CANR
WORK TITLE: Sing, Unburied Sing
WORK NOTES: Finalist for National Book Award
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://jesmimi.blogspot.com/
CITY:
STATE: AL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/01/jesmyn-ward-national-book-award http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones/ * https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jesmyn-ward/sing-unburied-sing-ward/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1977, in MS.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, B.A., 1999, M.A., 2000; University of Michigan, M.F.A., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, memoirist, and educator. Previously worked for Random House (publisher), New York, NY; University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, former faculty member; University of South Alabama, Mobile, former assistant professor; Tulane University, associate professor of creative writing. University of Mississippi, John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence, 2010-11.
AWARDS:National Book Award for fiction, 2011, and Alex Award, American Library Association, 2012, both for Salvage the Bones; Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University, 2008- 10; MacArthur Fellowship (MacArthur Genius Grant), 2017; Strauss Living Prize; Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and Media for a Just Society Award, both for Men We Reaped.
WRITINGS
Author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Mississippi native Jesmyn Ward is a graduate of Stanford University. After earning her undergraduate degree, she worked in publishing for a time, taking a job at Random House in New York City before she continued her education at the University of Michigan with a master of fine arts degree. Her writing later earned her a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was released in 2008.
Ward began to write Where the Line Bleeds after the death of her brother. She had always intended to write a novel, but the story was still coalescing in her mind, and her brother’s death somehow served as the impetus she needed to start. At the time she was working in New York in the publishing industry, but she ended up completing the novel while working toward her graduate degree in Michigan. Ward credits her relationship with her brother and with male friends growing up for her accurate portrayal of the twin boys who serve as the novel’s focal point. A Southerner to the core, Ward also feels her writing is influenced by classic Southern writers. Brad Hooper, interviewing Ward for Booklist, remarked that “when asked whom she includes among her literary masters, Ward unhesitatingly answered, ‘William Faulkner, particularly his novel As I Lay Dying.’ She admits that ‘it made my head explode’ upon her first reading of it.’ Ward cited Toni Morrison and poetry as a genre as additional influences on her style of writing.
Where the Line Bleeds takes place in the small rural town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, situated on the Gulf Coast. The residents are primarily black, and economically speaking, the town is at a stand-still, with little to encourage young people to stay on and make their lives there after they have grown old enough to leave. The protagonists of the book are twins Christophe and Joshua. After graduating from high school, they set out to make their mark on the world, intent on leaving both their small town and parents of somewhat questionable morals far behind them. Unfortunately, neither twin gets very far. Joshua ends up working the docks, but when Christophe is unable to find a job, he begins to sell drugs with their cousin. There is little hope of them escaping the dead-end life ahead—no money for college, a father who is a junkie, and a mother who took off for Atlanta years earlier, leaving them behind. The boys strive to please their beloved grandmother, who virtually raised them and encouraged them to stay on the right path, but events conspire against all their efforts.
Critics praised Ward’s debut effort as a strong and illuminating look at the rural South. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that Ward describes a place that has been little seen before in novels: “the rural African American South, a place of grinding poverty but enduring loyalties, tragic but somehow noble.” Brad Hooper, in his Booklist review, declared that she “successfully escapes first-novel awkwardness, obviously knowledgeable of and comfortable with the milieu in which she sets her narrative.” In a review for the Dallas Morning News Web site, William J. Cobb concluded of the boys’ story that “the ending that eventually unfolds does not perhaps change their destiny as much as confirm it. This vision of the real America is not a pretty picture, but it’s a powerful, realistic story.” Elizabeth Jackson, writing for the Austin Chronicle Online, commented that “Ward is an author to watch, to be sure, as one readily anticipates her sense of proportion and emphasis will gain subtlety.”
Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, was published in 2011 and won both a National Book Award for fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Set in the fictionalized coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the novel chronicles the lives of pregnant teenager Esch Batiste, her three brothers, and their alcoholic and abusive father during the ten days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and the day after. The events in Salvage the Bones are partly inspired by what happened to Ward’s own family in 2005 when Katrina impacted their community. Salvage the Bones “begins in disaster, and endures cataclysm. Early scenes—of pups arriving, some of them dying, of the shooting and gutting of a squirrel, of desperate, bloody dog fights and limb-risking efforts to steal supplies, of friends and family striking out in crazed efforts to survive in sweat and dirt and steam-heat, of characters getting bitten and sliced and broken—are full-frontal, graphic. This novel’s got no time for comfort,” asserted San Francisco Chronicle contributor Joan Frank, who called the novel “strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible.”
“We are immersed in Esch’s world, a world in which birth and death nestle close, where there is little safety except that which the siblings create for each other. That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail,” observed Los Angeles Times contributor Carolyn Kellogg. “What makes the novel so powerful … is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy,” remarked Washington Post Book World reviewer Ron Charles. In an article about the author for the London Guardian Emma Brockes praised the novel, noting that Ward’s “writing is lyrical; savage.”
In an interview with Elizabeth Hoover for Paris Review Online, the author discussed how she came up with the title for Salvage the Bones: “The word salvage is phonetically close to savage. … It says that come hell or high water, Katrina or oil spill, hunger or heat, you are strong, you are fierce, and you possess hope. When you stand on a beach after a hurricane, the asphalt ripped from the earth, gas stations and homes and grocery stores disappeared, oak trees uprooted, without any of the comforts of civilization—no electricity, no running water, no government safety net—and all you have are your hands, your feet, your head, and your resolve to fight, you do the only thing you can: you survive.” She added: “Bones is meant to remind readers what this family, and people like this family, are left with after tragedy strikes.”
Ward’s third novel is titled Sing, Unburied, Sing. Ward “tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. “This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South,” commented BookPage writer Michael Magras. JoJo, the main character, is a thirteen-year-old African American youth who, along with his younger sister Kayla, live with his grandparents, Mam and Pop. Their mother, Leonie, is an unreliable parent, a drug user and dealer who has an inexplicable connection to the world of spirits. More often than not, JoJo ends up taking care of his sister. When JoJo and Kayla’s father—Michael, a white man— is released from the notorious Parchman prison, she believes the family might finally be able to reconcile and live well together. Despite the fact that Mam is dying of cancer, Leonie packs JoJo into a car and takes off across Mississippi to pick up Michael. Their journey, however, is eventful, marked by temptations and danger, not the least of which is the inadvertent picking up of a ghost named Richie, the spirit of a thirteen-year-old boy who was killed at Parchmen when Pop was incarcerated there. Both family background and the regions racial history serve to propel their journey and the difficult lives they lead.
“Vivid, sharp, and instantly engaging, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a powerful work by one of America’s foremost novelists,” commented Rhianna Walton, writing on the Powell’s Website. A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed, “As with the best and most meaningful American fiction these days, old truths are recast here in new realities rife with both peril and promise.” Vanessa Bush, writing in Booklist, noted that Ward “renders richly drawn characters, a strong sense of place.”
Ward is also the author of a memoir and the editor of a book of nonfiction. In her memoir, Men We Reaped, Ward tells the tragic stories of five young men she knew who died within a four-year period. They include three close friends, a cousin, and her brother, Joshua. All were residents of the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place with few opportunities and where the main occupations seem to be drugs and alcohol. In Ward’s view, “the underlying cause of their deaths was a self-destructive spiral born of hopelessness,” Bush commented in another Booklist review. Her brother, for example, was killed when a hit-and-run drunk driver crashed into his car. The driver was later convicted of leaving the scene of the crime, not manslaughter, which further illustrates the racial tensions and injustices in this part of the country. In addition to the stories of her dead friends and relatives, Ward also chronicles her own family history, her struggles to escape, and the breaks she received which allowed her to find a different future. In this book, “Ward has a soft touch, making these stories heartbreakingly real through vivid portrayal and dialogue,” commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. A Kirkus Reviews writer called the book “beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear.” Reviewer Dominique Nicole Swann, writing in World Literature Today, concluded, “In giving voice to these young men who can’t speak, Ward certainly compels readers to listen.”
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Ward, contains a collection of eighteen essays that address the state of racial equality, and the still-fractured state of race relations, in the United States today. The book’s title is based on a work by James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, and Ward “hopes this book will offer solace and hope to a new generation of readers, just as Baldwin’s work did for her,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer. The text “explores what it means to be black in America, past and present,” observed Library Journal reviewer Stephanie Sendaula. The book contains “poetry, essays, and flash nonfiction to address the renewed racial tensions that continue to boil in America in the twenty-first century,” commented reviewer Diego Baez, writing in Booklist. The book’s contributions “work together as one to present a kaleidoscopic performance of race in America,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. The Kirkus Reviews writer called the book a “Timely contributions to an urgent national conversation.” USA Today reviewer Charisse Jones stated, “Ward’s reflections on race and racism, along with those of seventeen other writers, are thoughtful, searing and, at times, hopeful.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Ward, Jesmyn, Men We Reaped (memoir), Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2013.
PERIODICALS
Biography, fall, 2013, Tayari Jones, review of Men We Reaped, p. 904.
Booklist, November 15, 2008, Brad Hooper, review of Where the Line Bleeds, p. 28; August 1, 2013, Vanessa Bush, review of Men We Reaped, p. 21; July 1, 2016, Diego Baez, review of The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, p. 6; July 1, 2017, Vanessa Bush, review of Sing, Unburied, Sing, p. 24.
BookPage, September, 2017, Michael Magras, review of Sing, Unburied, Sing, p. 20.
Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 2013, Yvonne Zipp, review of Men We Reaped; October 11, 2017, “Sing, Unburied, Sing Is a Road Novel, a Ghost Story, a Family Epic,” review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Essence, November 1, 2008, “Boys to Men: Delve into Our Seventeenth Essence Book Club Pick, a Novel That Offers a Truthful View of Young Black Men in America Today,” p. 79.
Guardian (London, England), December 1, 2011, Emma Brockes, “Jesmyn Ward: ‘I Wanted to Write about the People of the South.’”
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2008, review of Where the Line Bleeds; May 1, 2013, review of Men We Reaped; May 15, 2016, review of The Fire This Time; August 1, 2017, review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Library Journal, September 1, 2013, review of Men We Reaped, p. 111; June 15, 2016, Stephanie Sendaula, review of The Fire This Time, p. 91.
Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2011, Carolyn Kellogg, review of Salvage the Bones.
New Statesman, February 14, 2014, review of Men We Reaped, p. 46.
New Yorker, September 11, 2017, Vinson Cunningham, “After the Flood,” review of Sing, Unburied, Sing, p. 69.
New York Times, August 17, 2016, Dwight Garner, “Inspired by James Baldwin, in a Racial Struggle with No End,” review of The Fire This Time, p. C1(L).
Observer (London, England), December 11, 2011, Olivia Laing, review of Salvage the Bones.
Press-Register (Mobile, AL), November 16, 2011, “Jesmyn Ward, University of South Alabama Professor, Wins National Book Award for Fiction.”
Publishers Weekly, September 22, 2008, review of Where the Line Bleeds, p. 39; June 24, 2013, review of Men We Reaped, p. 160; June 6, 2016, review of The Fire This Time, p. 75; July 3, 2017, review of Sing, Unburied, Sing, p. 49.
San Francisco Chronicle, November 27, 2011, Joan Frank, review of Salvage the Bones.
School Library Journal, December 1, 2008, Jamie Watson, review of Where the Line Bleeds, p. 157.
Smithsonian, September, 2013, review of Men We Reaped, p. 99.
Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), October 20, 2017, Melanie Kembrey, “Jesmyn Ward Interview: ‘My Ghosts Were Once People, and I Cannot Forget That.'”
USA Today, August 30, 2016, Charisse Jones, “Pain of Racism Illuminated in Timely Fire This Time,” review of The Fire This TIme, p. 05D.
Washington Post, August 29, 2017, Ron Charles, “Jesmyn Ward’s Powerful New Novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing,” review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Washington Post Book World, November 8, 2011, Ron Charles, review of Salvage the Bones; August 30, 2017, Ron Charles, “A Powerful New Story,” review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.
World Literature Today, November-December, 2014, Dominique Nicole Swann, review of Men We Reaped, p. 78.
ONLINE
Apooo Book Club Web site, http://www.apooobooks.com/ (February 22, 2009), Darnetta Frazier, review of Where the Line Bleeds.
Austin Chronicle Online, http://www.austinchronicle.com/ (December 19, 2008), Elizabeth Jackson, review of Where the Line Bleeds.
Boston Globe Online, http://www.boston.com/ (December 28, 2008), Anna Mundow, “Tragedy, Loyalty on the Bayou.”
Dallas Morning News Online, http://www.dallasnews.com/ (November 30, 2008), William J. Cobb, review of Where the Line Bleeds.
Entertainment Weekly Online, http://shelf-life.ew.com/ (November 18, 2011), Stephan Lee, author interview.
Literary Fiction Review, http://www.litficreview.com/ (July 27, 2009), review of Where the Line Bleeds.
Los Angeles Review of Books, http://www.lareviewofbooks.org/ (October 11, 2017), Louise McCune, “Ghosts of Our Past: An Interview with Jesmyn Ward.”
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (September 11, 2017), Adam Vitcavage, “Haunted by Ghosts: The Millions Interviews Jesmyn Ward.”
National Book Foundation Web site, http://www.nationalbook.org/ (April 9, 2012), author profile.
National Public Radio Website, http://www.npr.org/ (August 31, 2017), Melissa Block, All Things Considered, “Writing Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward Salvages Stories of the Silenced,” interview with Jesmyn Ward.
One-Minute Book Reviews, http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/ (February 15, 2012), Janice Harayda, review of Salvage the Bones.
Paris Review Online, http://www.theparisreview.org/ (August 30, 2011), Elizabeth Hoover, author interview.
Powell’s Website, http://www.powells.com/ (August 29, 2017), Rhianna Walton, “Powell’s Interview: Jesmyn Ward, Author of Sing, Unburied, Sing.“
Warren County, Vicksburg Public Library Blog, http://wcvpl.blogspot.com/ (March 31, 2009), “Dive into Jesmyn Ward’s World.”
Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the author of the memoir, Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She lives in Mississippi.
Novels
Where the Line Bleeds (2008)
Salvage the Bones (2011)
Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
Non fiction
The Men We Reaped (2013)
The Fire This Time (2016)
Awards
National Book Award for Fiction Best Book winner (2011) : Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
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Jesmyn Ward
Occupation
Writer, professor
Language
English
Alma mater
Stanford University (B.A., M.A.)
University of Michigan (M.F.A.)
Genres
Fiction, memoir
Notable works
Salvage the Bones
The Fire This Time (ed.)
