Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

By Jesmyn Ward

There are times when the pervasive nature of suffering demands all of my attention. But in my life, those times come and go. They ebb and flow. I return from experiences of suffering to a tolerable, if not peaceful stability. In contrast to my own experience, Jesmyn Ward’s book showed me what life can be like when suffering is relentless. When moments of peace must be found, even chiseled from an ocean of misery.

It’s a tough go. It’s a story of a mixed-race couple in Mississippi with two children and a collective painful past. The protagonist, JoJo is the couple’s son, the result of a pregnancy which brought the two together and perhaps holds them together.

But Ward’s writing engaged me from the first page and carried me through a story I read in two days. Because I wanted desperately to know what would happen to this young man, JoJo who had somehow found his way into his own knowing. Who unselfconsciously lived into choices of love, tenderness and a compassion far beyond his years.

In the story, JoJo’s mother gathers him, his three-year-old sister and her best friend into their car to travel across the state and pick up JoJo’s father who is being released from the penitentiary. The trip begins with his sister vomiting in her car seat, and continues with the gut wrenching struggle of a journey shaped by poverty, racism and suffering.

The poetic and at times fantastical writing Ward brings to their journey draws the heart into a story which I might otherwise want to ignore. She paints despair and compassion, longing and desperation in such a tender light I am spellbound within the story. Ward creates complex characters, at once fallible and courageous, real and ghostly, to show us how the web of poverty and racial injustice ensnare and entrap. She also shows us the very human attempts we all make, regardless of circumstance, to come to terms with our choices, our truths, and the stories which need to be told.