“Better to leave the baby asleep,” Pop says. If I let the cold goad me, I know when I see the goat, I’ll flinch or frown when Pop cuts the throat. I left my hoodie on the floor in Leonie’s room, where I sleep, and my T-shirt is thin, but I don’t rub my arms. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub. This spring is stubborn most days, it won’t make way for warmth. He spits in the dry red dirt, and the wind makes the trees wave. Pop weaves in and out of the trees, straight and slim and brown as a young pine tree. Better for Grandma Mam to sleep, because the chemo done dried her up and hollowed her out the way the sun and the air do water oaks. Better for my little sister, Kayla, to sleep, because on nights when Leonie’s out working, she wake up every hour, sit straight up in the bed, and scream. I don’t want Mam or Kayla to wake up with none of us in the house. I grab the door so it don’t slam, ease it into the jamb. 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. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and “an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and present” ( The Philadelphia Inquirer). He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. “Ward’s writing throbs with life, grief, and love… this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it” ( Buzzfeed). Jesmyn Ward’s historic second National Book Award–winner is “perfectly poised for the moment” ( The New York Times), an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEARĪ finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a “tour de force” ( O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.
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