Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing is Jesmyn Ward's 2017 third novel, the National Book Award winner and the structural pivot that made Ward the only female writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice (after Salvage the Bones, 2011). The structural premise is Jojo, a thirteen-year-old biracial boy raised by his maternal grandparents Pop and Mam in rural coastal Mississippi (the fictional Bois Sauvage that anchors Ward's broader catalog), joining his drug-addicted mother Leonie on a road trip to pick up his white father Michael from Parchman Penitentiary (the actual Mississippi State Penitentiary at the heart of the broader American carceral-state literary tradition) at the end of Michael's prison sentence. The novel rotates close-first-person chapters across Jojo, Leonie, and Richie — the ghost of a thirteen-year-old Black boy killed at Parchman during Jojo's grandfather Pop's own youth-prisoner sentence at Parchman in the 1940s.

Ward's structural method is the patient three-voice rotation across the road trip and the Bois Sauvage household, with the Richie-ghost-chapters carrying the structural argument about how the operational mechanics of the American carceral state across the twentieth century produced specific kinds of inheritance that the Black American literary tradition has been working toward for forty years (from Beloved 1987 through The Underground Railroad 2016 and beyond). The Pop-and-Mam chapters carry the structural emotional weight of the grandparent-and-grandchild thread; the Leonie chapters carry the structural moral weight of the addicted-mother-and-son thread; the Jojo chapters across the entire novel deliver the structural emotional payoff that the entire ensemble has been preparing. The novel reads in the patient Mississippi-realist register Ward established with Salvage the Bones and that distinguishes her project from the broader contemporary American Southern literary tradition.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Ward entry point alongside Salvage the Bones, Let Us Descend (2023), and Men We Reaped (2013, memoir), and as one of the canonical contemporary American Southern literary novels. Compare to Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead), and the broader contemporary American Southern Black literary tradition. The Kelvin Harrison Jr. / Chris Chalk / Rutina Wesley audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.