payment page
Summary
Chapters 13-14
Chapter 13
Jojo is restless at night, disturbed by the eerie sound of Richie singing from under the house. When Jojo wakes, Pop is already chopping up a termite-ridden pen in the yard. Jojo sees Richie crouching in the tree outside Mam’s window and decides to try and get Pop to finish Richie’s story. As Pop works, he tells Jojo about Richie’s escape. A violent and disturbed inmate named Blue beat and raped one of the female inmates at Parchman, then fled with Richie. Richie interjects, telling Jojo that Blue forced him to come because Richie witnessed the assault. Pop describes how Blue was cornered, mutilated, and brutally killed by a mob after he attacked a white girl he came across while trying to escape. Richie, who was with Blue but had tried to stop him, was then in danger of being brutally killed by the same mob.
Pop can’t meet Jojo’s eyes as he describes finding Richie, hiding and terrified. Faced with the certainty of an excruciating death for Richie at the hands of the mob, Pop stabs Richie in the neck, killing him quickly to spare him the torture. He then urged the Parchman dogs to eat Richie’s body in order to make Richie’s death look like the result of an animal attack. Pop was praised for leading the dogs to Richie, and allowed to leave Parchman. He spent the rest of his life haunted by the murder. In the present, Richie, listening, condenses into a black hole of energy and disappears.
Chapter 14
Leonie sadly returns home with the cemetery rocks and sees Given looking agitatedly at something. She follows his eyeline and sees Jojo and Pop sitting on the ground outside, hugging. Given’s ghost starts to bleed, and he staggers toward the door as if he’s being pulled. Leonie can’t understand what’s happening, but Given’s shade blurs and disappears. She feels like she’s losing her grip on reality.
Kayla wakes up, crying and repeating that she sees “the black bird, the Black boy,” but Leonie ignores it as toddler babble. Kayla kicks her and tells her that whatever she sees wants Mam. Leonie opens the door to show her that Mam is fine, but immediately sees that something is horribly wrong, as Mam sits suspended in the air. The room stinks, and Mam tells Leonie that it’s too late to save her, that a little dead boy wants her to be his mother. Mam begins to fight Leonie, and Given tries to speak to her. Mam is struggling with Richie, whom Leonie can’t see, as Jojo and Pop rush in. Mam begs Leonie to say the litany to summon Maman Brigitte, and she does, although Jojo tries to stop her.
There’s a confusing rush of events as ghosts and people struggle, and then Given suddenly walks calmy to Mam’s bed. He greets Jojo and Kayla, and then lies down with Mam, telling her he’s come to take her. Jojo angrily blames Leonie for Mam’s death, and she slaps him in fury. She runs outside, and when Michael returns she tells him they have to leave. He reluctantly agrees, and they drive away together, hunting for a temporary reprieve from their grief.
Chapter 15
The novel ends with Jojo’s perspective. Leonie and Michael have become very thin and worn, and the only thing they leave behind when they go is an indent in the sofa. Sometimes Jojo overhears Pop talking to Mam at night. He wonders if speaking directly to someone who isn’t there is helping Pop to process her absence, or if it’s more like Pop is praying. Jojo starts to think he can understand something of what Leonie feels, as he begins to have a sense of restlessness in Pop and Mam’s house. He begins to go for long, solitary walks.
Richie surprises Jojo on one of these walks and tells Jojo that he wasn’t able to move on to the afterlife. There are too many Black souls in pain, trapped on Earth by their trauma. Suddenly, the woods around Richie are full, the branches of the trees covered with Black ghosts. They whisper their deaths to Jojo and he stands transfixed until after dark. Pop and Kayla come to find him and Jojo tries to make them leave, but Kayla walks up to a tree full of ghosts and begins to sing. The ghosts, appeased, sway to the sound of the lullaby she sings. “Home,” they say, “Home.”
Analysis
In this final section, the truth about Richie’s past is finally revealed, but it doesn’t have the effect that Richie and Jojo hoped for. Richie believed that understanding his death would allow him to depart his earthly purgatory, but finding out the horrifying truth only leaves the ghost boy feeling angrier and more confused. He is faced to confront painful paradoxes: He was violently murdered, but the murder was intended to mercifully spare him from the torture and horror of a lynching. He died at Parchman, but he died in the arms of Pop, the only person he loved. Pop is also traumatized from the experience, saying that he can’t escape the smell of Richie’s blood. Something strange happens to Richie at this point; he turns completely dark, like a black hole, and then suddenly disappears. His sense of self has been completely upended, and everything he thought he knew about his death has been reversed. Jojo hopes that learning the story has been enough to send Richie over the border into the afterlife. It certainly seems to have lifted a burden on Pop, as the whole world has become golden and celebratory around them. But, of course, that isn't the case, and Richie is left looking for another way to pierce the veil.
Entering the afterlife becomes a common practice in the later stages of the novel, though Richie still isn’t able to successfully cross over. Mam is in the final throes of her cancer, and she intends to die with Maman Brigitte by her side to help her get into the afterlife. She also enlists Leonie’s help to perform the ritual and gather the sacred items, an attempt to build a bridge with her daughter and help her with her grief After the tumultuous, complicated death of Mam, Richie is compelled to leave. Rather than finding a home, or finding a way into the afterlife, Richie has instead been banished to find a new place to haunt. Mam’s death is both a relief and a tragedy, but Jojo blaming Leonie for her passing is the last straw in their relationship. Leonie can’t bear to be with her children anymore, and runs away with Michael. By the end of the novel, it seems as if both of them have slipped very seriously into addiction, as they are only home two nights a week and JoJo says that they have grown fish-thin.
By the end of the book, Jojo has grown more fully into himself, at the cost of his relationship with his parents. He doesn’t dread seeing his mother anymore, and he’s able to bond and commiserate with Pop and Kayla about their shared grief. Jojo just starts going for long walks, and on one of these walks he is astonished to run into Richie again. Richie is less surprised to see him, but it’s clear that his plans haven’t worked out the way he expected. Richie insists on showing Jojo a harrowing sight, which is one of the centerpieces of the novel’s commentary on the violent history of the South. There is a tree in the forest which Ritchie points out, and which he then climbs. As Jojo looks at the tree, he sees that instead of there being fruit or leaves on the branches, they are crowded with the souls of dead Black people. The language in this part of the novel is very frightening, as the figures have huge black eyes and are squashed together in the tree, crouching like a flock of birds. They are eerily silent, but they speak to JoJo with their eyes. They tell him—in a great rush of traumas—about the horrible ways in which they were killed and why they're stuck on the Earth. There are too many of them to count, and the stories they tell range from pre-Liberation days to the contemporary, illustrating the astonishing tenacity and brutality of racism and anti-Black behavior.
