Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

 [Part 1]

 Narrator: “The novel that earned me my first 100k advance?  Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Mississippi writer Jesmyn Ward took to Twitter almost three years after the release of her fourth book to reveal that it was the one that finally got her paid six figures upfront—a lower offer than white counterparts for books that sold far fewer copies.  Despite having received the National Book Award for her 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, Ward’s seemingly sizable advance for Sing, Unburied, Sing was hard fought.  Her tweet was in response to other Black women writers who were decrying the lack of equitable treatment and pay by the publishing industry. In this case and in a bit of irony, Ward experienced a similar devaluation to the Black family in the novel.

 Today, we’ll tell the story of family, loss, and the possibility of redemption bound up in an author deliberately framing the perils of systemic racism in the South within the lives and bodies it targets most.

 You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions—a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels.  

 Narrator: Sing, Unburied, Sing centers the perils of a 13-year-old, mixed race boy named Jojo.  His voice is one of three that recount a history of murder and injustice in the small fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.  The novel takes the reader on a literal and figurative journey from Bois to Parchman—Mississippi’s State Penitentiary.  The movement of this text, both emotional and physical, is just as griping as the journeys of the novel and author to critical acclaim and equity.

 Lumumba: By the time Sing, Unburied, Sing, which was published in 2017, is in the works, Ward has more than proven herself as a writer.  She’s already won the National Book Award for Fiction.  She’s written three award-winning texts including her memoir The Men We Reaped.  She’s on the shortlist for the MacArthur Genius grant which she wins a month after Sing, Unburied, Sing is released.  Considering all of this, it’s unfathomable that she would have to petition for a larger advance to write her book.  The publishing industry was just as exposed as Parchman penitentiary is within the novel.

 Narrator: That’s Ebony Lumumba, a professor of English literature at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.

 Lumumba: We cannot overlook the fact that not only is Ward a Black, woman writer in a white, male-dominated industry.  She is also a writer from Mississippi writing about Mississippi from within Mississippi.  There are obvious implications that come along with those identity intersections.  Her work is constantly exposing the fissures of inequity in the surface of our society.  Her identity underscores that effect. 

 Narrator: Stories about Mississippi are often not heroic.  Popular tales of the southern state do not mimic those of classic literature. There are no heroes laden with hubris or journeys littered with feats of strength.  With Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward continues her goal to reclaim a position among epic narratives for Mississippi—especially for Black Mississippians.  Ward’s vivid narratives and bold language redress all common erasure of lives that are too Black and too poor to be worthy of focus. She provides context for her choice in an interview in The Paris Review when she states that she was infuriated “that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as other.”  Ward’s novels are as much reclamation as they are resistance.  

 Lumumba: By the time Sing, Unburied, Sing is finally released, the novel receives widespread praise.  Considering the disparity in Ward’s advance for the novel in comparison to white writers publishing at the same time, it was almost as if the industry didn’t think Ward could do it again—what she achieved with Salvage the Bones.  Almost as if it’s some sort of fluke.  They didn’t want to believe this Black woman writing about Mississippi could produce another evocative tale that grips us and forces difficult, complex realities into our view.  They cannot deny it once the novel is released.

 Narrator: Sing, Unburied, Sing silenced any doubt about Ward’s talents as a novelist. Her book won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction.  The novel was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2017 and became a New York Times bestseller.  Sing, Unburied, Sing was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Aspen Literary Prize.  The major publications that published glowing reviews of the novel included the most prominent in the field, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post to name a few.  The New York Times selected the novel as the inaugural pick for the Now Read This book club,  a partnership between The New York Times and PBS NewsHour. The book club hailed Ward’s novel as “perfectly poised for the moment.”

 [Interlude]

 [Part 2]

 Narrator: Sing, Unburied, Sing begins on the main protagonist’s 13th birthday.  Very obviously a coming-of-age tale, this novel, described as haunting, afflicted, traumatic, and apocalyptic by reviewers, does not shy away from engagement with the most unsavory aspects of life.  The novel’s three narrators are: JoJo, his drug-addicted mother Leonie, and the ghost of Richie—a 12-year-old boy sentenced to time at Parchman in the 1940s for stealing food to feed his siblings. Those narrators guide us through a sordid, intermingled tale of loss and trauma.  Although JoJo and Leonie are living, their accounts become almost dream-like (nightmarish if you will) as the mother and son recount all that has been taken from them and how unbearable their daily lives have become as a result.  JoJo and Leonie both see dead people, but those supernatural souls are more comforting at times than those living among them in the natural world.  Ward’s language is raw and grotesque.  

 Lumumba: Ward was immediately likened to literary juggernauts like William Faulkner and Toni Morrison for her literary approach in this novel.  Sing, Unburied, Sing has multiple first-person narrators and the narration spans across temporal boundaries and the consciousness of the characters telling the story.   For many reviewers and critics, the conjured allusions invoke Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Ward’s Bois Sauvage has been considered as a similar construction to that of Faulkner’s Yoknapawtpha.  The haunting element of memory evokes Morrison’s Beloved.  It was not only the language and style that unearthed these comparisons.  Ward is also intentional about demonstrating the elements of classic literature that exists in the lives of her characters, in Black literature, in Mississippi.  

