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Summary
Chapter 1
In the opening chapter, Jojo begins his thirteenth birthday with a stark lesson in life and death. He assists his grandfather, Pop, in killing a goat, albeit squeamishly. He holds his composure for a while but has to run outside to vomit when Pop cuts open the goat’s belly, spilling its guts. Returning inside, Jojo gets caught in a reminiscence about an altercation between his parents. As clearly as if it were happening in that moment, Jojo “sees” his white father, Michael, depart the house after a heated exchange with his Black mother, Leonie. Michael walks away from Leonie and gets into a truck where his own father, Big Joseph, angrily awaits him. After they leave, Jojo goes inside to prepare himself a sandwich, and Leonie comes in briefly before leaving him alone. Jojo doesn’t like being alone in the house, so he goes outside. He hears a weird, high singing and realizes it must be his great-uncle Stag, who wanders around the farm making noises and humming in a made-up language. He tries to avoid Stag by checking on the farm animals, and cuts his foot deeply on a can lid sticking out of the grass. When Leonie and Pop both return, Pop shouts at her for leaving Jojo alone and letting him injure himself. He pulls the metal shard out of Jojo’s foot and makes it clear that he’s horribly disappointed in his daughter.
The narrative returns to the present moment as Jojo and Pop cook the goat’s liver to feed to Mam, and Pop recounts a violent episode from his youth that led to his and Stag's incarceration at Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. Stag was the person who actually committed the crime, stabbing a white man in a bar brawl. Pop was at home alone when Stag arrived, quickly followed by a furious mob of white men who tied him and his brother up and took them to Parchman. Pop was convicted of harboring a fugitive and sentenced to three years. In the present moment, Jojo’s younger sister Kayla wakes up, and Pop stops talking. Jojo cares for her and sings to her. When Kayla is sufficiently distracted, Pop continues the story, telling Jojo that he and Stag were placed in separate camps at Parchman, and that he was only fifteen years old when he was first imprisoned. Parchman looked like an easy place to escape, as it was a large, wide-open plot of land, but it was not. Just as it was in its past—when Parchman was a plantation that exploited enslaved people—men with guns and dogs were hidden everywhere patrolling the perimeter. While enduring his time at the prison, Pop meets twelve-year-old Richie, who has been imprisoned for stealing food for his family, and the two begin to form a friendship.
Jojo and Pop are interrupted for a second time when Leonie walks in with a store-bought cake for Jojo's birthday celebration. The cake is decorated for a baby shower, but Leonie insists it will do. The party is anything but festive, especially as Mam is too sick to make a cake or participate as she used to when she wasn’t ill. Nevertheless, the family gather in Mam's room for a weak chorus of Happy Birthday, led by Leonie. The song is interrupted by a phone call, and Jojo is left to blow out his candles while his mother speaks to Michael, who’s calling from prison. From the bits and pieces of the conversation he can overhear, JoJo knows his father is coming home, and he is filled with dread.
Analysis
In Chapter 1 of the novel, we are introduced to Jojo, a thirteen-year-old mixed-race boy living in contemporary Mississippi, as he navigates a rite of passage on his thirteenth birthday. From the beginning, it’s clear that Jojo is a kind child who wants to please people around him, and who is searching for affection anywhere he can find it. He knows that Pop wouldn’t be angry if he couldn’t help with the goat, but would rather face the bloody scene than risk disappointing him. The themes of survival and haunting are clearly present even in this first chapter, as Pop’s stories of Parchman catalog painfully violent incidences of lynching and kidnapping, interspersed with his own memories of pain and loss. It’s obvious that the echoes of the past shape the present for Jojo, as more than half of this chapter is narrated as an intense flashback. It’s not just his own past that interests him, however. Jojo is endlessly curious about Pop’s history, and takes any opportunity to ask his grandfather to tell him stories from his time in jail. These stories don’t come easily to Pop, however; although he wants to share them with Jojo, he knows his grandson isn’t ready to hear everything just yet.
Jojo is unable to rely on either of his parents, so he is desperate to prove his maturity and demonstrate his capability to face harsh realities. He views the act of helping Pop to kill the goat as a chance to prove to his grandfather and to himself that he can endure life's cruelties. In a similar way, Jojo sees looking after his baby sister Kayla as being solely his responsibility. He’s determined not to "flinch or frown when Pop cuts the throat," seeing it as an endurance test for his own survival. He doesn’t flinch away from Kayla’s vomit or dirty diapers or tantrums. Instead, he simply absorbs everything he can, trying to temper himself so the world can’t hurt him.
This chapter is full of knives and sharp edges; the can that cuts Jojo’s foot; Stag’s knives and stilettos in Pop’s story; the knife that kills the goat; the knife that cuts Jojo’s birthday cake. The things that hurt people in the past are still the things that hurt them in the present, both literally and metaphorically. The cake itself isn’t sharp, but it also cuts Jojo deeply because it represents how little Leonie cares for him. It’s not actually a birthday cake but a cake meant for a baby shower, as “[b]lue and pink pastel sprinkles litter the top of the cake, and on the side, two little blue shoes.” Leonie is a substandard parent, and this is one of many instances where she does the bare minimum to show her love for her son. It’s clear even at this point that her priorities are not parental; she makes this even more obvious when she abruptly leaves the birthday gathering before Jojo blows out his candles. The group listen to her talking animatedly on the phone to Michael, the one person she truly cares about. Jojo and Kayla’s father being released is far more important to her than anything else that’s happening. Jojo absorbs this blow like he does all the others; quietly and without surprise.
Although none of the actual ghosts who drift around Bois Sauvage have shown up, there’s a sense of the Southern Gothic right from the get-go. The farm’s atmosphere is tinged with death around every corner. There’s blood in too many places to count, whether it’s spilling from a goat’s throat or being sucked from people’s bodies by the ubiquitous mosquitoes. It’s a place where living bodies survive because they profit from dead ones; Pop cannot escape a certain amount of violence in his life no matter what he does. Leonie hasn’t described seeing a ghost yet, but is herself so unreliable and so often gone that she seems like a ghost to Jojo and Kayla. Like a ghost, she shows up unexpectedly and often with unpleasant consequences. Mam, formerly a bright and intense personality, is also becoming less and less real as her life ebbs away. She has faded to a shade of herself from the cancer that’s killing her. The birthday party that Jojo endures already feels tainted by her death, as it’s a faint reflection of previous ones that she had presided over.
Fittingly, the party comes to a halt when Michael—Jojo’s father and the living ghost who haunts the entire family—calls to tell Leonie he needs to be picked up from prison. Michael exists to Jojo mostly as stories and a voice at the end of the phone, not as a real man with a solid body. This is perhaps why the thought of his return is so unnerving to Jojo, as if Michael is coming back from the dead. The author also reminds us often at this early stage that trauma can echo down through generations; Jojo’s father and grandfather were forced to work the same fields at Parchman Farm. With this in mind, the stories that Pop shares with Jojo about his past aren’t just historical: they’re also meant to warn and inform Jojo about the nature of the world he will have to survive as a Black man. Pop wants to keep him safe, but he also knows that Jojo will encounter many of the same dangers that racism and prejudice foisted on him.
