Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“It Ain’t Changed None”

Those old enough to remember the film Easy Rider will know the fate of its protagonists, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. They dared bring their long hair and loose morals into The Deep South almost 50 years ago. They both end up dead, shot off their motorcycles by the local rednecks for being different. The point of the film? Although Fonda and Hopper are white folk - and this was the target audience - this is what black people experience on a daily basis in a society that looks to differences in order to justify itself.

The film was made and released during the long reign of George Wallace (and his wife) as governor of Alabama. He was a man proud of his apartheid views who did all he could to provoke the real rednecks on the ground to a new Civil War based on race. Who would have believed at the time that the grandchildren of those rednecks who supported him would be the ones to sustain the same culture of hate, racism, and provincial sectarianism, much less a President sympathetic to their cause, a half-century later?

It takes the voices of two people, a mother (Leonie) and young son (JoJo), and two spirits, one of the mother’s brother and the other of a teen aged convict, to tell this story of dystopia in today’s Mississippi. Leonie is a hapless victim of race, poverty and drugs. The mixed race JoJo is the adult to his incompetent mother, whom he rightly mistrusts; and sole caretaker for his baby sister, whom he protects. Spirit One is the drug-induced image of Leonie’s murdered brother, Given, known naturally as Given-not-Given in his ephemeral form, who haunts his sister in her moments of intoxication. Spirit Two is the ghost of young Richie, worked and beaten and killed at the Parchman State Prison Farm, a real and familiar place to black Mississippians. Richie is interested in JoJo as a way to get home, that is, to some final peace.

The spirits consolidate memory and collapse time. They know how hate and racial violence have a persistence and continuity: “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none... It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same,” says the ghost Richie. And referring to Parchman Prison: “Got a lot of men in there ain’t so friendly. Then and now. It’s full of wrong men. The kind of men that feel better if they do something bad to you. Like it eases something in them... Parchman was past, present, and future all at once?”

Leonie’s use of drugs has a therapeutic purpose - to see and feel her dead brother. All her other emotional attachments - to her children, to her parents, to her only friend - are stunted and frustrating. Only her relationship with her husband has significance, and that mostly destructive. Given’s murder at the hands of her white husband’s cousin is the likely cause of her emotional infirmity. Drugs return her to that time before violence. Ultimately, however, she loses even Given-not-Given when he accompanies their mother into a final restful death. At that point she also loses even the little of the cultural memory she had available through her mother. There is no future for her because there is no past. The therapy has failed, as it must.

Only JoJo has the innate mystical sensitivity and talent to see, hear and understand the spirit of Richie. Of this sort of lost soul there are in fact an uncountable number, the immaterial remains of those who have been wronged but for whom there is no justice. JoJo is their voice: “They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to my babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me still I was sick and he said I was an abomination and Jesus say suffer little children so let her go and he put me under the water and I couldn’t breathe.”

“‘There’s so many,’ Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. ‘So many of us,’ he says. ‘Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.’” And more, presumably, arrive everyday until the Song of Hatred is drowned out. This is why they sing.

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