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Notable awards
National Book Award for Fiction (2011)
MacArthur "genius grant" (2017)
Website
jesmimi.blogspot.com
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction[1][2] and a 2012 Alex Award[3] with her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community covering the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after.[4] Prior to her appointment at Tulane, Ward was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.[5] From 2008 to 2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.[6] She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010–2011 academic year.[7] Ward joined the faculty at Tulane in the fall of 2014. In 2013 she released her memoir Men We Reaped.[5] In 2017, she was the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.[8]
Contents [hide]
1
Early life and education
2
Literary career
3
Awards and honors
4
Works
5
References
6
External links
Early life and education[edit]
Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, a small rural community in Mississippi.[9] She developed a love-hate relationship with her hometown after having been bullied at public school by black classmates and subsequently by white students while attending a private school paid for by her mother’s employer.[9]
The first in her family to attend college, she earned a B.A. in English, in 1999, and an M.A. in media studies and communication, in 2000, both at Stanford University.[10][11][12] Ward chose to become a writer to honor the memory of her younger brother,[13] who was killed by a drunk driver in the summer of 2000, just after she had completed her master's degree.[12][14]
In 2005, Ward received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.[14] Shortly afterwards, she and her family became victims of Hurricane Katrina.[9] With their house in De Lisle flooding rapidly, the Ward family set out in their car to get to a local church, but ended up stranded in a field full of tractors.[5] When the white owners of the land eventually checked on their possessions, they refused to invite the Wards into their home, claiming they were overcrowded.[5] Tired and traumatized, the refugees were eventually given shelter by another white family down the road.[15]
Ward went on to work at the University of New Orleans, where her daily commute took her through the neighborhoods ravaged by the hurricane. Empathizing with the struggle of the survivors and coming to terms with her own experience during the storm, Ward was unable to write creatively for three years – the time it took her to find a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds.[16]
Literary career[edit]
In 2008, just as Ward had decided to give up writing and enroll in a nursing program, Where the Line Bleeds was accepted by Doug Seibold at Agate Publishing.[15] The novel was picked as a Book Club Selection by Essence magazine[5] and received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award in 2009.[17] It was shortlisted for the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award[18] and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.[19] Starting on the day twin protagonists Joshua and Christophe DeLisle graduate from high school,[20] Where the Line Bleeds follows the brothers as their choices pull them in opposite directions.[21] Unwilling to leave the small rural town on the Gulf Coast where they were raised by their loving grandmother, the twins struggle to find work, with Joshua eventually becoming a dock hand and Christophe joining his drug-dealing cousin.[21] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called Ward "a fresh new voice in American literature" who "unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope."[21]
In her second novel, Salvage the Bones, Ward homes in once more on the visceral bond between poor black siblings growing up on the Gulf Coast.[9] Chronicling the lives of pregnant teenager Esch Batiste, her three brothers, and their father during the 10 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after,[4][22] Ward uses a vibrant language steeped in metaphors to illuminate the fundamental aspects of love, friendship, passion, and tenderness.[23] Explaining her main character's fascination with the Greek mythological figure of Medea, Ward told Elizabeth Hoover of The Paris Review: "It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.' I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one."[24]
On November 16, 2011, Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction for Salvage the Bones. Interviewed by CNN’s Ed Lavandera on November 16, 2011, she said that both her nomination and her victory had come as a surprise, given that the novel had been largely ignored by mainstream reviewers.[9] "When I hear people talking about the fact that they think we live in a post-racial America, … it blows my mind, because I don’t know that place. I’ve never lived there. … If one day, … they’re able to pick up my work and read it and see … the characters in my books as human beings and feel for them, then I think that that is a political act", Ward stated in a television interview with Anna Bressanin of BBC News on December 22, 2011.[25]
Ward received an Alex Award for Salvage the Bones on January 23, 2012.[3] The Alex Awards are given out each year by the Young Adult Library Services Association to ten books written for adults that resonate strongly with young people aged 12–18.[26] Commenting on the winning books in School Library Journal, former Alex Award committee chair, Angela Carstensen described Salvage the Bones as a novel with "a small but intense following – each reader has passed the book to a friend."[3]
In July 2011, Ward wrote that she had finished the first draft of her third book, calling it the hardest thing she had ever written.[27] It was a memoir titled Men We Reaped and was published in 2013. The book explores the lives of her brother and four other young black men who lost their lives in her hometown.[9]
In August 2016, Simon & Schuster released The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, edited by Ward. The book takes as its starting point James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, his classic 1963 examination of race in America. Contributors to The Fire This Time include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnett Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel José Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, Kevin Young, and Jesmyn Ward herself.
Ward's third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, was released in 2017 [28] and met with several effusive reviews. It is a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.[29]
Awards and honors[edit]
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) shortlist for Men We Reaped[30][31]
2011 National Book Award Winner for Salvage the Bones[19]
Works[edit]
Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Publishing, 2008)
Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011)
Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013)
The Fire This Time (Simon & Schuster, 2016)
Sing, Unburied, Sing: a novel (Scribner, September 2017)
Powell's Interview: Jesmyn Ward, Author of 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'
by Rhianna Walton, August 29, 2017 12:23 PM
Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is a taut triumph, rich with the poetry and political nuance for which her award-winning fiction is known. Set in the rural woods of Bois Sauvage, a bayou town in the Mississippi Gulf, the novel follows 13-year-old Jojo and his family as they deal with a maelstrom of terminal illness, poverty, drug addiction, child abuse, incarceration, and racism. The characters’ struggles are by turns eased and complicated by the ghosts who haunt the forests and fields of Mississippi, and by their connections to the flora and fauna of the Gulf. Inspired by both the present-day realities of African American life in the rural South and the spiritual and folk traditions of Voodoo and Hoodoo, Sing, Unburied, Sing tells a story that is both specific and universal, about how the lives we lead are influenced by the natural world and the open wounds of our shared, often brutal, national history. Vivid, sharp, and instantly engaging, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a powerful work by one of America’s foremost novelists. We're excited to present it as Volume 69 of Indiespensable.
Rhianna Walton: The promotional copy for Sing, Unburied, Sing markets it as “the archetypal road novel,” but that label feels inaccurate to me. While the family’s trip to Parchman takes up a significant portion of the novel, the main object of a typical journey — to get from Point A to Point B, and back again — relies on linear notions of space and time that are inconsistent with your novel’s focus on the simultaneity of the past, present and future. Additionally, in a standard road novel, the protagonists encounter characters and situations that change them, so that the people they were when the journey began are not the same people who return home. But in Sing, Unburied, Sing, it seems like it’s their experiences at home that alter the characters. What’s your take on reading Sing, Unburied, Sing as a road novel?
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Jesmyn Ward: That's an interesting question, because when I began writing the rough draft of the novel, I thought it would be a novel about a journey, or a road trip novel. Then I realized I had to do research for the novel, because I knew nothing about Parchman prison. Once I began reading about the history of Parchman Farm in Mississippi, and discovered that there actually were 12- and 13-year-old black boys sent to Parchman in the late '30s through '50s, that fact was so horrible and striking to me that I realized that one of those kids had to be a character in my book. That character had to exist in the present and not just in memory, because I really wanted to give him the opportunity to live in the present and to speak.
Once I discovered that, early on in the first draft, I realized that there would be ghosts in my novel. I didn't really know what [Richie] wanted when I introduced him. As I wrote more and got deeper into the manuscript, and the story took on a life of its own, I began to figure out what he wanted.
My understanding of what the novel was about changed as I wrote it. I would agree with you that it's not just a story about a journey, that it has become something more. Much of what is important to the characters happens at home once they've returned.
Rhianna: Regarding the importance of home, I kept thinking about the notion of “terroir” while I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing. The ways in which Jojo and his family are tied to the land and water of the Gulf — and then the way the land and water are peopled by the ghosts of history — made it feel as though the characters and certain events in the novel could only occur in Bois Sauvage; that there is a very specific quality to the soil, air, and sea there, born of both natural and historical conditions. Could you speak to the importance of place in Sing, Unburied, Sing?
Jesmyn: When I first began writing the book, I didn't really realize that one of the things that most of the characters are searching for is home. They all have different understandings of what home is, and of what it can be and what it means, but in some way that's what they're all searching for.
It's true that those definitions of home are very particular to this place and to the Gulf Coast — not only to the Gulf Coast, but also to the history of Mississippi. I do think that this is a story that could only happen here.
I hope, though, that although readers see that this is a story that can only happen here, they can also identify with the search for home, as well — that they understand that it's universal. It's funny, because like I said, I didn't understand that that's what Richie was searching for from the very beginning. Even though he said, "I'm going home," when I first introduced his character, I didn't understand what home was for him.
Rhianna: I'm not sure he totally understands that. As the reader, I thought, he's confused. His idea of home changes.
Jesmyn: I actually had to do a couple of revisions of the book before I began to tease out what home meant for the other characters, as well. It was pretty clear for me from the beginning what home meant for Leonie, but my understanding of what home meant for Jojo changed throughout the book. As my understanding of what home meant for them changed, I think that they grew as characters. They took on new life. They became more complicated. Their inner lives were richer because they were more complicated.
Rhianna: One of the things I really appreciate about your writing is that every character is complex.
You mentioned — and you’ve said this in prior interviews, too — that you hope your stories are read as universal. I think Sing, Unburied, Sing does that, because although the novel felt very place-specific to me, it also deals with issues that are endemic to rural areas across the country, like poverty, child abuse, addiction, racism, violence, and incarceration.
I was wondering how incorporating the prosaic and spiritual elements of black life on the Gulf Coast helps you process and explore black life in America more generally, or if that's something you're even trying to do.
Jesmyn: It's interesting, because I think that part of the reason that I wanted to incorporate spirituality into the book — so, Voodoo and Hoodoo — and that I wanted the characters to be able to access the supernatural world, is because this is part of my characters’ legacy. At the same time that they've inherited the simple facts that they live in poverty, that they are struggling against entrenched, systemic racism, they also have a different legacy. This spiritual legacy allows them, not to transcend their reality, but to access a different understanding of their reality.
In some ways, it makes their reality richer because they're able to connect with those who have gone before. You know what I'm saying? I think that that allows them some joy, and some love and connection. I think that's important to their survival.
I think that because, at times, the story is very dark and the characters are living through some pretty difficult things, having that spiritual element allows them some light. I think that's important, especially if you are trying to figure out how people survive. They need some light, and that was my way of giving the characters that.
I don't think that the way that my characters see and experience the world should be limited by their circumstances. Faulkner taught me that.
Rhianna: The poetic nature of your prose is something that gets brought up in a lot of reviews of your work, and a criticism that I’ve seen repeated is that the poetry can weigh down the narrative. I disagree! [Laughter] Not just because I enjoy your writing, but because the critique suggests that figurative language is somehow too decorous or fantastical for the rural characters and settings you choose for your novels. One of the things I think your lyricism does is it reminds the reader of the uniqueness and complexity of individual experience.
I was wondering if you would talk to that a little bit — if lyricism is just a part of how you write, or if you cultivate a poetic style to give your characters greater dimensionality.
Jesmyn: I think it's a combination of the two, because I've been in lots of writing workshops and I've done a lot of reading of contemporary literature, and I know from both that the way that I write is not in vogue. People don't read me and say, "Oh, it's so clean and elegant." [Laughter] I understand that. I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to.
I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me. I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.
I agree with you. I think that part of the pushback that I get is from people who see the kind of characters that I write about, who are mostly uneducated, poor, working class, black. They're not voracious readers, most of the time, and because I write from a first-person point of view, people feel that the way the characters use language is too poetic.
I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally. I think that their interior life can be very rich and poetic, have such texture, and that their vision can be very complicated, while the way that they express themselves in their speech can be very different. You know what I'm saying? Their verbal speech can reflect more of their circumstances, but people are complicated. I don't think that the way that my characters see and experience the world should be limited by their circumstances. Faulkner taught me that.
Also, I was just thinking today about Carson McCullers. Especially with her writing, there's such a big difference between the way that characters experience the world and the richness of their interior lives, and the ways that they speak to others.
Maybe this is an argument that Southern writers have had to make in their fiction for decades. I'm just one in a line of writers who are doing the same thing.
Rhianna: The other thing I was thinking about is that in Sing, Unburied, Sing, figurative language allows you to tell a very complex story, in which everyday aspects of life in the rural south — poverty, addiction, etc. — are both connected to and subjected to a larger order made up of history, nature, and the supernatural. I don't know if you could do that without poetry.
Jesmyn: Yeah, I think so. Like you're saying, the characters that I'm writing about are living through very difficult situations. They have to process them. They have to attempt to understand them. I feel like the language communicates how complicated that process is for them, how layered; they're wrestling with multiple legacies at the same time as they're attempting to understand and deal with what they're living through.
Rhianna: I had a hard time sympathizing with Leonie. Maybe it’s because I’m a mother myself, but her selfishness and neglect of Jojo and Kayla really upset me. I wanted to feel for her, for a lot of reasons: her grief over Given’s death, her strong, tender relationships with Michael and Mam, her moments of self-knowledge — but in the end I couldn’t forgive her for being a drug addict and an abusive parent. That said there’s this beautiful moment at the end of the novel that feels redemptive to me. It’s when Kayla soothes the tree of ghosts, and mimics the way Leonie used to rub her children’s backs “when we were frightened of the world.” In the same scene, Jojo tells us that Kayla “says shhh like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb…and now she sings it.” It’s almost as if Leonie’s abuse is at least partly nullified by the intrinsic goodness of mothering. I know that you’re a mother, too, and I was wondering how you feel about Leonie, and why it felt important to give her character a voice.
Jesmyn: She was a really difficult character for me to write. I think, initially, because I was very aware of the fact that she was abusive to her kids and did neglect her kids. I just couldn't understand...I just didn't like her, and I usually love most of the major characters that I write. I always feel a deep sympathy for them. It was really hard, in the beginning, for me to access that sympathy for her. When I began to figure out who she was and I wrote the first chapter for her that really stuck, then it felt like I could progress through the novel with this character.
From the beginning, she was who she was. She was an addict. She was neglectful. She was really self-centered. One of the things that I had to do in order to avoid failing her character was to figure out what drove her, what motivated her. You've already touched on some of those, but the way that I was able to do that was by figuring out where her pain comes from. There are multiple pains that she's lived with in her young life — the loss of her brother, and the fact that she feels like a disappointment to her mother and father, and to her children. Once I figured all those things out, I think it was easier for me to write her, to understand and to feel some sympathy for her. Because I realized that she was wounded in ways that had never healed, that she's carrying these wounds around with her, and that that’s what is motivating much of her behavior.
Then, of course, I began to understand, too, that she was who she was from the beginning. She’s self-centered throughout. It's really hard for her to see beyond her own pain and mess and to be a mom — to focus on her children, and meet her children, and provide for them, to care for them, and to show that she cares for them, because of who she is, because of her personality.
By the end of the novel, that earlier distaste that I had felt for her was gone. It was really important for me to have her speak and to tell nearly half of the story from her point of view. Because she's like Esch [from Salvage the Bones] to me; if you just look at who she is on the surface, many readers would say, This person doesn't deserve any sympathy. I mean, Esch was a 15-year-old, poor, black, pregnant teenager. Those kids never get to speak. They never get to be complicated and textured. They never get to tell their truth. I initially felt the same way about Leonie.
Here's this younger mother, who's struggling with addiction, and who, in many ways, is abusive towards her kids. This is the kind of woman we hear about on the news, or whom we read inflammatory posts about on Facebook, who neglected her kid, you know, really harmed or actually killed her kid.
Those are the people that we read about and immediately feel distaste and horror for. I wanted to break that, I think. I wanted to give this character a voice, so that she becomes as human as I can make her on the page. Maybe because the next time people encounter a woman like her, they'll think about her differently.
This spiritual legacy allows them, not to transcend their reality, but to access a different understanding of their reality.
