Sometimes I wonder who that parched man was, that man dying for water, that they named the town and the jail after. But I see the prison name, the place Pop was: Parchman. The pen’s marks are dark si it’s hard for me to read the route names, the letters and numbers shadowed. “She’d marked the route with a pen it scrawls north up a tangle of two-lane highways, smudged in places from Leonie’s finger running up and down the state. The terrain is palpable through her characters’ words and observations, oscillating between their felt senses and the reveries those sensations invoke: On the contrary, Ward’s sentences embody the rawness, the mugginess, and the intense heat of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Which is not to say that the book is overly flowery or riddled with abstraction. The alternating perspectives offer insight into why Leonie cannot provide motherly love, why Pop avoids certain topics of conversation, and how Jojo is able to alleviate Kayla’s worries.Įach character has distinct concerns, but they all narrate with a similar heightened language full of poetic notes. The book is told through the voices of Jojo, Leonie, and Richie. Richie’s experiences with Pop decades ago at a work camp thematically overlap with Jojo and Leonie’s odyssey through rural Mississippi and establish a generational lineage of remorse that the family struggles to overcome. Jojo, in turn, is haunted by a ghost named Richie, a young man from Pop’s dark past. But Given’s spirit only appears to her when she is high. Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her brother, Given, who died a violent death years ago at the hands of a belligerent white classmate. Their journey takes the shape of a classic road story, replete with Leonie’s failures as a mother, the woes of drug addiction, and Jojo’s attempts to protect Kayla from the family’s plight. When the kids’ white father is released from prison, Jojo and Kayla accompany Leonie, along with her friend Misty, on a road trip to the upstate penitentiary to retrieve him. Jojo learns about manhood from Pop, who is dealing with his own challenges as Mam slowly succumbs to cancer. She spends more time getting high than caring for her children, forcing Jojo to become the caregiver for Kayla. Thirteen-year-old Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, have been living with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. It starts as an unassuming family drama but ends as a profound invocation of the human condition. Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is a mesmerizing saga that infuses a contemporary road narrative with a timeless vitality and urgency of the likes of Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer.

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