Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Eight of us attended the book discussion of Sing Unburied Sing on Saturday Oct. 13, 2018. The book was so haunting but extremely well written. We all agreed that this book is very much like a Toni Morrison book, which in my opinion is the highest praise a writer could receive. Connie went as far

to say that Sing Unburied Sing reminded her of Sula and Song of Solomon.

Three of the women who attended on Saturday were first-timers. One was Sarah, who started the discussion with how much she hated it when the children walked out of the door to take the road trip with their mother.  Another first-time attendee is Laura, who said that this book was so unsettling that she couldn’t read it before bed. Asadie said she had “questions” about what was happening in the book. I think she meant that she found it curious that people who had already died could be seen and heard and play an active role in the story.

Carla said she loved the writing and baby’s sickness really pulled her in. The little girl needed so much love and her brother Jojo delivered that love to her. Carla continued by saying the drug part was sickening and stated “When Leonie said Given was there, I thought it was her imagination.” Leonie could only see her brother Given, who was killed when a teenager, when she was high.

Shelara called Leonie an arbiter of death. Sara said that Michael got Leonie started on drugs. I thought whether Michael got her started or not, something was wrong with Leonie before she even started the drugs. It seemed that she needed to rebel against her parents, even from a young age. Perhaps because her mom was a gatherer of herbs and a healer (what my Grandma used to call a “root worker.”) This embarrassed Leonie and she said that her school mates used to say her mother was a witch.

Because most of us were so insistent that Leonie didn’t have a heart, she didn’t have a mothering instinct, she didn’t seem to love her parents or her children, Connie, ever the voice of reason, stepped in and explained to us that some people, even though it appears that they come from loving parents, still lacked something. She told us that people need varying degrees of demonstrated and stated love. Just because Mam and Pop seem so morally upright to Jojo (and to us) perhaps they didn’t give Leonie the emotional support she needed.

Connie further explained to us that trauma is often passed down through our DNA. Perhaps Leonie suffered from collective trauma that had been inflicted on her ancestors. Connie asked us, “Who would choose to be that miserable? Leonie was preordained to be this way.” This led to the discussion of a theory offered in the book called The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der KolK M.D.

In Sing Unburied Sing, not only the living suffer trauma but ghosts cry out also. They want their stories told. Richie needs his story told. It’s so interesting to me that when Kayla first sees Richie, she calls him a bird. She had said “Birds, Birds” when she looked across the field at Parchman. When Jojo looked, for a moment he saw the men in the fields bent over working, then they were gone.  This idea of people’s spirits as birds stems from African folktales of “flying away” like the song “I’ll fly Away” and Milkman flying in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and in the story “The People Could Fly” published by Virginia Hamilton.

When Jojo sees the tree with the branches filled with ghosts on page 284 he actually thinks, “They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until 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...”

Three year old Kayla is able to sing to them and grant them the opportunity to finally rest in peace.