Rhianna: Ritchie's another character that I spent a lot of time thinking about. You touched on him a bit earlier. He’s a lost soul, a dead boy tethered to earth by a giant hunger for love. He seems to illustrate something profound about motherhood, home, and the history of violence in the world of Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is that the ghosts who haunt the characters and terrain of the book haven’t just died violent deaths — they also lack a mother figure to usher them “home,” in the spiritual sense.
Jesmyn: While I was writing the book, I did think about mothers and motherhood. I feel like that's something that I write about often. I guess it's one of those ideas that I return to again and again in my work.
Richie was interesting for me, because he'd been failed in multiple ways, too, while he was alive. His mother wasn't a good mother to her children. There's that line toward the end where Pop is saying that when he went and found Richie's mom and told her what happened, she just shut the door in his face. There's no outpouring of grief — her response is, in some ways, very cold. Part of the reason why I gave him a mother like that is because I felt like he had to have a reason to still exist here on this plane, and to search.
If he'd had a better mother who really gave him a home, I think, and who was his home, then perhaps he would have stuck around, despite his death being so horrible, and the crimes done to him when he was sent to Parchman. Maybe he would have returned to her and that place, and found some peace. Because she isn't that type of mother, and because she doesn't provide him with that idea of home, he goes elsewhere. He can't rest. He can't return to her and to the place where he was with his siblings. For Richie, the person who came the closest to providing him with that feeling of home, of being safe, cared for, and loved, was River, and that's who he's searching for.
That's why he is drawn to Jojo. That's why he gets in the car. That's why he goes south with them. He’s still a child, even though he's existing in an afterlife, and so when he realizes that he can't interact with River, and he can't get home by interacting with River, that's when he turns his attention to Mam.
It was heartbreaking for me when I discovered that she couldn't provide that for him, either.
Rhianna: There’s a long, problematic history, going back to Petrarch, of literary authors conflating blackness with darkness, and Sing, Unburied, Sing seems to be confronting and exploring this history. In the novel, as in America, blackness is one half of a terrible racial dichotomy, which leads to many of the story’s most horrifying moments, but it’s also intimately tied to the novel’s evocations of the earth, death, and the experience of want. Richie’s character in particular is subject to shifts in light and darkness, but there are many other compelling uses of the white/black trope, like the white snake that becomes a black vulture. The novel’s exploration of light and dark complicates blackness so that it becomes a concept of cosmic proportion and significance, as well as something inseparable from soil and life, rather than simply a racial or political category. There’s a lot of artistic value in this representation, but I was wondering if you intended for it to be read politically, as well?
Jesmyn: I'd been thinking about the interplay of light and darkness while I was writing the novel. I think that it began because I was doing research about Voodoo, Hoodoo, and spirituality.
That research forced me to be aware of the way that, while darkness can be associated with death, and sorrow, and awful things, at the same time, it can also be pregnant with possibility, with life. Conversely, we're conditioned to see whiteness as light, and as pure and good. I know people have already had this conversation, but I thought it was really interesting that the symbol of the white snake is the one that's associated with the afterlife in Voodoo. From the beginning, I began to see the symbols within that spiritual tradition that are in opposition to how I'd been programmed to think about light and dark as I grew up.
I wanted to open up those ideas and play with the audience’s expectations of them, maybe jar the audience a bit, because I think, at least in this culture, that most readers associate light and dark with good and evil. I thought that I could challenge those ideas in the text, in certain ways. That’s what I was attempting to do.
Rhianna: There’s a devastating scene late in the novel that recalls Sethe's actions in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and maybe also Medea’s, although it lacks the latter’s spite. Then, a page later, the character adds, "I washed my hands every day, Jojo. That damn blood ain't never come out," which is a reference to Lady Macbeth.
I know you sometimes incorporate classical texts into your fiction, and was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how and why you selected these particular texts for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Jesmyn: When I wrote that line, I was sort of thinking about Lady Macbeth. Because I wrote so much about the Medea myth while I was writing Salvage the Bones, I was also thinking about Greek mythology, the Medea myth in particular, and maybe even about the Bible in some ways — the idea of sacrificing human beings for whatever reason.
The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum — because of slavery.
I think about slavery and entire cultures, people from those cultures, being robbed of their cultural traditions. Yet, something that is so great about African American art is that we incorporate aspects of our lost African heritage with aspects of the various people in this country whom we've mixed with and encountered. I think that, in part, is what I am trying to argue in my work. Not overtly, but that's part of the reason I love to incorporate stories from various world cultures into my work — because that's what African American art does. It would be nice if that was more widely recognized.
Maybe part of it, too, is that by using easily recognized tropes, common stories, it will be easier for the reader to understand the characters and what they’re going through in my work. I want to jostle the reader to make them realize that these are universal human issues.
I spoke with Jesmyn Ward by phone on August 8, 2017.
< Writing Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward Salvages Stories Of The Silenced August 31, 201711:37 AM ET Listen· 7:50 7:50 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Email ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Writer Jesmyn Ward calls Mississippi a place she loves and hates all at once. It's where she grew up and still lives in a tiny town by the Gulf Coast, a place where African-American families like hers are, she writes, pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism. And those struggles run all through her writing. NPR's Melissa Block went to Mississippi to visit Jesmyn Ward at home. JESMYN WARD: Isn't it beautiful? MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: It is. We're driving over the bayou near Jesmyn Ward's hometown, DeLisle, Miss., the air summer-heavy and hot, the sky piled high with billowing clouds. WARD: There's just this dense tangle of trees. And then, you know, we come to these bridges and the landscape opens up. And then... BLOCK: This is the landscape Jesmyn Ward has known all her life. It's where her family has lived for generations. WARD: So this is the black - one of the black portions of DeLisle here. BLOCK: We pass small homes and rickety trailers set into the brush. We pass the field where she and her family rode out Hurricane Katrina in a pickup truck, watching the waters rise around them, feeling the wind rock them back and forth. WARD: There were six of us sandwiched into this pickup truck. Two of the people that were in that truck were, like, visibly elderly, right? And my sister was visibly pregnant. BLOCK: But they had to stay in the truck because the people whose land they were on wouldn't let them come into their house, said it was too full. WARD: They're white. We're black. And that's the only reason that I could think of. BLOCK: Jesmyn Ward's books are all set in this part of Mississippi, her characters poor and black, the people, she says, who've always been seen as worth less. These are the people whose lives she brings to the page in stunning, sometimes brutal clarity. In her novel "Salvage The Bones," it's a family barely surviving the wrath of Katrina. WARD: (Reading) We sat in the open attic until the sky brightened from a sick orange to a clean, white gray. We sat in the open attic until the water, which had milled like a boiling soup beneath us, receded inch by inch back into the woods. BLOCK: "Salvage The Bones" won her a National Book Award in 2011 when she was 34, a surprise to many, including Ward herself. She followed it with a searing memoir, "Men We Reaped," about five young black men in her community who died violent deaths. Now she's turned back to fiction with a new novel titled "Sing, Unburied, Sing." We'll talk more about that in a few minutes. We stop by the local bookstore cafe in nearby Pass Christian, where Jesmyn Ward shares space on the shelves with fellow Mississippi writers like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. And this year, her portrait was added to a poster, the state's official literary map. WARD: Yeah, I made the map. You know, in high school I would look at that map, you know? And here's Faulkner. And here's Welty. And here's Richard Wright. And I think a part of me sort of always dreamed or asked, you know, like, what if? You know, what would it be like to be on that map one day? BLOCK: That what if would have seemed like a distant fantasy to Jesmyn growing up. WARD: You know, we were poor. BLOCK: Her father worked occasional factory jobs and raised pit bulls for dogfights. He left the family when Jesmyn was young. Her mother worked as a maid and at times relied on food stamps to help feed her children. They lived in a single-wide trailer. Later they moved in with extended family, 13 of them packed into her grandmother's house. For Jesmyn, reading was her escape, especially books about spunky girls. WARD: "Harriet The Spy," "The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," "The Secret Garden," "Island Of The Blue Dolphins," "Julie Of The Wolves," "Pippi Longstocking." BLOCK: Did you see yourself in them? WARD: I think I wanted to see myself in them. BLOCK: But those girls were bold adventurers. Jesmyn was painfully shy. And those characters didn't look like her. They were never black. WARD: And that underlying message, that thing that I understood, was that stories about people like me, like, nobody wanted to read them, you know? Or that those stories weren't worth being told. Or that people like me weren't capable of being the hero. BLOCK: In middle school, Jesmyn got an unexpected opportunity. Her mother was working as a maid for a wealthy white family in their mansion on the Gulf Coast, and they offered to pay the tuition for Jesmyn to go to a small private Episcopal school. For years she was the only black girl there. She went on to Stanford - the first in her immediate family to go to college - got her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and communication respectively. But she figured she needed to be practical, so a career as a writer was out of the question. WARD: You know, it made more sense for me to go to law school or go to nursing school and train myself for a profession where success was sort of guaranteed. But I - but my brother died, and I didn't have a choice anymore. BLOCK: That was Jesmyn's younger brother, Joshua, killed by a drunk driver when he was 19. WARD: You know, like, I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us and about the people I loved. And it's not that I was confident that I could actually do it. You know, that didn't get me here. Confidence definitely did not get me here. More of like a desperation, right? And I thought, well, like, I can try. At the least I can try. BLOCK: We've been talking in the room where Jesmyn Ward writes. It's painted a deep red. Her power color, she says. WARD: I like to call it my library, but then that sounds pretentious. BLOCK: Books everywhere, spilling off the shelves and piled on the floor. Here she wrote her new novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing." It traces the twined narratives of a mixed-race adolescent boy named Jojo, his drug-addicted mother and the ghosts of those long dead who visit them. Ward set some of the story in the 1940s in Mississippi's notorious Parchman penitentiary. WARD: So much about that place reveals, like, the essence of the worst of Mississippi. They were treated as slaves were. I mean, they were worked and worked and worked and worked. They were starved and they were beaten. You know, they were tortured. BLOCK: Ward tells me the weight of history in the South of slavery and Jim Crow makes it hard to bear up. And when she thinks about the future, she worries - worries about climate change and more devastating storms like Katrina and Harvey that she fears could erase her town, DeLisle, from the map. And she worries about her two young children - Noemie, who's nearly 5, and 10-month-old Brando. She was especially unnerved by the recent violent rallies staged by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. WARD: Part of me is panicking thinking about my children and thinking about the place that I'm choosing to raise them in and thinking about my brother and wondering, am I going to be able to, like, raise my children to adulthood? Like, are they going to live to be adults, to be as old as I am now in this climate, in this country? That's Noemie. BLOCK: Suddenly, as we're talking, the door bursts open. WARD: Hi, honey. BLOCK: And Noemie rushes in, home from preschool, eager to show her mother the writer her own work. She's learning to write her name. WARD: Oh, look at that. Look at that. You made an M. BLOCK: Melissa Block, NPR News, DeLisle, Miss. WARD: You got all the letters. They're a little out of order, but we'll work on that.
The Millions Interview
Haunted by Ghosts: The Millions Interviews Jesmyn Ward
By Adam Vitcavage posted at 12:00 pm on September 11, 2017 0
Jesmyn Ward hadn’t realized it’s been more than half a decade since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones made her a literary star. That’s because she has been extremely busy, both professionally and personally.
Since her Hurricane Katrina-centric novel, the author wrote the raw and emotional Men We Reaped, a memoir about losing five family members and friends to drugs, suicide, and accidents that can only happen to young, poor, black men. She also edited The Fire This Time, an essay and poetry collection about race and identity written by this generation’s brightest talents. She also moved with her husband and children back to DeLisle, Miss., the small, poverty-stricken town where she grew up. She lived there and survived Hurricane Katrina before going to Stanford and the University of Michigan to pursue higher education.
Even though Ward was busy producing non-fiction, readers anxiously awaited her fiction followup to Salvage the Bones. Ward’s third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, returns to similar settings and themes as her previous works, but is wholly original. Set in modern Mississippi, the novel follows Jojo, a 13-year-old of mixed race, and his drug addict mother as they drive to pick up his father from state prison. The mix of harsh reality and magical realism create a sense of wonderment that makes readers question what they know about identity.
Ward and I spoke via phone about racial tensions, why history is so important, how hurricanes effect those who survive them, as well as what she hopes readers will remember about her novels.
The Millions: I wanted to start our conversation with Salvage the Bones. It came out in 2011 and won the National Book Award. It’s been a little more than half a decade, and I was curious about how your relationship with the book or the characters has changed since the book’s release.
Jesmyn Ward: I didn’t realize it had been so long. That’s so crazy. My characters remain with me in one way or another even after I’m done. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to those characters in a sequel, but I definitely still think about them. Especially now with Hurricane Harvey and Houston or whenever we encounter another hurricane and we witness the kind of devastation we are witnessing right now. I think about them lately because I wonder if people who read the book and read about this family who couldn’t leave see what is happening currently and think about Salvage the Bones and those characters.
Those characters still live with me. I still think about Skeet, Esch, and Big Henry, I actually roped them into the end of Sing, Unburied, Sing and it was nice to see them again. Part of the reason it’s been a surprise to me that it’s been so long since Salvage was published is because whenever I think about those characters, I can only age them by a couple of years. It’s hard for me to think of where they’d be now, 11 years later after Hurricane Katrina.
That showed up in Sing because when I was writing that moment when Esch showed up, I felt she was two years older than she was at the end of Salvage and my editor, of course, caught it. She pointed out that the character would need to be 10 years older now. She hadn’t aged at all in my head. Maybe that’s a deficiency on my part because I can’t age them. They live with me though as they existed in their books.
TM: Were you working on Sing, Unburied, Sing during the entire time since Salvage?
JW: No, not really. After I finished the rough draft of Salvage the Bones, which was in 2009, I began working on Sing, Unburied, Sing, but it was a very different book then. When I say I was working on it, I meant I was working on unsuccessful first chapter after unsuccessful first chapter. Jojo’s character was the only character that was present and real to me at that time. I didn’t know anything about his mom, his dad, or the rest of his family. In the beginning his mom was white [as opposed to black in the final version]. My understanding of who the members of his family are changed a lot. I couldn’t write a good first chapter when I didn’t have a clear understanding of who the other characters were. I spent a good four of five months writing bad first chapter after bad first chapter.
Then I decided I should work on what would become the memoir Men We Reaped. I just put those bad first chapters away. I set Jojo aside and worked on the memoir. Following that, I edited the collection The Fire This Time. While I was working on The Fire This Time was when I started working on this novel again. I did take a substantial break but I came back to it again.
It was very hard with me for Sing to find a successful entryway into the story. I think part of the reason it was difficult was because I couldn’t figure out who the people around Jojo should be and who they were. That’s where I start: I need a vague understanding of who the most important characters are and what their motivations are. That was very hard for me to pin down with this book. It took me a long time.
After I finished Men We Reaped was when I returned to Jojo. I threw out everything I had before and I just started again. Once I figured out who Leonie, Pop, and Mam were I gained some traction. I used the momentum to move into the second chapter. Then I was able to move through that first rough draft.
TM: This novel has a very serious, realistic undertone, but it also has this notion of ghosts and magical realism thrown in. When did that come into play with the story?
