This haunting novel is told through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old African-American child, Jojo and his mother Leonie. Jojo is a lot like his grandfather, Pop, who has basically raised him with his grandmother, Mam, who has been sick for a while now with cancer and is dying. Pop tells him the story in bits and pieces without the ending of his incarceration at the infamous Parchman Farm prison where prisoners work the land mercilessly and are whipped for any small infraction. Where there are prisoners who are set up as watchmen to overlook their work and make sure they don't try to escape and prisoners who train the hounds in case someone does try to escape they can be tracked down. While there he meets a thirteen-year-old kid named Ritchie who is too young to be able to handle the place and he tries his best to help him survive it.
Jojo, himself is just trying to survive a life where his mother pops in and out of it at random intervals, is sometimes out of it when she is there, and is sometimes violent with him, and his father, Michael, a white man, is in jail. He has taken to calling his mother Leonie because she has stopped being a mother to him. Jojo takes care of and protects his little sister Kayla who is a toddler and who adores him.
Leonie is addicted to drugs and to Michael. Her children come in a distant third. She calls Kayla Michaela. Mam preferred Kayla and started calling her that and it stuck and Leonie wasn't around so Kayla answers to that. When she is high she can see the disapproving ghost of her dead brother Given who was murdered when he was in high school by a rich white boy. Mystical abilities and the ability to use herbs run in the family, but Leonie has forgotten more than she remembers of what her mother taught her about the herbs. Her mother had the ability to see what was going on with a person and sometimes see what would happen in the near future.
Michael is getting out of jail and Leonie wants their children to be there when he does so they go on the two-day pilgrimage to get there along with her friend from work Misty whose man is still in Parchman. They stop and stay the night at Michael's lawyer's house where they drop off some drugs they picked up along the way at a nasty woman's house for money. After they had left the woman's house, Kayla throws up in the car and they can't get her to hold anything down. Jojo is worried to death and Leonie is a bit worried herself, but eventually hears the siren call of the drugs and gets talked into leaving her kids even though Kayla now has a fever. She did make a questionable tea of blackberry vines and leaves from the side of the road because she remembered that one of them could be used to help settle the stomach for adults and if you use a little bit for kids and gave it to Kayla. Jojo, however, not trusting it, made Kayla throw it up.
This book shows a family that has strange abilities beyond this world, but also one that is African American and what they go through in the Mississippi Delta over the years and how things really haven't changed much, especially for a young black man struggling with his place in this world. It is also a book about death and dying as there are some dead people in this book and Mam is on her deathbed and heading toward the next world. This book is filled with strong characters including Jojo who is as strong and unyielding as the trees that grow in the forest in his backyard. He can take anything that Leonie or Michael dish at him so long as they leave Kayla alone. He gets his backbone and protectiveness from Pop. Leonie is as weak as Jojo is strong. She is also very selfish and thinks of her own needs and desires first. Mam tells JoJo that that was just how she was made. Leonie takes nothing from her mother except her mystical gift. This is a powerful book that really packs a punch, not the gut, but to the soul. It will get under your skin and effect you in mysterious ways that will stay with you long after you finish it. I give this book five out of five stars.
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Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sing-Unburied-Novel-Jesmyn-Ward/dp/1501126075?crid=3MVVJH6TG9MO6&keywords=sing+unburied+sing&qid=1539170247&sprefix=sing+ub%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-1&ref=sr_1_1This is the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my first period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.-Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing p 105)
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