Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
Summary
Jojo is thirteen, growing up in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in the household that actually raises him: Pop, his grandfather, dignity itself, teaching him goats and gris gris and how to be gentle; Mam, his grandmother, dying of cancer in the back room; and Kayla, his baby sister, who clings to him as to a parent, because their actual mother, Leonie, Black, addicted, furious and haunted in the exact sense, is a storm that passes through. When Michael, the children's white father, finishes his sentence at Parchman, the state penitentiary, Leonie packs the children into the car to collect him, and the novel becomes a road trip through the hell mouth of the rural South: meth stops, a lawyer's house, a highway search with Kayla vomiting and Jojo cuffed at gunpoint at thirteen.
The dead ride along. Leonie, when high, sees Given, her murdered brother, killed by white men in a hunting accident that was no accident. And at Parchman the car picks up Richie, the ghost of a twelve year old boy imprisoned there in the 1940s alongside young Pop, whose fate, the story Pop can never finish telling Jojo, is the book's buried center, and the debt the living are still paying.
Ward writes it in three voices, Jojo, Leonie, Richie, the prose running from close realism to full incantation, and the ending, Kayla singing to the tree of unburied spirits, earns its title.
Around two hundred and ninety pages.
Best for readers who want the Southern road novel remade as a ghost story, where the haunting is simply history refusing burial.
Historical Context & Significance
Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017, making Jesmyn Ward the first woman, and the first Black American, to win the fiction prize twice, six years after Salvage the Bones. The sweep around it was total: best of the year lists at the Times, Time and the BBC, Obama's reading list, and a settled consensus ranking it among the decade's essential novels.
Parchman Farm, the novel's dark star, is documented history: the penitentiary's early decades ran on forced plantation labor and held child prisoners, and Richie is built from that record. Ward has said the book began with Jojo's voice and with reading about Parchman's twelve year olds, the ghost story arriving as the only honest container.
It completed Bois Sauvage's elevation into the permanent geography of American fiction, three novels deep, and Ward's subsequent Let Us Descend carried the project back into slavery itself. The MacArthur Foundation's citation praised her novels for exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South.