JW: From the very beginning, I knew that Leonie was seeing a phantom. In the very beginning, she was seeing a phantom of Michael. For the first four chapters of the rough draft she was seeing a phantom of Michael and it just wasn’t working. I figured out it wasn’t working because his presence didn’t add to the understanding of who she was. Leonie was a very difficult character for me to write because I couldn’t figure out what was motivating her to be such a horrible parent and sometimes a horrible person. All that told me about her was that she was in love with this man and perhaps she was hallucinating because of the drugs she was using. It didn’t tell me anything that I already didn’t know about her and who she loved and valued. It felt like something was wrong.
Then I began rethinking that phantom of someone she actually lost; not just a man she loved who was in prison. What if it was a family member she lost. That’s when I stumbled upon the fact that she would have lost a brother and that it was his ghost she was seeing.
Instead of going back and correcting that in the first four chapters I had already written, I wrote going forward with that idea that the phantom was her brother. I wrote with that assumption and suddenly she began to work for me as a character. She took on new life. I understand her motivation. I understood the pain in her heart that she carried with her. By her not dealing with that pain, it feeds into how selfish and egotistical she is. It makes her a worse parent because she’s so wrapped up in this pain that she isn’t able to resolve.
That’s when I knew there was one ghost: the ghost of her dead brother. At the same time I was working on the beginning of this, I read about Parchman Prison. I came across this bit that there were black boys as young as 12 that were charged with petty crimes and spent time in Parchman. I read that and I knew how brutal the prison was and that fact was heartbreaking.
I wanted a child to be part of my novel and be present in the moment. I figured the only way I can make that happen was to make him a ghost. I wanted him to exist in the present moment and not just exist in a flashback. I wanted him to be able to interact with Jojo.
TM: When I was reading Sing, I thought a lot about The Turner House and Swamplandia. Is this idea of ghosts, ghost stories, and the past as part of everyday life in southern or black culture?
JW: I think that ghosts are embodiments of the past. Especially here in the South because we’re so close to the past. So much of the past lives in the present. We live with the ramifications of the past that might not be as clear or feel as present in the rest of the country.
I sit and think of the furor we live with regarding Confederate monuments and the endless debates about whether or not to take them down. I think about all of the advocacy and opposition. We’re still dealing with monuments from a war that happened 150, 160 years ago. The violence that surrounds that history is still very present.
In the South, we may not talk about it or it may not be a part of public conversation around these issues, but the underlying understanding is that the history of this region bears very heavily on the present and informs our actions. I think the ghost story form is a great way to explore and express that.
TM: You’ve been very outspoken about racial tension in America. I know the media is discussing this more, but I think there is still a disconnect where most of the country doesn’t really understand what it’s like to be in these situations. Do you think about this when you’re writing?
JW: I do. It influences my work because my awareness of history and the legacy of racist violence in this country bears heavily on my thinking when I’m casting about for ideas for my novels. I’m always thinking about race, violence, the history of the South, and how that history bears on the present.
I saw Ann Patchett speak 10 or 15 years ago and one thing she mentioned in her speech was that how she thought writers write the same book over and over again because they’re obsessed with the same ideas. Those ideas always surface in each story they write. As I’ve written more fiction and creative non-fiction, I’ve found that is true in my case. I’m always thinking about how black people survive. How people are marginalized in the South and the way they still survive that oppression.
I do have to say that when I’m writing and I’ve immersed myself in that world with those characters, then I am just thinking about the characters in the story and who they are and how they are evolving. I’m trying to find the important moments in their lives—moments beyond which nothing is the same. That’s what I’m thinking about when I’m writing. I’m not thinking about themes or symbolism. When I’m actually writing I’m just thinking about the people.
I think about the issues and big ideas when I’m thinking about novel ideas, but once I begin writing I throw that all out the window because the work is able to come alive and these people are able to live when you immerse yourself in the world.
TM: Earlier you mentioned how devastating Hurricane Harvey is to the people of Texas. I know you were still living in the Mississippi Gulf Coast when Hurricane Katrina hit. If you don’t mind, I was just curious what life was like for residents after the media and most of the country move on from these tragic events? What do families go through? What is it like having to restart?
JW: It’s really difficult. Donations do make a difference because they help people who are attempting to rebuild their lives. Habitat for Humanity did a lot of work here after Hurricane Katrina. They rebuilt a lot of homes. It’s a hard question to answer because a lot of people had house insurance and made house insurance claims, but that didn’t work for everyone. Some claims were denied on technicalities. A lot of the rebuilding that people had to do down here was out of their own pockets. It was a slow process. They rebuilt as they were able to slowly save the money that they needed to rebuild.
That’s one of the reasons a hurricane appears out in the Gulf—and I don’t want anyone to go through the pain we went through—but I’m always grateful when the hurricanes don’t come for us. I still feel like a decade after Katrina, we’re not ready. There was just extreme flooding in New Orleans two or three weeks ago from just a bad rainstorm. The streets were flooding and homes were damaged. It’s a hard question for me to answer because it’s still a continuous process.
TM: Your memoir came out between Salvage and Sing. Do you ever think about more memoirs on different topics?
JW: Right now, no. I really don’t want to write another memoir. There are many reasons for that. Men We Reaped was the hardest book I’ve ever written. It required that I make myself vulnerable. It required that I make the members of my family vulnerable. I had to tell the truth and reveal all of these secrets about our lives and that was very hard to do. I don’t know if I can do that again.
It was important to me because I had to write that book to tell my brother’s story. I had to tell the story about my friends and my cousin. Men We Reaped came out before Black Lives Matter was a movement. I almost feel like at that time I was trying to express the sum of the opinions that Black Lives Matter has expressed, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to do so. That book was difficult to write because I didn’t have that vocabulary to write about these people that I loved and lost.
Fiction is easier than creative non-fiction for me. Creative non-fiction is hard for me in general whether it’s essays or a book-length memoir because I tend to shy away from the pain of what I’m writing about. It makes me write around my subject instead of focusing. Creative non-fiction is a lot of work for me and my editors because they have to make me focus on whatever I’m trying to avoid in the piece I’m working on.
So, no, I don’t want to tackle another non-fiction book, but who knows in 20 years?
TM: Is it going to be another half decade before your next work of fiction comes out?
JW: I have something percolating, but it’s probably going to take me some time to finish. It might be another four or five years before it comes out. I’m writing the first chapter of the rough draft. I’m at the very beginning of the process.
The novel is set in New Orleans at the height of the domestic slave trade during the early 1800s. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever written before. It’s definitely challenging me as a writer and as a human being because the main characters in this are people who were enslaved. It’s really hard to sit with that. The subject matter is making it hard for me to write this novel. Hopefully it will be done in four or five years. That’s including the rough first draft and multiple revisions of that.
TM: What is your hope of what people walk away with after they finish Sing, Unburied, Sing?
JW: I hope that the characters stay with them. That Jojo, Leonie, Kayla, Ritchie, and Pop stay with them. That next time readers encounter an older black gentleman in the grocery story or the next time they unfortunately see a 14- or 15-year-old black boy like Jojo dead from police violence that maybe it’s a bit more painful and a bit more prevalent for them because they’ve seen the humanity in the characters I’ve written. Maybe that makes it a little easier for them to see humanity and personhood.
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Ghosts of Our Past: An Interview with Jesmyn Ward
October 11, 2017 LARB Blog Leave a comment
By Louise McCune
When Jojo and his family go to pick up his father Michael from Parchman Prison, they return home with an unlikely additional passenger. Richie — who can be seen only by Jojo and his toddler sister Kayla — is a ghost who has kept residence at Parchman for decades, haunting the site of his untimely death in an attempt to understand it. Richie was only a boy when he was incarcerated for spurious reasons, and he was only a boy when he was killed for trying to escape. Sing, Unburied, Sing, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, is a novel populated by living characters who contend daily with the consequences of state-sanctioned racial violence. Richie’s story intervenes in an otherwise 21st-century narrative to indicate that, when it comes to American racism, the past remains very much alive.
In 2011, Jesmyn Ward won acclaim for Salvage the Bones, her novel about a family living in the Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Since then, she has written a memoir, Men We Reaped, and edited an anthology about race in America called The Fire This Time. With Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward returns to fiction and to Bois Sauvage to tell the story of a family haunted by ghosts.
While Sing, Unburied, Sing is a regional story in the sense that, according to Ward, it “could only happen in Mississippi,” the book makes a universal appeal to the urgency of retrospectivity in 2017. I spoke with Jesmyn Ward to learn more about the importance of listening to our ghosts.
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LOUISE MCCUNE: In the epigraph to your book, you quote Eudora Welty, saying: “The memory is a living thing — it too is in transit.” How might readers understand memory as a “living thing” in Sing, Unburied, Sing?
JESMYN WARD: In Sing, Unburied, Sing, memory comes alive and is embodied by the ghosts Given and Richie. They come alive and they interact with the characters. They interact with their loved ones, and they act on them.
One of the reasons that I love that quote so much — and why I think it is so applicable to the story that I’m telling — is because a question that the book is asking is about how the past bears on the present. For me, the quote about memory being a living thing is another way to say that the past is not the past, and that time isn’t linear. That’s a theme that I’m wrestling with in the book. These ghosts from the past haunt those in the present because of enslavement, because of Jim Crow, because of the terrible history of Parchman Prison and of places like Parchman Prison. All of that — which hypothetically happened in the past — reverberates into the future and into the present.
In a review of Sing, Unburied, Sing in the New York Times, Parul Sehgal pointed out the prevalence of ghosts in literary fiction in the past year or so. She references George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, White Tears by Hari Kunzru, Grace by Natashia Deón, and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. What do you make of the great number of ghosts in fiction this year? Are there any literary ghosts who inspired or instructed you as you wrote your own ghosts into being?
There actually weren’t any literary ghosts that inspired my ghosts. I think that my ghosts came from my non-fiction reading because I was reading a lot about Parchman Prison and Mississippi history in general. I knew nothing about those things, really. I read that there were kids — 12- and 13-year-old black boys – who were charged with petty crimes like loitering and then sent to Parchman Prison to be enslaved, tortured, and die. When I read that children were sent to prison because they were boys and because they were black, I knew that I had to have a character like that and that that character had to be a ghost. I wanted that character to be able to interact with characters in the present — Jojo and his family, who I was writing about.
I think that maybe one of the reasons that ghosts are figuring so prominently in literary fiction as of late is that writers are resisting. We’re pushing back against this trend that seems to be happening right now, where people in politics are attempting to rewrite history and attempting to undermine our understanding of what came before. That’s really horrible. A lot of writers are wrestling with a trend in the larger culture to deny what has happened in the past. Maybe that could explain the appearance of so many ghosts (who are reckoning with the past and bearing witness to the past) in fictional work lately.
I was struck by something you wrote in the introduction to The Fire This Time about how you had initially envisioned that you would categorize the poems and essays into three tidy sections: past, present, and future. You noticed though, when pieces started coming in, they skewed heavily toward the past and the present. Only three explicitly referenced the future. Did that surprise you? How did it feel to make that observation, especially as a writer who is trying to write against the tendency of people in power to rewrite history?
It did surprise me. It gave me hope to see that so many people were doing that kind of work, to see that so many people were really fighting back against the erasure of facts and knowledge. So on one hand it was heartening, but on the other hand it was disheartening because I think that it’s a skill that we need for survival. It’s something that engenders hope — we have to be able to imagine our future. It did make me a little sad to see that not many of us were imagining our futures.
Were there other resonances between The Fire This Time and Sing, Unburied, Sing? Were you working on those two projects simultaneously?
I was working on them simultaneously. I referenced Trayvon Martin in my introduction [to The Fire This Time]. At the time when I was working on Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Fire This Time, I was thinking a lot about Trayvon. I was thinking a lot about the seemingly endless list of young black men who were dying one after another.
I write about characters who are women in the book, and in some respects Sing, Unburied, Sing is asking questions about motherhood, about black motherhood, about womanhood, and about family. But at the same time, I think that the other half of the book is really concerned with black boyhood and black manhood. It’s about how, across generations, through the decades, and through the centuries, that personhood has been threatened. I was thinking about many of the same things when I was working on both projects.
You’ve said in other interviews that Jojo’s character was the seed that stirred you to write this book. This book, also, has been called a road novel and bears comparisons to The Odyssey. Did you always know that bringing Jojo to the page would mean sending him (and his family) on a journey away from home? Did you always know that it would be a journey to Parchman?
I did, actually. From the very beginning, I knew that Jojo and his mom would get in the car, and I knew that they were traveling to Parchman Prison. When I began working on the first draft, that’s all I saw the novel as. I thought, well, this will be a road trip, this entire novel. I thought it would be a road trip through the modern south, that it would be a little surreal and a bit bizarre. When I was starting out, those were the ideas that I had. As I did more research on Parchman Farm and discovered that kids like Richie existed, my ideas around the story evolved and changed. The story became something else. It became a ghost story, too. That discussion about time and about how the past bears on the present — it became more complicated for me.
Did Richie come to you with the same clarity that Jojo did?
Not as immediately, no. He didn’t. I had written three or four chapters at the point where I discovered Richie’s character. I thought, well, maybe later on in the book I’ll have a chapter from his perspective. He can speak, he can tell his story. I didn’t do that in the first draft. I completed a first draft, and he wasn’t there. I mean, he was there in scene, he was there in action, but everything was filtered through Jojo’s or Leonie’s point of view. I went through multiple revisions of the book, and when I say multiple revisions I mean like 12. I got feedback from friends of mine who are writers and went through more revisions. Then I sent it to my editor and my editor asked if I had thought about writing any of the sections from Richie’s perspective. It was only then that I went back and tried to hear him. I think I was afraid to write from his perspective because his perspective required me to build that entire world. I had to build an afterlife. That afterlife had to have some logic, it had to make sense. It had to feel real, and vivid, and believable for the reader. I was afraid to do that because I had never done anything like that before.
Parchman Prison, in Jojo’s grandfather’s memory, is guarded by inmates. He says it’s a place that’ll fool you into thinking it isn’t a prison at all because it doesn’t have any walls. When Jojo’s dad is there many years later, it’s low, concrete buildings and barbed-wire fences; he calls it a fortress. In your reading about Parchman, what else has changed from its earlier days until now? What has stayed the same?
It’s not a working plantation anymore. Inmates are no longer guarding other inmates. Back when [Jojo’s grandfather] and Richie would have been there, if one of the inmate guards killed another inmate who was trying to escape they would have been granted their freedom. That system no longer exists. They’re no longer whipped. They’re no longer tortured. But one thing that hasn’t changed between now and then is that the large majority of inmates are still black men. They still work while they’re in prison, and when they get out they’re still disenfranchised. They’re not able to vote. Their crime and the time that they spent there follows them. They don’t have full rights of citizenship. That part hasn’t changed.
Did you visit the prison as you were writing the book?
I actually did not visit the prison. I wish that I had the opportunity to, but I didn’t. My editor actually visited and took tons of photographs for me. She bought me a book and a collection of CDs that have all of the Parchman Farm songs on them that were recorded in the ‘40s and the ‘50s. I’m a new mom — I have a daughter who just turned five, and an 11-month-old. Between those two I couldn’t fit a trip to Parchman in.
You’ve talked before about this thing you call “narrative ruthlessness” — how, when you were writing Salvage the Bones, you resisted against an urge to “spare” the characters you loved so much from the realities of the place you were writing about. Was that something you were thinking about as you wrote Sing, Unburied, Sing?
