The story opens when Jojo is assisting Pop in his backyard to slaughter a goat made me weak in my knees and panting. The perspective of Leonie, a drug addict who is haunted by the death of her brother Given, Jojo who is more like a parent to his sister Kayla and Pop’s affection to these kids despite having his own horrors had me in tears. They were quite descriptive and captivating.
I loved the character descriptions and every character had a part to play. Sing Unburied Sing perfectly portrays contemporary American-African families, their struggles and battles against race, poverty and death. The story had my attention from the start and this is exactly how family dramas should be written. Now here comes the hard reality Leonie is a black woman and Michael a white man. Jojo and Kayla’s father, Michael, is in Parchman prison, about to be released. Jojo is a thirteen year old kid who lives with his sister Kayla, his grandparents Mam and Pop and a drug addicted mother Leonie. It is a majestic new work from an extraordinary and singular author. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. She is black and her children’s father is white.
His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.
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