I could reach out and touch them both, but I don’t.” When she narrates such scenes, Leonie’s detachment from her own children, and her frustration at their inseparable bond, bump up against each other: “He rubs her back and she rubs his, and I stand there, watching my children comfort each other. On the road, the conventional challenges flare into view: Kayla gets sick along the way, and the only person she wants to be held or helped by is Jojo. Leonie’s greatest addiction, though, and one that borders on a self-annihilating compulsion, is her love for Michael, the white father of her children who has been locked up for three years at Parchman. Leonie, the children’s mother, disappears for days at a time, then comes home grinding her jaw from another drug bender. Mam is in the end stages of cancer, but remains held back from passing on by something that won’t let her go. Pop mans the homestead, tending to the goat yard, pigpen and chicken coop with an emphatic correctness, hoping to teach Jojo what it is to be a man.
In “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward’s third novel, it is home to 13-year-old Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, who live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop. Readers of Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning “Salvage the Bones” will recognize Bois as the setting where 14-year-old Esch and her family live out the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.
Men strung out across the fields, the trusty shooters stalking the edge, the driver on his mule, the caller yelling to the sun, throwing his working song out.” Though it’s a fictional town, Bois Sauvage is as mired in its own history as, frankly, most real places in America, a fact that has become painfully plain in the handful of years since Trayvon Martin’s killing first made headlines.
And where being black and poor or white and unlucky might get you sent upstate to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which has evolved only superficially from the long-ago days when it operated like a plantation: “ the long line. $26.īois Sauvage, Miss., is the kind of place where a black man might be shot dead because of a bet gone awry, and where the authorities might agree to deem the incident a “hunting accident.” A place where ignoring a No Trespassing sign can get you chased off a white man’s property at the barrel of a gun. SING, UNBURIED, SING By Jesmyn Ward 304 pp. (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017.
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