It was definitely something I thought about when I was writing this book. I was thinking about it with every single character. Say, for instance, with Ma’am, Jojo’s grandmother. She’s sick with cancer at the beginning of the book. As soon as I knew she was sick with cancer, I was like, okay. There’s a strong possibility that that would lead to death. I knew that even though I would come to love her in the book, that if she had to die then she’d have to die. I couldn’t stand in the way of things that were happening to her.
I definitely felt that way with Leonie, Jojo, and [his sister]. The part of me that loves my characters and wants to protect them just wanted to lift the children out of that situation and take them away from their emotionally abusive, neglectful mother. But I knew that I couldn’t do that. They’re family, and I knew that they had to struggle through what they were enduring together.
I really felt that way with Richie. Richie is such a heartbreaking character, and that’s even more complicated by the fact that I know that kids like him existed. Part of me wanted to save him. I wanted to deliver him, while I was writing, from the life and the death that he had. I also wanted to ease his way in the afterlife. But then there’s something dishonest about that, you know what I’m saying? There’s something dishonest about being kind to my characters because the world, so often, isn’t kind to them. I thought about that with all my characters. It was constantly on my mind. I had to be honest. I had to be ruthless.
Is there anything that has surprised you about the way that audiences have received and responded to Sing, Unburied, Sing so far?
I’m delighted that people have responded so positively to it, especially because it’s a story that could only happen in Mississippi. Readers know that this is a story that could only happen in Mississippi, but at the same time they’re empathizing with the characters. They’re identifying a universality in the story. That’s been a nice surprise.
October 20 2017
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Jesmyn Ward interview: 'My ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that'
Melanie Kembrey
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Generations of Jesmyn Ward's family have lived in DeLisle, a small rural town near the coast of Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. As a child, Ward spent her almost unbearably hot school holidays playing in the wooded forests and marshy streams that surrounded her home. More recently, she waded through flood waters when Hurricane Katrina raged through the town in 2005.
DeLisle is also where her younger brother, Joshua, is buried. He died when he was 19 after a drunk driver ploughed into the back of his car and fled the scene. The driver, a white man in his 40s, spent three years in jail and never paid the restitution he owed Ward's family. This month marks 17 years since Joshua died.
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Jesmyn Ward's latest novel is a finalist for the National Book Award. Photo: AP
Home then is where the heart is for Ward, but also where the hauntings are. The ghosts of traumatic events flourish in her new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is a finalist for the National Book Award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the US. It is the first novel Ward has written while living in DeLisle, which has a high poverty rate and a population of about 1000.
"Both my father's family and my mother's family have lived in DeLisle as far back as we can remember," Ward, 40, says on the phone from DeLisle.
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Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
"It is a place where family and community are really tightly bound together. It is very poor and working class. It is still segregated in some respects but I think that is because in the past those generations were segregated. It is a place that feels weighted by a lot of history."
Ward wrote the draft of Sing, Unburied, Sing after returning to DeLisle to live about six years ago. It is the longest stretch of time she has spent in the town since she left for Stanford, when she became the first in her family to attend college.
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"I think there is value living where I live because it keeps me honest," Ward says. "It keeps me passionate about the people that I write about. I have no choice but to be very present and to be very aware of the circumstances of their lives."
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Ward's mother was a housekeeper and her father ran kung-fu classes. She grew up as the eldest of four siblings. A wealthy white family that employed Ward's mother paid her tuition so she could attend an Anglican private school. Ward says she was the only black girl at the school for most of her junior and high school years.
After gaining a bachelors degree in English and a masters in communication, it was the death of her brother that drove Ward's determination to write. She wanted to tell the stories that were unheard; to show the importance of the lives lost and ignored. There is a permanent reminder on the inside of her wrists where she has tattooed her brother's signature and the words "love brother", which is how he once ended a letter he wrote to her.
Ward's latest novel is set in Bois Sauvage, a fictional town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast based on DeLisle. The setting is the same as that of Ward's earlier novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows teenage girl Esch and her family as Hurricane Katrina looms. The novel largely flew under the radar, both critically and popularly, until it won the National Book Award in 2011.
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, 13-year-old Jojo, his younger sister Michaela, their meth-addicted mother Leonie and her friend from work, embark on a road trip to collect the children's white father, Michael, from prison. The destructive legacy of slavery, racism and intergenerational poverty bares down on the family; past and present intertwine as ghosts accompany them on the journey.
"Because we don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once," Jojo's dying grandmother tells him.
It is a place that feels weighted by a lot of history.
In one striking scene, the novel teeters on a moment of inexplicable violence. It is a scene that Ward says many readers have felt drawn to and approached her to discuss.
A police officer pulls over the car in which Jojo and his family are travelling home. When Jojo puts his hand into his pocket to touch a good luck charm given to him by his grandfather, the officer draws his gun and points it at Jojo's head. Everyone holds their breath while Jojo is handcuffed. "It is like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone," Jojo says.
Critics and readers have pointed out the relevance and importance of Ward's novel, drawing links to the Black Lives Matter movement and the political climate in the US post Donald Trump's election.
Ward says she was not attempting to directly respond to the "ugly turn" in American politics, but her interest in African American lives and the south have given her novel a particular pertinence.
DeLisle is a popular stop for Republican candidates on the campaign route, and it came as no surprise to Ward that white voters in Mississippi supported Trump (she says she knows no black voters who backed him).
"I think that a lot of Trump's worst ideas are not new to me because I have been hearing them from white people who live in this place my whole life," Ward says. "It didn't seem to change much here because his ugliest policies and his ugliest ideas have flourished in this area for a long time unfortunately."
Sing, Unburied, Sing is Ward's first novel since 2011. After the success of Salvage the Bones, Ward published the memoir Men We Reaped. It is a powerful account of five black men, including Joshua, who Ward knew and who all died violently between 2000 to 2004.
"To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I've ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that," Ward writes. "I wonder at my neighbourhood's silence. I wonder why silence is the sound of our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief. I decide this is not right, that I must give voice to this story."
Ward has also edited a collection of essays and poems about race in the US called The Fire This Time. She says she felt the lingering pressure of returning to fiction after the success of Salvage The Bones.
"I just had to push that all out of mind and really forget about it in order to be able to fall into Sing and give that story the attention and respect it deserves," Ward says.
While the themes and lyricism of Sing, Unburied, Sing flow across Ward's oeuvre, the element of the supernatural is new. Two ghosts haunt the novel – Leonie's younger brother Given who died when he was shot by a white man, and Richie, who was a black prisoner at the brutal Mississippi State Penitentiary known as Parchman Farm.
Ward says that writing the magical quotient proved a challenge but was something she had always wanted to do. Sing, Unburied, Sing has been compared to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's Beloved but surprisingly Ward says it did not cross her mind as she wrote her book.
"That's a pretty weighty comparison and I tend to shy away from it because she's a legend," Ward says. She was, however, thinking of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which is also set in a fictional Mississippi town (Yoknapatawpha County) and recounts a road trip through the deep south.
Ward, who joined Tulane University as an associate professor in 2014, is now working on her next novel, which is set in the 1800s at the height of the slave trade in New Orleans.
Having two young children has changed her writing routine and Sing, Unburied, Sing was the first novel Ward has written since becoming a mother. Previously a night owl, Ward now gets up early each morning to write while her son and daughter are asleep. She has not yet started reading chapter books with her children, but will begin with Charlotte's Web, which was the first chapter book she was read as a child.
"I end up reading children's literature on my own because I do need that release. I feel like I can read children's literature and I experience it just as a story. I do not assess it like a writer and I like that," Ward says.
While she sees the value of living and writing in DeLisle, Ward is not certain she will always feel the same way.
"I have two kids now and I often think about their wellbeing and their safety so that's why I don't know if I will stay here forever."
But, as she has previously written, "the pull home is an inexorable thing".
Sing, Unburied, Sing is published by Bloomsbury at $24.99.
Ward, Jesmyn: SING, UNBURIED, SING
(Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Ward, Jesmyn SING, UNBURIED, SING Scribner (Adult Fiction) $26.00 9, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5011-2606-2
The terrible beauty of life along the nation's lower margins is summoned in this bold, bright, and sharp-eyed road novel.In present-day Mississippi, citizens of all colors struggle much as their ancestors did against the persistence of poverty, the wages of sin, and the legacy of violence. Thirteen-year-old Jojo is a sensitive African-American boy living with his grandparents and his toddler sister, Kayla, somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Their mother, Leonie, is addicted to drugs and haunted by visions of her late brother, Given, a local football hero shot to death years before by a white youth offended at being bested in some supposedly friendly competition. Somehow, Leonie ends up marrying Michael, the shooter's cousin, who worked as a welder on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The novel's main story involves a road trip northward to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, where Michael's about to be released from prison. Leonie, very much a hot mess, insists on taking both children along to pick up their father even though it's clear from the start that Jojo--who's more nurturing to his sister than their mother is--in no way wants to make the journey, especially with his grandmother dying from cancer. Along the way, Jojo finds he's the only one who sees and speaks to another spirit: Richie, an ill-fated friend of his grandfather's who decades before was imprisoned at a brutal work camp when he was slightly younger than Jojo. Ward, a National Book Award winner for Salvage the Bones, (2011), has intimate knowledge of the Gulf Coast and its cultural complexities and recounts this jolting odyssey through the first-person voices of Jojo, Leonie, and occasionally Richie. They each evoke the swampy contours of the scenery but also the sweat, stickiness, and battered nerves that go along with a road trip. It's a risky conceit, and Ward has to work to avoid making her narrators sound too much like poets. But any qualms are overpowered by the book's intensely evocative imagery, musical rhetoric, and bountiful sympathy toward even the most exasperating of its characters. Remorse stalks the grown-ups like a search party, but grace in whatever form seems ready to salve their wounds, even the ones that don't easily show. As with the best and most meaningful American fiction these days, old truths are recast here in new realities rife with both peril and promise.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ward, Jesmyn: SING, UNBURIED, SING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499572813&it=r&asid=4c16cf16908b07d7d70829ee93a9ef17. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572813
After the Flood
Vinson Cunningham
93.27 (Sept. 11, 2017): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Byline: Vinson Cunningham
After the Flood
Jesmyn Ward's "Sing, Unburied, Sing," a haunted novel of the Gulf Coast.
In the late summer of 2005, the novelist Jesmyn Ward, a native of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, lived through Hurricane Katrina. After fleeing her grandmother's flooding home, Ward and her family weathered the worst violence of the storm huddled in trucks spread across an otherwise empty field. "I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive," she said in a 2011 interview with The Paris Review.
Images like these, lately evoked again by the flooding of Houston after Hurricane Harvey, altered the course of American politics. Katrina was the definitive display of the unaccountable incompetence of the Bush Administration-and a stroke of racial catastrophe visible enough to catalyze, however subtly, the election of the first black President. Much as the 2008 financial crisis scrambled our political economy-yielding the Zuccotti Park occupiers who went on to wave signs for Bernie Sanders, as well as the intractable Tea Partiers-turned-Freedom Caucusers-Katrina radically reconstituted our understanding of race, place, and inequality. Activists and theorists who, since the nineteen-sixties, had insisted that the legacy of slavery and white supremacy was the interpretive key to America's history now had a contemporary tragedy to point to as the proof of their case. As it does every generation or so, the idea of America as a vast conspiracy gathered fresh plausibility, and began, gradually, to make its way into the mainstream. Nine years later, in 2014, the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, gave national prominence to the Black Lives Matter movement; the young activists who led the protests had been weaned, politically, on pictures of an avoidable flood. Katrina brought into being a generation of justified pessimists.
It also helped create Jesmyn Ward's art. Ward's vocabulary tends toward the epic; she alludes to the Old Testament and Greek mythology with equal frequency and intensity; for her, Katrina is comparable in significance to the Egyptian captivity or the aftermath of the Trojan War. Only one of her books, "Salvage the Bones" (Bloomsbury), which won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, takes Katrina as its primary subject, but the storm lingers, ghostlike, in the others, operating as a grand, whooshing metaphor for the vulnerability-physical, emotional, environmental-of the residents of rural Bois Sauvage, the fictional Mississippi-coast town in which all her novels are set. In "Salvage the Bones," a father struggles to fortify his home against the coming hurricane, but fails to notice the rise of quieter waters: his young daughter-the narrator, a bookish girl named Esch-is hiding a pregnancy; his son steals to feed the pit bull he is training to fight; his children are going hungry, foraging for eggs in the yard. The father's single-mindedness is a product of memory: he witnessed Hurricane Camille, which wrecked the coast in 1969, and therefore understands Katrina as part of a foreordained sequence. For this modern-day Noah, the radio spouts warnings like an oracle. Ward tells the story with a tense patience, marking day after day; when the storm comes, overturning everything, it feels like a fatal relief. At least the waiting's over.
"Salvage the Bones" expands our understanding of Katrina's devastation, beyond the pictures of choked rooftops in New Orleans and toward the washed-out, feral landscapes elsewhere along the coast. Ward's regionalism, grounded in rurality and in poverty, gives us the images-often beautiful, always barely hiding danger-that recur throughout her books: shushing pines; skin and garments red with mud; animals wild, domestic, or waiting for the slaughter. Siblings stand at the end of a road after the storm and look at the coast. All the remembered details-"the gas station, the yacht club, and all the old white-columned homes that faced the beach, that made us feel small and dirty and poorer than ever when we came here with Daddy"-have been ripped away and washed into the sea. "Not ravaged," Esch thinks, "not rubble, but completely gone."
"Ain't nothing left," somebody says.
Ward's third novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing" (Scribner), takes place after Katrina, and the storm is named only once, almost passingly: one character, white, lives in one of the famous post-disaster "Katrina cottages" conferred by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. But just as these pastel-hued structures-eventually found to contain harmful levels of formaldehyde-serve as semipermanent monuments to the storm, "Sing, Unburied, Sing" has the haunted quality of an afterlife; its characters seem stranded in an epilogue.
Jojo, thirteen, the most consistently perceptive of the novel's trio of first-person narrators-a group that also includes his mother and a child who died decades before-is, like Esch, a laconic, prematurely self-sufficient kid. Jojo's mother, Leonie, is indifferent, and his father, Michael, is serving out the final days of a prison sentence. Both tend more closely to their vices than to their son or their three-year-old daughter, Kayla. Like other neglected children, Jojo calls his parents by their first names. His filial respect goes, instead, to his grandfather, Pop, whose every mannerism he imitates. The book opens with blood: Pop is slaughtering and skinning a goat to barbecue for Jojo's birthday, and Jojo insists on helping, "so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody." As he plays the butcher's assistant, he watches, and so, Ward seems to say, must we:
Pop slits. The goat makes a sound of surprise, a bleat swallowed by a gurgle, and then there's blood and mud everywhere. The goat's legs go rubbery and loose, and Pop isn't struggling anymore. All at once, he stands up and ties a rope around the goat's ankles, lifting the body to a hook hanging from the rafters. That eye: still wet. Looking at me like I was the one who cut its neck, like I was the one bleeding it out, turning its whole face red with blood.
