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Summary
Chapters 5-6
In Chapter 5, the focus shifts back to Jojo. Seeing Kayla crying miserably and unable to stop vomiting, he’s growing increasingly anxious for her well-being. He knows it is hunger and not carsickness that is troubling her, and also think that something is wrong with her stomach. He knows that Leonie isn’t good at taking care of her children, thinking back to when she bought him a betta fish as a young child. She kept forgetting to buy the betta food, so when Jojo ran out of the sample-sized bag the fish came with, it starved to death. He has no trust in her ability to care for living things.
The scenery changes as they drive, and Jojo tries to distract Kayla from her pain with a story about a rabbit—also named Kayla—which briefly soothes her. However, she continues to fuss until the group stops at a brightly lit, welcoming house with a porch covered in wisteria. Here they meet Al, Michael' lawyer, who is cooking spaghetti for them. Jojo is starving and the spaghetti smells extremely tempting. Leonie tells Al she has to cook something and goes to get the blackberry plants she’s collected for Kayla from the car. As she comes back in, she trips over the edge of the carpet and drops the bag of drugs they had been transporting on the ground. Jojo sees it but decides not to say anything. Leonie tries to make a decoction that will help Kayla by boiling the blackberry scraps, which she then mixes with Kool-Aid to try and make them more flavorful. Despite Jojo’s concerns, Leonie convinces Kayla to drink the mixture. The children are put to bed, but Jojo waits until the adults are distracted and then induces Kayla to vomit in order to rid her of Leonie's potion. She cries and protests, but eventually stops vomiting and falls asleep. Jojo feels extremely guilty for hurting and frightening her, but he doesn’t know what else he could have done. As Jojo lies awake listening to a feverish Kayla breathe, he thinks about Pop and a story about Parchman prison in which Richie was brutally beaten.
The next morning, the family leaves Al’s house. Jojo is still worried about Kayla, but Leonie dismisses him. She’s fixated on her own upcoming reunion with Michael and barely registers the presence of her children. When they arrive, Michael walks out of the prison and he and Leonie begin kissing passionately. Jojo turns away, feeling awkward, and briefly hallucinates that he sees rows of men picking cotton in the fields of Parchman. Michael approaches them but Kayla doesn’t recognize him and is afraid. They get back into the car, and Kayla quickly vomits again. As her parents argue over what to do, Jojo sees a ghostly figure of a boy by the car. The ghost says “I’m going home.”
Chapter 6
This chapter switches to the ghost Richie’s perspective for the first time. He immediately recognizes Jojo as being related to Pop—a man who he knew as River, or Riv—because of his scent and appearance. He wants to tell Jojo that he can’t protect Kayla from the world, but he stops himself.
Richie recalls his first days as a ghost, and his first meeting with a large white snake which speaks to him about why he’s still on Earth after he dies. It shapeshifts into a scaly black bird, and gives him one of its scales, which allows Richie to fly. From high in the air, the bird shows him the Black prisoners doing forced labor on Parchman Farm, and then allows him to hibernate underground until it guides him to the car with Jojo in it. As he sits crouched on the floor of the car, Richie thinks about his past. He remembers how good River was with the dogs at Parchman and how hard it was when the sadistic white prisoner Hogjaw was placed in control of River and the animals. River attempted over and over again to protect Richie, but he couldn’t. The chapter ends with Richie silently watching Jojo and Kayla, clutching the bird’s scale in his hand, and waiting.
Analysis
Jojo sees Parchman prison for the first time in this chapter, and it’s a chilling moment. While he waits for his father and mother to disentangle themselves from their passionate reunion, he gazes into the fields and sees lines of enslaved people picking cotton. The author implies here that Kayla can also see them, although she doesn’t know how to communicate what she’s looking at. Jojo actually seems less disturbed by this vision than by Michael’s presence, as does Kayla. The children are awkward and standoffish with Michael because he is practically a stranger. When Kayla vomits all over herself, Jojo realizes that even though both of his parents are present, it’s still him who will have to clean Kayla up and make sure she’s changed and dry. The dynamics are confusing because nobody in the group is quite sure of where they stand in these parent-child relationships.
When Jojo spots Richie, he has no idea who the strange child leaning on the car is. However, Richie knows exactly who Jojo is, and is powerfully drawn to him. He knows that Jojo is related to Pop (whom Richie calls Riv, or River) because of his face and the “way his bones run straight and true.” In Jojo, Richie sees an opportunity, one he’s been waiting for the entire time he’s been dead. We learn that Richie has not been able to pass on to the afterlife because he’s been trapped by his traumatic end. He describes a long time spent in a grayish limbo version of the world, and then a meeting with a supernatural creature that is sometimes a white snake and sometimes a scaly vulture. The creature offers to act as a guide for Richie, and after it shows him Parchman prison from above, it leaves him. Richie is forced to miserably haunt the place where he was incarcerated, occasionally giving up and burying himself to “sleep” in the ground before rising again to look for River.
The flashback that follows this introduction reveals a crucial piece of Richie's past–his connection to Pop and the brutality they endured at Parchman. The memories of River's struggle to protect him from the sadistic Hogjaw illustrate the depth of their bond. Richie’s thoughts about Pop are tonally similar to Jojo’s: both boys love him immensely and see him as being skillful, kind, and a staunch father figure. Richie’s memories about being at Parchman with River also contain repeated threats of danger and brutality. The prison was not a place where any prisoner was safe, from each other or from their jailers. This chapter is the first place that explicitly addresses the ever-present threat of violence within the prison walls. Richie knows that as a boy with “soft pink insides,” he needs to be protected, and Pop steps into that role. Richie's silent observation of Jojo and Kayla at the end of the chapter suggests a similar sense of protectiveness, mirroring the role River once played for him. He doesn’t know where the family is going, but he knows it that going with them is his best hope to learn what happened to him.
Jojo also spends much of this section worried about Kayla. Because she's so young, it's difficult for her to communicate exactly what's wrong. Despite this, he can see that it's not just boredom or nausea from traveling in the car that’s making her fussy. He's frustrated by Leonie's unwillingness to prioritize her and feels powerless. The arrival at Al's house feels like a temporary break, as the children smell food cooking and have the prospect of slaking their thirst.
Jojo distrusts Leonie's haphazard attempts to make a medical concoction for Kayla, especially when he thinks back to a past incident when he was ill as a child. The author implies here and in several other places that part of the reason Mam is such a good healer is that she cares about people deeply. Leonie doesn’t, and often cuts corners when it comes to even the most important things. In this case, Mam had asked Leonie to find her a specific plant, and Leonie brought back the wrong leaves. Drinking the resulting brew made Jojo even sicker. The next day, to his horror, he found a cat that had drunk the fluid dead by the porch step. He has this horrible image in his mind as he watches his mother try and force-feed the potion to Kayla, which is why he sneaks out and forces his baby sister to vomit it all up. It makes him feel horribly guilty, especially after seeing Kayla and Leonie both miserably throwing up all day. However, he knows it’s the right course of action, so he does it even though it makes him feel deeply ashamed of himself.
