly to his sister Leonie when she’s high on any of the drugs she is addicted to. He’s a silent presence, mirroring the fact that the truth about his murder was covered up. Given’s death casts a long shadow over the family, but it has the most intense effect on Leonie, who is for most of the novel the only person who can see him. Given’s haunting of his sister is not just Leonie daydreaming or remembering vividly. He’s there in the room with her, as present as the air she breathes. Similarly, Richie, the ghost boy who implores Jojo to help him discover the truth about his own death, is not an imaginary creature. He’s a dynamic apparition that shapes Jojo’s days around his persistent existence. He will not leave Jojo alone until he gets what he came to get: the truth about his death, told to him in person by his only friend, River, who happens to be Jojo’s Pop. His presence in Jojo’s life creates a bridge between the past's atrocities with the present's challenges. The ghosts of Given and Richie literally bring the past into contact with the present. The hatred that the people of color in Bois Sauvage endure every day does the same thing emotionally and spiritually.
Because of this this intermingling, memory is a double-edged sword in Sing, Unburied, Sing. On one hand, the memories that the living characters in the novel have are precious. They are connected to previous generations and to each other through shared remembrances, which is why Richie is so heartbroken to have lost a big chunk of his own history. Memory is a vital part of people’s sense of self, as Mam demonstrates when she tries to pass on her healing talents and her kindness to Leonie. However, memory is also a significant source of pain. The narrative of this book dips into flashback and reminiscence a great deal, formally representing the way memories can heal or worsen commonplace hurts. Pop's recounting of his past, and Leonie's memories of Given offer moments of joy and a sense of connection, but, they’re also brutally painful. This paradox mirrors Leonie’s drug habit. She started taking drugs when she was grieving over Given, but now can only see her brother when she takes them. Seeing him brings her comfort, but as it’s only his silent ghost, it also hurts her immensely. She’s trapped between wanting to remember and wanting to forget.
This novel closely examines the impact of racism and privilege on selfhood and self-understanding. Jojo—who is going through adolescence and learning about the difficulties of biracial identity—is the book’s a focal point for examining the effects of racial division. Jojo’s paternal grandparents Big Joseph and Maggie hate him because to them, he is Black. There’s no nuance there, even though his white father is their son. Jojo’s struggle for a coherent identity in a world hacked into distinct racial hierarchies is a microcosm of a very common problem. Leonie struggles with discrimination and unkind treatment, but also feels frustration and jealousy at the privileges her white friend Misty and Misty’s white boyfriend enjoy. Chapters told from Leonie’s perspective often contain reflections on how the white people around her assume that their lives are similar when they couldn’t be more different. It’s a regular source of conflict between herself and Misty, and is one of the reasons Leonie’s parents are skeptical of her relationship with Michael.
Despite the way it trains its focus on trauma and suffering, Sing, Unburied, Sing also offers its reader moments of hope. The scene at the end of the novel, where Kayla sings to the tree full of spirits, suggest that there is a way forward out of the history of racial hatred. The pathway to healing, or at least to peace, is a difficult but not impossible one to follow. a pathway to healing. These elements hint at the possibility of transcending the pain of the past without forgetting its lessons. The ghosts will never be laid to rest, but they might, Ward suggests, be offered something like justice, something like a way home.