The episode is of a piece with Ward's treatment of animals elsewhere. She is unsentimental, and sometimes brutal, about the necessity of their deaths, but also presents them as quasi-mystical portals between the world of human affairs and the indifference of nature. This sense is deepened in "Sing" by Jojo's ability to divine the meanings of animal noises: it's soon clear that his brief, telepathic connection with the goat is more than fancy. He remembers a day when, left at home by Leonie, he spent his time in the woods: "When the horse Pop keeps bowed his head and shimmied and bucked so that his sides gleamed like wet red Mississippi mud, I understood: I could leap over your head, boy, and oh I would run and run and you would never see anything more than that. I could make you shake. But it scared me to understand them, to hear them," he says. By book's end, he hears-and sees-much more, and much worse.
While the magical element is new in Ward's fiction, her allusiveness, anchored in her interest in the politics of race, has been pointing in this direction all along. It takes a touch of the spiritual to speak across chasms of age, class, and color. Further complicating communication in "Sing" is a set of intra-familial racial dynamics: Leonie is black and Michael is white, and her passionate attraction to him-forsaking all others, Jojo foremost-has much, it seems, to do with their racial difference. Leonie has mixed, almost tortured, feelings about whiteness. Her best friend, Misty, is white, and there are glimmers of jealousy about, for instance, her hair: "It was one of the things she did that she was never conscious of," Leonie says, "playing with her hair, always unaware of the ease of it. The way it caught all the light. The self-satisfied beauty of it. I hated her hair." Jojo has to drag his white father across species in order to understand him. "Michael is an animal," he says. "I know what he is saying."
Racial mixture is a preoccupation of Ward's-perhaps inevitably, given the Spanish, French, and West African ethnic history of the Gulf. She often notes the tawny skin or yellowish hair of her black characters. Leonie and Michael's relationship sharpens her focus on this subject; so does the novel's portrayal of hybrid religious belief. Jojo's "sight" is inherited from his grandmother, Mam, who, though dying, keeps her faith in "the Mothers": the Virgin Mary and Mami Wata, a deity, customarily associated with water, venerated across many religious cultures of the African diaspora. Mam uses roots and leaves as medicine; when she was young, she could hear voices "humming" to her their applications. Pop, meanwhile, is a kind of pantheist, devoted above all to "balance"-between life and death, stillness and motion, and, one assumes, black and white. "Sing, Unburied, Sing" has a fairly straightforward plot. It is a novel of the road. Jojo, Leonie, Kayla, and Misty shuttle crookedly toward the prison from which Michael will be released, and where Pop, long before, lived out a nightmare. But its echoes of Pop and Mam's values-synthesis, veiled things uncovered for good-make it rich, sometimes unbearably so.
The signal characteristic of Ward's prose is its lyricism. "I'm a failed poet," she has said. The length and music of Ward's sentences owe much to her love of catalogues, extended similes, imagistic fragments, and emphasis by way of repetition, as well as to her tendency to cluster conjunctions, especially "and." The effect, intensified by use of the present tense, can be hypnotic. Some chapters sound like fairy tales. This, and her ease with vernacular language, puts Ward in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner; Bois Sauvage, with its watchful children and desiccated vistas, is a kind of duskier Yoknapatawpha. The tone and atmosphere in "Sing, Unburied, Sing" call out, too, to Toni Morrison-particularly "Beloved," whose most sorrowful revelations are echoed in the climax of "Sing." As in Faulkner and Morrison, portentous sentence rhythms are the sign of the seriousness of Ward's subject, and of the trauma through which her characters have passed and will, inevitably, pass again. There's love here, but little laughter.
Some lines-like these, from Jojo's memory of a story told by Pop-feel overworked: "The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming. It was the only way I could untether my spirit from myself, let it fly high as a kite in them fields." Because of their mutual musicality, the three narrators often sound quite alike. Still, Ward's tone is darkly appropriate to its purposes, and its origins. Lyricism slips in and out of favor in American writing; the "plain style" of our Puritan past-with its insistence that quick comprehensibility is a pathway to democracy, and to the divine-is always with us. But there is a counter-tradition whose banner has often been carried by black women, including Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and, now, Ward.
Again, region and religion matter: the Catholicism of the Gulf, tinged with aspects of African-derived belief, acts in "Sing" as a refutation of Protestant clarity. Frankness, here, is a lie. There's a quality of the gothic at work: the elements of the novel-sudden violence, black spectres, an interminable past-are reminiscent of Melville's great story "Benito Cereno," in which Catholic mystery and African presence come together uncannily.
The criticisms that this sort of writing is open to-that it is overly emotional in its appeal, and too didactic-resemble many of the objections raised, by conservatives and liberals alike, to the tone of much post-Katrina activism, in Ferguson and beyond. Ward's lyricism seems inextricable from the politics that emerged from the storm.
In 2013, Ward published a memoir, "Men We Reaped," which details the deaths of five beloved young men, including her younger brother. She tells the story in reverse chronological order, boy after boy in bleak succession; it feels like a gruesome detective story: how did this happen, and who to blame? The losses are, on the surface, unconnected-car accidents, suicides, senseless murders-but each, under Ward's grieving eye, seems to flow from the same wellspring. Nothing in the larger society is designed to protect these poor black Southern kids, and so, from the beginning, they are doomed.
In "Sing, Unburied, Sing," Ward describes a chorus of the lost, "women and men and boys and girls," perched in a tree, singing an awful song about their deaths. They won't let go until something-but what?-gets solved. The book's most moving illumination of danger and exposure is one of its least supernatural. Jojo, whom Ward clearly loves, is alone in the back yard, still hearing the animals. Nobody's home; the structures that should make him safe have been washed away. "I didn't see the jagged lid of the can rising from the earth," he says. "It sank deep." He bleeds.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cunningham, Vinson. "After the Flood." The New Yorker, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA504515402&it=r&asid=b24c93630f713045eb39294de3727266. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504515402
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Michael Magras
(Sept. 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
$26, 304 pages ISBN 9781501126062 Audio, eBook available
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward's (Salvage the Bones) new novel, you know you're in for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South.
Ward shifts perspective among three characters: 13-year-old mixed-race boy Jojo, who lives with his mother and toddler sister, Kayla, in the home of his black grandparents, Mam and Pop; Leonie, Jojo's black mother, who struggles with drug addiction and sees visions of her murdered brother; and Richie, a young boy who died decades earlier and whom 15-year-old Pop knew when they were at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Jojo's white father, Michael, the son of a man who abhors Leonie because she's the black woman "his son had babies with," has been in Parchman for many years. When Leonie learns of Michael's release, she, Jojo and Kayla drive across Mississippi to pick him up. But the trip, which includes unexpected illnesses and a stop for drugs that Leonie wants to sell, is more eventful than the family had anticipated.
Visitations from dead people, tales of snakes that turn into "scaly birds" whose feathers allow recipients to fly--this material would have felt mannered in the hands of a lesser writer. But Ward skillfully weaves realistic and supernatural elements into a powerful narrative. The writing, though matter-of-fact in its depiction of prejudice, is poetic throughout, as when Jojo says that, as Michael hugs him after a fight with Leonie, "something in his face was pulled tight, wrong, like underneath his skin he was crisscrossed with tape."
Sing, Unburied, Sing is an important work from an astute observer of race relations in 21st-century America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Magras, Michael. "Sing, Unburied, Sing." BookPage, Sept. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502517416&it=r&asid=ffcf23e71e3b7c1b8ccb83e32abe5b7c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502517416
Sing, Unburied, Sing
264.27 (July 3, 2017): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward. Scribner, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-5011-2606-2
Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, while Leonie, their mother, drifts in and out of their lives, causing chaos. Snorting coke one night, Leonie explains, "A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn't buy, the melted cake ..." Leonie wants to be a better mother, and when Jojo's and Kayla's father is released from prison, Leonie takes the kids with her, hoping for a loving reunion, but what she gets instead is a harrowing drive across a muggy landscape haunted by hatred. Throughout the novel, though, are beautifully crafted moments of tenderness. When the dead, including Leonie's murdered brother, make their appearances and their demands, no one in the family's surprised. But their stories are deeply affecting, in no small part because of Ward's brilliant writing and compassionate eye. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sing, Unburied, Sing." Publishers Weekly, 3 July 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498381343&it=r&asid=93f3429f307a2fa65f05b87db86a3c57. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498381343
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Vanessa Bush
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Sing, Unburied, Sing.
By Jesmyn Ward.
Sept. 2017.304p. Scribner, $26 (9781501126062).
Jojo, 13, and his 3-year-old sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, while their mother, Leonie, struggles with drug addiction and her failures as a daughter, mother, and inheritor of a gift (or curse) that connects her to spirits. Leonie insists that Jojo and Kayla accompany her on a two-day journey to the infamous Parchman prison to retrieve their white father. Their harrowing experiences are bound up in unresolved and reverberating racial and family tensions and entanglements: long-buried memories of Pop's time in Parchman, the imminent death of Mam from cancer, and the slow dawning of the children's own spiritual gifts. Ward alternates perspectives to tell the story of a family in rural Mississippi struggling mightily to hold themselves together as they are assailed by ghosts reflecting all the ways humans create cruelty and suffering. In her first novel since the National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones (2011), Ward renders richly drawn characters, a strong sense of place, and a distinctive style that is at once down-to-earth and magical.--Vanessa Bush
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bush, Vanessa. "Sing, Unburied, Sing." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499862707&it=r&asid=9b0636045b783cac31d0e0f8c5dcffa0. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862707
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race
Diego Baez
112.21 (July 1, 2016): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. Ed. by Jesmyn Ward. Aug. 2016. 288p. Scribner, $26 (9781501126345). 305.8.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
James Baldwin's famous book of essays, The Fire Next Time (1963), brilliantly examines the interrelated roles of race, history, and religion in the U.S. Building on Baldwin's title, editor Ward has assembled poetry, essays, and flash nonfiction to address the renewed racial tensions that continue to boil in America in the twenty-first century. The author of two award-winning novels and the critically acclaimed memoir Men We Reaped (2013), Ward divides the volume into three sections: "Legacy," "Reckoning," and "Jubilee." The result is a powerfully striking collection, from Honoree Jeffers' illuminating and exhaustive efforts to correct the legacy of Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry in the U.S., to poet Kevin Young's insightful consideration of the humor and tragedy at the heart of the racial hoax perpetrated by the former president of a chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal. "White Rage," a short piece by Carol Anderson, deftly reconfigures the outrage and violence of Ferguson, Missouri, as the result of calculated oppression, and poems by Jericho Brown, Natasha Tretheway, and Clint Smith punctuate the book. An absolutely indispensable anthology that should be read alongside other recent, equally transformative works, including Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me (2015) and Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014).--Diego Baez
YA/M: This rich range of voices and lucid and creative approaches to race in the U.S. is perfect for YAs seeking to make sense of current events and ongoing conflicts. DB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888840&it=r&asid=f9e6e6b5008d72f976e5236d245c5f34. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888840
Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Stephanie Sendaula
141.11 (June 15, 2016): p91.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. Scribner. Aug. 2016. 240p. ISBN 9781501126345. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781501126369. SOC SCI
Using James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as inspiration, this collection by National Book Award winner Ward (English, Tulane Univ.; Salvage the Bones') explores what it means to be black in America, past and present. A stellar cast of writers and poets ruminate on contemporary events such as the racially motivated church shooting in Charleston, SC, in 2015. Especially enlightening is the excerpt from Carol Anderson's White Rage, noting white backlash to Brown v. Board of Education. Novelist Edwidge Danticat parallels black mourning today to the events of the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, wondering how to explain injustice to her children. Poet Claudia Rankine describes the anxiety that mothers of black sons face, while cultural critic Garnette Cadogan relays the danger of walking as a black man (no hoodies or standing on street corners). Writer Kiese Layman mesmerizes with a reflection of hip hop duo Outkast, and Mitchell S. Jackson eloquently narrates the father figures in his life. Many black families will relate as Ward laments the difficulties of constructing a family tree or Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's experience as the sole employee of color. VERDICT This relevant anthology illuminates the fears, hopes, and joys of blackness and will spark interest in the contributors' previous works. [See Prepub Alert, 2/8/16.]--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sendaula, Stephanie. "Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race." Library Journal, 15 June 2016, p. 91. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455185462&it=r&asid=4ef4823d7b500137937e7c6b0d838356. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455185462
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
263.23 (June 6, 2016): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Edited by Jesmyn Ward. Scribner, $25 (240p) ISBN 978-1-5011-2634-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this timely collection of essays and poems, Ward (Men We Reaped) gathers the voices of a new generation whose essays work together as one to present a kaleidoscopic performance of race in America. The 18 contributions (10 of which were written specifically for this collection) cover topics deep in history as well as those in the current culture. One, for example, reveals fresh insight about Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet, and her husband, while other essays are situated in the present, taking readers on a tour of street murals in N.Y.C. and exploring the music of hip-hop duo OutKast. One entry evokes the experience of a young college student exploring the streets of a new city as he learns "what no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat." Over the course of the collection, readers engage with the challenge of white rage, and learn about the painful links between Emmet Till's open casket and the black bodies on today's streets. The two concluding pieces provide a profoundly moving view of the future deeply affected by the past, through a husband's letter to his expectant wife, followed by a mother's message to her daughters. Ward's remarkable achievement is the gift of freshly minted perspectives on a tale that may seem old and twice-told. Readers in search of conversations about race in America should start here. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race." Publishers Weekly, 6 June 2016, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454731026&it=r&asid=ce6eb4a05ccddd7c7d3c9e6d28579e1c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454731026
Ward, Jesmyn: THE FIRE THIS TIME
(May 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Ward, Jesmyn THE FIRE THIS TIME Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 8, 2 ISBN: 978-1-5011-2634-5
Poets, scholars, and essayists reflect on race in America.In this insightful collection, novelist and memoirist Ward (Creative Writing/Tulane Univ.; Men We Reaped: A Memoir, 2013, etc.) brings together 18 writers "to dissent, to call for account, to witness, to reckon." Taking her title from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Ward hopes this book will offer solace and hope to a new generation of readers, just as Baldwin's work did for her. Many essays respond to racial violence, invoking the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sarah Bland, worshipers at Charleston's Emanuel Church, and Abner Louima, among many others. Edwidge Danticat reports that she asked Louima recently how it feels each time he hears that a black person was killed by police. "It reminds me that our lives mean nothing," he told her. As other parents reveal in their essays, Danticat feels she must have two conversations with her daughters: "one about why we're here and the other about why it's not always a promised land for people who look like us." She wishes, instead, to assure them "they can overcome everything, if they are courageous, resilient, and brave." Poet Claudia Rankine was told by the mother of a black son, "the condition of black life is one of mourning." Besides fear for their children's futures, some writers focus on their black identity. As a result of genetic testing, Ward discovered that her ancestry was 40 percent European, a result that she found "discomfiting." "For a few days after I received my results," she writes, "I looked into the mirror and didn't know how to understand myself." Wendy Walters resisted thinking about slavery until the discovery of long-buried slaves in New Hampshire provoked her to research the past. Poet Kevin Young shrewdly probes NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal's motives to pass as black. Carol Anderson, Emily Raboteau, Natasha Trethewey, and others also add useful essays to this important collection. Timely contributions to an urgent national conversation.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ward, Jesmyn: THE FIRE THIS TIME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452198032&it=r&asid=60d12951152d44e455fb1acba6775083. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452198032
Men we reaped
Jesmyn Ward
143.5197 (Feb. 14, 2014): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
"From 2002 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths. The first was my brother, Joshua, in October z000." Jesmyn Ward grew up poor in DeLisle, Mississippi, where unemployment, racial disharmony and drug addiction are the norm. Her powerful, chatty memoir blends the story of her escape to university and the writing life, with the lives of five men whose deaths are anything but exceptional in a divided America. Bloomsbury, 272pp, [pounds sterling]16.99
Ward, Jesmyn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ward, Jesmyn. "Men we reaped." New Statesman, 14 Feb. 2014, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA363104011&it=r&asid=8e097cc0905f6935398891d2ff3cc426. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A363104011
Ward, Jesmyn. Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Joyce Sparrow
138.14 (Sept. 1, 2013): p111.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Ward, Jesmyn. Men We Reaped: A Memoir. Bloomsbury. Sept. 2013. 272p. ISBN 9781608195213. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781608197576. LIT
National Book Award-winning novelist Ward (Salvage the Bones) recently mourned the death of five young men in four years. Accidents, drugs, or suicide claimed her brother, a cousin, and three friends. Her moving memoir details her relationships with the dead men and associates their deaths with the dismal existence experienced by many Southern black men. She explores how a history of racism, economic inequality, and lapsed personal responsibility continues to fester within portions of this population. As Ward details her loss and her family's life in Louisiana and Mississippi, she tries to understand why her brother died and digs deep within her heart and mind to discover why this is her story to tell. Through Ward's narrative, readers come to know her own struggles as the only black female in a private high school and as a budding writer finding her place in the world. VERDICT Ward's candid account is full of sadness and hope that takes readers out of their comfort zone and proves that education and hard work are the way up for the young and downtrodden. [See Prepub Alert, 3/ll/13.]--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL
Sparrow, Joyce
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sparrow, Joyce. "Ward, Jesmyn. Men We Reaped: A Memoir." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2013, p. 111. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA341127091&it=r&asid=b01a3fc3f8b2342b0eea809af05c9ccc. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A341127091
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
44.5 (Sept. 2013): p99.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Smithsonian Institution
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
by Jesmyn Ward
Toward the end of Jesmyn Ward's moving memoir, the National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones describes the first time she drank alcohol as a kid and the morning after, when, desperately hung over, she confessed her cooking-sherry binge to her younger brother. He offers an admission of his own as they're standing outside in the Mississippi winter: He's selling crack. This moment encapsulates the rather bleak mood of Ward's memoir, in which she juxtaposes the universal experience of growing up against the peculiar and oppressive challenges of being black and poor in the South in the 1980s and '90s. The book is structured around the deaths of five young men (the "men we reaped" of the title): Ward's brother, her cousin and three other close friends who might as well have been family members, so fluid are the boundaries of this community Ward punctuates the story of her own early life with the tales of these men to show the proximity of death in down-and-out Mississippi. Upon learning that a community park is also zoned as a burial site, she writes poignantly: "One day our graves will swallow up our playground." There are glimmers of hope--and lots of love--here, but the overall impression is that Ward, who had an early benefactor and made her way to an Ivy League college, was very lucky to get out.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Men We Reaped: A Memoir." Smithsonian, Sept. 2013, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA344212155&it=r&asid=92683a3c09cd8667abc1bcee3826cce3. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A344212155
Men We Reaped
Vanessa Bush
109.22 (Aug. 1, 2013): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Men We Reaped. By Jesmyn Ward. Sept. 2013.272p. Bloomsbury, $26 (9781608195213).813.