 Narrator: Like Salvage the Bones, Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is set in the fictional town Bois Sauvage and centers Black adolescents traversing the perils of a racialized South.  In both novels, Ward presents seemingly banal characters enduring circumstances cemented in trauma.  Salvage the Bones was all but ignored by mainstream critics.  Ward admitted shock at its nomination and subsequent selection for the 2011 National Book Award.  That unexpected acclaim sparked anticipation for what the writer would do next and where her vibrant language and tragic realities would take us.  The literary world waited with bated breath for the next Bois Sauvage story.  Then came Sing, Unburied, Sing.  In this novel much like in classical tales of ancient worlds, JoJo is our Homeric guide in another Ward novel about Mississippi that checks all the boxes for a classical tale that is unfortunately more real than mythic.

 Her second novel Salvage the Bones (published in 2011) intentionally aligns Esch Baptiste (the novel’s protagonist) to mythical Greek antiheroine Medea.  In Sing, Unburied, Sing JoJo begins the novel by preparing us for the odyssey that we will undertake in our reading.  At 13 years old, he is our guide into the underworld of the racial injustice, poverty, and neglect in Bois Sauvage.  Instead of focusing on another year of life, his first words/thoughts to us are—“I like to think I know what death is.”

Lumumba: Jojo’s gritty telling of his 13th birthday makes it difficult to grasp that he is only entering adolescence.  I had the privilege of discussing this text with men incarcerated at Parchman penitentiary.  Many of them related to Jojo despite the character being exponentially younger than all of them.  It was not only Jojo’s sophisticated contemplation of death.  The characters vulnerability and our access to that through Ward’s palpable language is remarkable.  Ward has often shared that Jojo was the first character that came to her when she was beginning this novel.  It is not surprising that he leads the action and captures us almost immediately as readers.  The scene where we experience the slaughtering of Jojo’s birthday goat possesses such powerful symbolism and depth for knowing and perhaps experiencing “what death is” and the decay of injustice in Mississippi’s history and present.

 Narrator: “Pop slices down the center of the stomach, and the innards slide out and into the tub.  He’s slicing and the smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit.  It smells like foragers, dead and rotting out in the thick woods, when the only sign of them is the stink and the buzzards rising and settling and circling.  It stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat.  But worse.  This smell is worse; it’s the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life.”  --From Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 

[Part 3]

 Narrator: Not all the reviews of Sing, Unburied, Sing were positive.  Some critics read the work as a problematic and stereotypical portrait of an impoverished Black family in Mississippi.  Others felt that Ward’s prose was too esoteric or lofty and forced.  While many agree that the novel achieves a precise interrogation of the South and its systems, some believe the novel lacks the precision of Salvage the Bones.

 Lumumba: It’s natural to compare an author’s previous work to the next novel especially when those stories are set in the same space and characters are shared.  I think we must set Sing, Unburied, Sing apart and allow it to stand on its own.  The supernatural bent alone begs an individual analysis of this work apart from Ward’s other texts. It allows us to engage the rich history of supernatural cultural heritage present in Black literature.  Ward is continuing a necessary tradition.

 Narrator: That’s Ebony Lumumba from Mississippi.

 Narrator: Some of the criticism of Sing, Unburied, Sing centers on Ward’s handling of the supernatural.  The novel mixes Western spirituality with non-Western spiritual practice.  It exposes and exorcizes systemic demons and reveals the spiritual heaviness of oppression.  For some readers and reviewers, this has been hard to grasp.

 Lumumba: Ward is paying homage to spiritual practices that are derivative of African ancestry.  To do that in a Mississippi setting is restorative. Despite the injustice illustrated across this novel, Ward achieves moments of justice by invoking the deeply rooted heritage of disenfranchised people—Black people.

 Narrator: Author of Wade in the Water and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith posited that each of the living and dead characters in Sing, Unburied, Sing were burdened with “unasked or unspoken” obstacles “not just to happiness or social mobility but to literal deliverance.”  In Smith’s analysis, she points to the opportunity Ward creates for each character to step up to the challenge and combat their ghosts.  Smith shares that within Sing, Unburied, Sing, “maybe that’s the miracle here: that ordinary people whose lives have become so easy to classify into categories like rural poor, drug-dependent, products of the criminal justice system, possess the weight and the value of the mythic — and not only after death; that 13-year-olds like Jojo might be worthy of our rapt attention while their lives are just beginning.”

 Smith goes on to contextualize Mississippi in Ward’s cosmology as a place where “one must grow inured to the rituals of killing and butchering animals for sustenance. Exhausted women beat their children in public. Men of good character do unspeakable things out of necessity, and the bad men do far worse.”  Ward thrusts us into exercises in empathy that unsettle to the core.

 There are many moments and manifestations within Sing, Unburied, Sing that torment and confuse its readers.  There are also instances of intimacy that warm us and conjure the familiar.  For its multiplicity, the novel exists as the complexity it takes on in its subject matter.  The characters are not monolithic nor are the plots or histories of their lives.  Like, Mississippi, like its author, Sing, Unburied, Sing is more than we can grasp in one setting—deserving of so much more of our time and thoughtful consideration.

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This episode of Remarkable Receptions was written by Ebony Lumumba and edited by Elizabeth Cali and me, Howard Rambsy. 

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.