The intersectionality of her oppressions, her barriers, nearly doom her.
As a young black woman growing up in poverty in rural Mississippi, Leonie is born into a world with three strikes against her. Then there is Jojo’s mother Leonie, a character who dances on the edge of stereotypes but Leonie is full-fleshed, simultaneously an archetype and an individual. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I’ve earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I’m ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger that’s how Pop walks. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight. The reader first meets Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy wise and wizened beyond his years, a nurturing soul devoted to his hard-working grandfather Pop, his dying grandmother Mam, and his feral little sister Michaela.
Ward gives her reader no quarter, no way to avoid the heartache and desolation of her characters.
Like Jesmyn Ward’s previous novel set in Bois Sauvage, a Mississippi town of her imagining, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is achingly honest, unmistakably southern, and award-winningly magnificent.
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