In four years, five young men dear to Ward died of various causes, from drug overdose to accident to suicide, but the underlying cause of their deaths was a self-destructive spiral born of hopelessness. Surrounded by so much death and sorrow, Ward closely examined the heartbreakingly relentless deaths of her young relatives and friends growing up in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, with few job prospects and little to engage their time and talents other than selling and using drugs and alcohol. She herself had partially escaped, going on to college in Michigan and California; but the pull of close family ties and a deep appreciation of southern culture lured her back each summer. Ward, author of Salvage the Bones (2011), lovingly profiles each of those she lost, including a brother, a cousin, and close friends, and their tragic ends as she weaves her family history and details her own difficulties of breaking away from home and the desperate need to do so. This is beautifully written homage, with a pathos and understanding that come from being a part of the culture described.--Vanessa Bush
Bush, Vanessa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bush, Vanessa. "Men We Reaped." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2013, p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA342873528&it=r&asid=7c5b284b1ce5b782c2e647b999599cd2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A342873528
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
260.25 (June 24, 2013): p160.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Jesmyn Ward. Bloomsbury, $26 ISBN 978-1-60819-521-3
In this riveting memoir of the ghosts that haunt her hometown in Mississippi, two-time novelist and National Book Award-winner Ward (Salvage the Bones) writes intimately about the pall of blighted opportunity, lack of education, and circular poverty that hangs over the young, vulnerable African-American inhabitants of DeLisle, Miss., who are reminiscent of the characters in Ward's fictionalized Bois Sauvage. The five young black men featured here are the author's dear friends and her younger brother, whose deaths between 2000 and 2004 were "seemingly unrelated," but all linked to drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and a general "lack of trust" in the ability of society--and, ultimately, family and friends--to nurture them. The first to die (though his story is told last in the book) was her brother, Joshua, a handsome man who didn't do as well in school as Ward and was stuck back home, doing odd jobs while his sister attended Stanford and later moved to N.Y.C. Joshua died senselessly after being struck by a drunk driver on a dark coastal road one night. The "wolf' that tracked all of these young men--and the author, too, when she experienced the isolation of being black at predominantly" white schools--was the sense of how little their lives mattered. Ward beautifully incorporates the pain and guilt woven her and her brother's lives by the absence and failure of their father, forcing their mother to work as a housekeeper to keep the family afloat. Ward has a soft touch, making these stories heartbreakingly real through vivid portrayal and dialogue. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Men We Reaped: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2013, p. 160. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA335070488&it=r&asid=51b1779ddc3102dffa0def7d7c012b3a. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A335070488
Ward, Jesmyn: MEN WE REAPED
(May 1, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Ward, Jesmyn MEN WE REAPED Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 9, 17 ISBN: 978-1-60819-521-3
An assured yet scarifying memoir by young, supremely gifted novelist Ward (Salvage the Bones, 2011, etc.). Like the author's novels, this study of life on the margins--of society, of dry land against the bayou, of law--takes place in the stunning tropical heat of southern Mississippi. Her parents had tried to leave there and make new lives in the freedom, vast horizon and open sky of California: "There were no vistas in Mississippi, only dense thickets of trees all around." But they had returned, and in the end, the homecoming broke them apart. Ward observes that the small town of her youth was no New Orleans; there was not much to do there, nor many ennobling prospects. So what do people do in such circumstances? They drink, take drugs, reckon with "the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor," they sink into despair, they die--all things of which Ward writes, achingly, painting portraits of characters such as a young daredevil of a man who proclaimed to anyone who would listen, "I ain't long for this world," and another who shrank into bony nothingness as crack cocaine whittled him away. With more gumption than many, Ward battled not only the indifferent odds of rural poverty, but also the endless racism of her classmates in the school she attended on scholarship, where the only other person of color, a Chinese girl, called blacks "scoobies": " 'Like Scooby Doo?' I said. 'Like dogs?' " Yes, like dogs, and by Ward's account, it's a wonder that anyone should have escaped the swamp to make their way in that larger, more spacious world beyond it. A modern rejoinder to Black Like Me, Beloved and other stories of struggle and redemption--beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ward, Jesmyn: MEN WE REAPED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA328141818&it=r&asid=22d0ab17936a2049df03a483722567eb. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A328141818
Jesmyn Ward. Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Dominique Nicole Swann
88.6 (November-December 2014): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Jesmyn Ward. Men WeReaped: A Memoir. New York. Bloomsbury. 2013. ISBN 9781608195213
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward crafts a beautiful narrative about loss, grief, and remembrance. Ward's second novel, Salvage the Bones, earned her the 2011 National Book Award. She continues to impress readers as she steps away from fiction to engage memoir.
Ward recounts the deaths of young black men from her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi. Five young men--Roger, Demond, C. J., Ronald, and Joshua--lose their lives prematurely in a span of just four years. Among these men is Ward's own brother, Josh, who dies after a drunk driver hits him and flees the scene. The driver, who is white, is only convicted of leaving the scene of an accident and not manslaughter. Without a promising education and lucrative job opportunities, all of these young men struggle to find meaning in their lives.
The author structures her memoir carefully, weaving together past, present, and future. Ward begins by taking a sober look at her town's history and her family's history. She punctuates her travel through time with chapters focusing solely on the five young men. The legacy of racism haunts each chapter, revealing how it affects young black men and women in the American South. What is most remarkable is Ward's ability to name the significantly different but always overlapping lived experiences of boys and girls in the South. Boys learn to long for freedom while girls learn to resist freedom's appeal. Nevertheless, both boys and girls succumb to depression as well as alcohol and drug abuse. As Ward makes clear, deep systemic oppression and gross institutional failures often claim the very lives of young black men and culminate in the inauspicious futures of young black women.
Ward's memoir successfully reveals how an epidemic of racism and economic inequality has affected and continues to haunt her family and her community. But her reflections gesture at an epidemic that reaches far beyond the Gulf Coast. Ward contributes thoughtfully to recent publications on black masculinity, which have highlighted the lives of young black men in inner cities. Her words have surfaced at an opportune time when discussions about race, inequality, and black masculinity have garnered national and international attention. She also places herself in great literary company, situating herself among writers like Richard Wright, the late Maya Angelou, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ward adds a refreshing view to the existing conversation underway in print and elsewhere, entering the conversation as a poor, young black woman in the rural South who faces the complexities, and the misfortunes, of black masculinity.
Men We Reaped challenges readers to consider institutional failures left unaddressed, failures that affect those who are young, have too little, and are the most overlooked. When the memoir comes to an end, Ward expresses how her mother's legacy has inspired her to "write the narrative that says: Hello. We are here. Listen." In giving voice to these young men who can't speak, Ward certainly compels readers to listen.
Dominique Nicole Swann
George Mason University
Swann, Dominique Nicole
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Swann, Dominique Nicole. "Jesmyn Ward. Men We Reaped: A Memoir." World Literature Today, vol. 88, no. 6, 2014, p. 78+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA388053852&it=r&asid=b191c30a3508a1917e0d8054e2dcdce2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A388053852
Ward, Jesmyn: Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Tayari Jones
36.4 (Fall 2013): p904.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Ward, Jesmyn
Men We Reaped: A Memoir. Jesmyn Ward. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 256 pp. $26.00.
"Jesmyn Ward, a native of DeLisle, Miss., chronicles our American story in language that is raw, beautiful and dangerous.... Ward's memoir is an elegy for five young men dear to her who died in Mississippi between 2000 and 2004. Chapters are announced with each of their names, along with the dates of birth and death, giving the reader a feeling of winding through an overcrowded cemetery. The death of her younger brother, Joshua, is at the core of the book--'This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.' Snaking through Ward's memoirs is the history of her family and DeLisle."
Tayari Jones. NYTBR, Sept. 15, 2013: 14.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jones, Tayari. "Ward, Jesmyn: Men We Reaped: A Memoir." Biography, vol. 36, no. 4, 2013, p. 904. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA373371869&it=r&asid=c6ae4b3ffda69299c6162103c9f6802f. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A373371869
'Sing, Unburied, Sing' is a road novel, a ghost story, a family epic
(Oct. 11, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Yvonne Zipp
Some novels will break your heart from the very first sentence. Sing, Unburied, Sing is one of those.
"I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it's something I could look at straight," Jojo says on the occasion of his 13th birthday.
Jojo and his baby sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Pop and Mam, in Mississippi. Their dad, Michael, is up in Parchman prison, and their mom, Leonie, is mostly gone or high. Like Esch, the teenage protagonist from Jesmyn Ward's award-winning 2011 novel "Salvage the Bones," Jojo hails from the fictional town of Bois Savage. In that novel, a family was trying to escape hurricane Katrina. In this case, rather than a flood, it's a flood of memories that threatens to destroy.
The fate of two 13-year-old boys hangs in the balance - and the fact that one is dead in no way lowers the stakes.
After three years in Parchman on drug charges, Michael - who used to be a welder on the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded - is due to be released. And Leonie is determined his whole family will be there to bring him home. For insurance, she also brings along her friend Misty and a stash of drugs to sell along the way.
When he was a teenager himself, Pop wound up in Parchman for five years thanks to his brother. Unable to protect him, since they were housed in different barracks, Pop (then known as River), took the youngest inmate of the prison under his own still-growing wing.
"Richie, he was called. Real name was Richard, and he wasn't nothing but twelve years old. He was in for three years for stealing food: salted meat," Pop tells Jojo. "Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn't get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it."
"Sing, Unburied, Sing," like "Salvage the Bones," has been nominated for the National Book Award, and it's frankly hard to imagine the award going to a different novel. Ward writes with the economy of a poet. Rather than a muse, she seems to have channeled the spirit of one of the Kindly Ones, the Erinyes of Greek mythology.
Unlike Kayla, Jojo remembers what family life was like when he still called Leonie "mom."
"That was when there was more good than bad, when she'd push me on the swing Pop hung from one of the pecan trees in the front yard, or when she'd sit next to me on the sofa and watch TV with me, rubbing my head," he thinks. "Before she was more gone than here. Before she started snorting crushed pills. Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee."
Leonie has her own memories, tangled up in her love for Michael, whose cousin murdered her brother when they were all teenagers and whose father is enough of a racist that he'd turn a gun on his daughter-in-law.
Unable to depend on their mother, Jojo and Kayla turn to each other, and the most tender passages in the book are between the teenager and the toddler.
While the whole family is haunted, Jojo and his mother are the ones who can actually see the ghosts. Every time Leonie gets high, she's visited by the spirit of her brother Given.
Once he gets to Parchman, Jojo finds the difference between then and now blurring. "I look out at the fields but I don't see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground."
The shortest one of those, Richie, hitches a ride home.
It's easy to see why Ward's new novel has been called a "Beloved" for the incarcerated generation, but there are also echoes of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Readers of the memoir "Men We Reaped," Ward's chronicle about the five young men she lost - including her brother - will also hear grace notes from that wrenching work.
At just 304 pages long, "Sing, Unburied, Sing" is a road novel, a ghost story, a family epic, and damning testimony bearing witness to terrible crimes. It is also unforgettable.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"'Sing, Unburied, Sing' is a road novel, a ghost story, a family epic." Christian Science Monitor, 11 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA509148166&it=r&asid=d11eec1a6c8a3558e70f5f92c8943b76. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509148166
Jesmyn Ward's powerful new novel, 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'
Ron Charles
(Aug. 29, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Ron Charles
Six years ago, a young, relatively unknown writer from Mississippi published "Salvage the Bones." In lush prose that felt determined to sprout off the page, the novel described a poor African American family struck by Hurricane Katrina. From its modest beginnings, "Salvage the Bones" went on to win the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and to establish its author, Jesmyn Ward, as one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country.
Now Ward is back with a new novel called "Sing, Unburied, Sing." Again, she tells a tragic story about an African American family challenged with dissolution, but the threats here are more complex and even more tenacious than the tempest that clawed through Louisiana and Mississippi. (Excerpts of the novel appeared earlier this year in Oxford American.) Working on a wider scale, Ward employs several strangely tethered narrators and allows herself to reach back in time while keeping this family chained to the rusty stake of American racism.
The novel is built around an arduous car trip: A black woman and her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father. Ward cleverly uses that itinerant structure to move this family across the land while keeping them pressed together, hot and irritated. As soon as they leave the relative safety of their backwoods farm, the snares and temptations of the outside world crowd in, threatening to derail their trip or cast them into some fresh ordeal.
The first voice we hear belongs to the convict's son, Jojo. Harsh circumstances have forced Jojo to shoulder far more responsibility than any 13-year-old should, but he's risen to the challenge. "I like to think I know what death is," he begins, and despite a touch of naive bravado, it's clear that he does know. He's also becoming aware of the bruised lives all around, a burden of perception that fascinates and terrifies him, while giving his narration an eerie quality of precocious insight.
Jojo has been raised by his black grandparents, whom he idolizes, and his erratic mother, Leonie, whom he dislikes and distrusts. Care for his 3-year-old sister has fallen largely to him, and he devotes himself to her with ferocious determination. He knows all too well how endangered he and his sister are whenever their drug-addled mother pretends she can care for them.
That tension between Leonie and her teenage son runs throughout the novel as the narration passes back and forth between them. Selfish and embittered, Leonie is rarely a sympathetic character, and Ward draws us deep into the bile of a mother who sometimes hates her children, often resents their claims on her and even relishes the chance to mistreat them. But in Leonie's doleful confessions, we get a fuller sense of her shame and disappointment than her judgmental son can imagine at his age. Her failings, which she knows are numerous, have been aggravated by addiction and grief and a racist culture that offers her no opportunity and little justice.
Driving to the state penitentiary several hours away, Leonie wants to imagine they can be a viable family again, but her mission is poisoned from the start by negligence and her own felonious cravings. She risks her children's safety in a series of crises that hurtles the novel forward toward calamity.
But the story's countervailing movement links these precarious lives to the past. These are people "pulling all the weight of history," and Ward represents those necrotic claims with a pair of restless ghosts, the unburied singers of the title. Readers may be reminded of the trapped spirits in George Sanders's recent novel, "Lincoln in the Bardo," but Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is a more direct antecedent. In this "death-crowded household," Leonie is haunted by her brother, who was shot by a white man in a hunting "accident." Jojo, meanwhile, can see and hear the agonized spirit of a boy who was imprisoned with his beloved grandfather decades ago when Southern jails were essentially a system of legalized slavery. (How much has changed?) The fact that Leonie and her son share this spectral affliction without knowing it or being able to comfort each other is just one of the novel's many painful ironies.
If "Sing, Unburied, Sing" lacks the singular hypnotic power of "Salvage the Bones," that's only because its ambition is broader, its style more complex and, one might say, more mature. The simile-drenched lines that sometimes overwhelmed Ward's previous novel have been brought under the control here of more plausible voices. And the plight of this one family is now tied to intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking out to the yard, Jojo thinks, "The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves."
Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted nation.
Ron Charles is the editor of Book World.
On Saturday, Jesmyn Ward will be at the National Book Festival at the Washington Convention Center.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "Jesmyn Ward's powerful new novel, 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'." Washingtonpost.com, 29 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502283364&it=r&asid=c7051d27c44159b7c39ea89fd72b25f2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502283364
Pain of racism illuminated in timely 'Fire This Time'
Charisse Jones
(Aug. 30, 2016): Lifestyle: p05D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Byline: Charisse Jones
The perils of walking, driving -- indeed living -- while black have become tragically apparent in recent months, with reports of yet another African-American killed by police coming at a pace that would be numbing if it were not so painful.
At a time of such tension, The Fire This Time (Scribner, 240 pp., ***1/2 out of four), a collection of essays chronicling the outrage, hurt and fear felt by so many African-Americans, might seem too much to bear. But ultimately, the prose and poetry contained in this concise volume, written by literary luminaries such as Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson and National Book Critics Circle Award recipient Edwidge Danticat, is illuminating and even cathartic.
The title is a riff on James Baldwin's classic The Fire Next Time. Jesmyn Ward, a winner of the National Book Award (Salvage the Bones) and editor of this collection, writes that in the wake of the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and so many others, she reached for Baldwin's words for succor, and there she found inspiration.
Ward's reflections on race and racism, along with those of 17 other writers, are thoughtful, searing and, at times, hopeful. In "Know Your Rights!" Emily Raboteau illustrates the struggle of so many black mothers as she tries to figure out when is the right time to have "the talk" with her own children about dealing with the police.
"By what age is it critical?" she asks. "How could it not be despairing? And what, precisely, should be said? The boy was four then. The girl, just two."
Then, she discovers murals painted across New York City that explain the rights all citizens have when dealing with law enforcement. "You have the right to film and observe police activity. a demand to speak with an attorney," they say. And as she photographs these colorful primers, Raboteau's feelings of agency, of empowerment, are palpable and uplifting.
In "Black and Blue," Garnette Cadogan writes that he had never received the talk growing up in Jamaica, where his skin color did not automatically put him in danger. But he recounts how after moving to New Orleans and later New York City, he quickly learned the pantomime and armor -- an Oxford shirt and V-neck sweater he dubbed his "cop-proof wardrobe" -- necessary to try to avoid harassment or worse.
"The mutual distrust between me and the police was impossible to ignore," he writes. "They'd glare. I'd get nervous and glance. a We'd continue the silent, uneasy dialogue until the subway arrived and separated us at last."
With the divisions in our nation starker than they've been in many years, it is clear that words are not enough to bridge inequities. But The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify.
CAPTION(S):
photo Kim Welsh
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jones, Charisse. "Pain of racism illuminated in timely 'Fire This Time'." USA Today, 30 Aug. 2016, p. 05D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462077456&it=r&asid=0d91c38f8f47708a0d39da6e174db9a2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462077456
Inspired by James Baldwin, in a Racial Struggle With No End
Dwight Garner
(Aug. 17, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
When the Mississippi-born writer Jesmyn Ward was in high school, she and five members of her class visited the office of Trent Lott, one of her state's senators, in Washington.
Ms. Ward would soon be on her way to Stanford, where she received her undergraduate degree. On this day she was one of six young people excited to be away from home, and the only African-American.
In her introduction to ''The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race,'' an anthology of essays she has edited, Ms. Ward describes what happened there. ''Trent Lott took a whip as long as a car off his office table, where it lay coiled and shiny brown, and said to my one male schoolmate who grinned at Lott enthusiastically: Let's show 'em how us good old boys do it. And then he swung that whip through the air and cracked it above our heads, again and again. I remember the experience in my bones.''
Over the course of ''The Fire This Time,'' like cordite in your nostrils, this scene remains with you. Essayist after essayist in this powerful book (there are also some poems) considers black experience in America in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and others. Most agree with Ms. Ward, who declares: ''Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.''
Well, one thing is new -- the wide distribution of mobile phones. Trembling hand-held videos testify to the mistreatment of African-Americans at the hands of police and other authorities. The wheel is come full circle. The police now offer their version of Richard Pryor's despairing riff (itself a paraphrase of Chico Marx: ''Who you gonna believe -- me or your lying eyes?''
The mobile phone has allowed for other testimony. Black Twitter, as the campfire gathering of minority voices on that social medium is called, is a must-read for anyone who wants to tap into, in real time, the crisscrossing debate. Black Twitter is equal parts op-ed page, comedy club, history seminar, photo booth, therapy session, town meeting, playlist delivery system and pep rally.
Ms. Ward calls Twitter ''a great social forum, a virtual curia.'' But its ephemerality disappoints her. She and others turn more than ever to writers like James Baldwin for sustenance, and she quotes one of the most memorable lines from his groundbreaking nonfiction book ''The Fire Next Time'' (1963): ''You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.''
Ms. Ward's book takes its title from Mr. Baldwin's. (His own book borrowed its title from a couplet in the black spiritual ''Mary Don't You Weep.'') It's a bold move, publishing a book that nods explicitly to Baldwin's. He was an electric polemicist, one of the crucial essayists of the 20th century. To announce that you intend to write about race in his vein is akin to proposing to write about whaling in Melville's.
And indeed, this anthology has soft spots. One of its best-known contributors, the historian Isabel Wilkerson, delivers a piece that feels written on autopilot. (It originally appeared in Essence magazine.) Claudia Rankine's nonfiction writing, as presented here in an essay that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, lacks some of authority of her verse. A few other essays scratch at the surface only to find more surface. They're the mussels, in this fragrant bowl, that fail to open.
There are five excellent reasons to buy this book: The essays by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Garnette Cadogan and Ms. Ward. Each is so alive with purpose, conviction and intellect that, upon finishing their contributions, you feel you must put this volume down and go walk around for a while.
Ms. Ghansah, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, speaks about Baldwin's legacy and also about her experience as an intern at Harper's magazine. She learned that she was the first black intern and that there never had been any black editors in the publication's more-than-150-year history. She refers to her arrival there as ''a real 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' moment.''
In an essay that originally appeared in The Washington Post, Ms. Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University, discusses what she calls white rage, the backlash that every advancement by blacks brings. She zeroes in on things like voter suppression, stand-your-ground laws and redistricting as the systemic injustices that lurk behind the everyday ones.
Mr. Young's essay, titled ''Blacker Than Thou,'' is simply dazzling. Mr. Young is a poet and an academic who was recently named director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. His essay pivots from a wry exploration of the life of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who passed for black and became president of a local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., to more harrowing themes.
He compares Ms. Dolezal to Steve Martin in ''The Jerk.'' And he also compares her to that one white lady at every black church who, he suggests, becomes an impassioned congregant. These women are welcomed, although with an eyebrow half-raised. He writes about this consistent welcome in the light of the one received by Dylann Roof (Mr. Young refuses to print his name), who was admitted to a Bible study session at a black church in South Carolina in 2015 before opening fire and killing nine.
Here's how Mr. Young's essay ends: ''This morning I woke from a 'deep Negro sleep,' as Senghor [the Senegalese writer Lopold Sdar Senghor] put it. I then took a black shower and shaved a black shave; I walked a black walk and sat a black sit; I wrote some black lines; I coughed black and sneezed black and ate black too. This last at least is literal: grapes, blackberries, the ripest plums.''
Mr. Cadogan writes about his love of walking. He is unable, as a black man, to emulate some of his favorite writers and become a flneur in New York City. He is too often mistaken, even while wearing Oxford cloth shirts and a smile, for a threat. The details he provides are riveting.
Ms. Ward, the author of ''Salvage the Bones,'' which won a National Book Award in 2011, writes about family and intellectual pleasure. She also reports how she sent away for a DNA test kit from the personal genomics company 23andMe. She analyzes the complicated results, which tug her sense of self in unanticipated directions.
The poet Gwendolyn Brooks once asked, ''Are there ways, is there any way, to make English words speak blackly?'' This potent election-year anthology, which cracks the air in its own fashion, answers in the ringing affirmative.
The Fire This Time
A New Generation Speaks About Race
Edited and with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward
Illustrated. 226 pages. Scribner. $25.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTO (C1); Jesmyn Ward (PHOTOGRAPH BY KIM WELSH) (C4)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Garner, Dwight. "Inspired by James Baldwin, in a Racial Struggle With No End." New York Times, 17 Aug. 2016, p. C1(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460887684&it=r&asid=297ba9453a2e46175747ba4b571e7d23. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460887684
Men We Reaped
Yvonne Zipp
(Oct. 2, 2013): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Yvonne Zipp
In 2000, Jesmyn Ward's 19-year-old brother, Joshua, was driving home from work when a drunk driver plowed into his car, killing him.
Ward was so grief-stricken that she fantasized about killing herself - tattooing her brother's name on one wrist and his handwriting on the other as protection, because she knew she would never cut through them.
"My first stories were attempts to honor my brother," she said in her speech accepting the National Book Award in 2011 for her second novel, "Salvage the Bones."
Over the next four years, Ward lost four more young men dear to her - three in 2004 alone.
"From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, seemingly unrelated deaths," she writes in her powerful, wrenching memoir, Men We Reaped. Her cousin C.J. was killed when a train hit his car. Her friend Demond was murdered in his front yard after agreeing to testify in a drug-related case; her friend Ronald committed suicide; and her friend Roger died of a heart attack, likely brought on by drug use.
"Death spreads, eating away at the root of our community like a fungus," she writes.
To Ward, the deaths are all inextricably linked to growing up poor and Black in DeLisle, Miss., a place nicknamed Wolf Town by its early settlers. The novel takes its title from a quote by Harriet Tubman: "We heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
Ward alternates elegies for each of her loved ones, working backward in time from the date of their deaths, with a memoir of growing up as the oldest child of a charming, faithless father and an overworked, dour mother.
While her father practices martial arts, rides his motorcycle, and trains pit bulls for fighting - one of which nearly kills Ward when she is six - her mother cleans rich people's houses until she's exhausted, then comes home to care for four kids.
"Remaining faithful to my mother required a kind of moral discipline he'd never developed," she writes of her father, whom she clearly loves, "since it was constantly undermined by his natural gifts: his charm, his sense of humor, his uncommon beauty."
After several attempts to reconcile, her parents' marriage eventually stutters to a halt, but not without emotional costs for the children.
During one fight, Ward writes, she and her brother hid out on the porch. "I hugged my brother in the dark. I was his big sister. My mother and father yelled at each other in the house, and as the bats fluttered overhead, dry as paper, I heard the sound of glass shattering, of wood splintering, of things breaking."
After Ward's parents divorce, her mother works even harder but becomes grim in her desperation. For a period of months, if one child does something wrong, all of them are whipped, Ward writes. Then her mother switches to psychological threats, saying she's going to put all four up for adoption.
"Sometimes I think that my mother felt that if she relaxed even a tiny bit, the world she'd so laboriously built to sustain us would fall apart," Ward writes.
Ward's mom expresses her love through food: huge pots of homemade gumbo, roasts, pork chops and mashed potatoes, cornbread, and German chocolate cakes and yellow cakes hand-decorated with vines and flowers.
She saves enough money to buy a parcel of land and clears it herself with machetes and chainsaws. Ward's grandmother got a job in a pharmaceutical plant that said it wanted a woman who could work as hard as a man (a bitter piece of irony after even a cursory glance at Ward's family). "My grandmother got that factory job after a man saw her lift and carry a full-grown hog on her shoulders," Ward writes.
Ward's mom also manages to get a scholarship for her bright, bookish girl to a private school. Ward ended up going to Stanford and then on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for her M.F.A. Being the only black girl among wealthy Southern kids "who wore entitlement like another piece of clothing" made life a daily misery, Ward writes. She is the only student who lived in a trailer and had to go in school in the hand-me-downs of students who treat her with contempt and sometimes blatant racism.
But there was no scholarship for Joshua or Ward's two younger sisters. Joshua drops out of high school and starts working, occasionally supplementing his earnings by dealing drugs. Ward writes powerfully about the daily toll of racism on herself, her siblings, and her friends.
"We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing," she writes. "We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it."
In the memoir, time meets up and stops at her brother's death.
"To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I've ever done," Ward writes. "But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that."
Yvonne Zipp is the Monitor fiction critic.
Yvonne Zipp
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zipp, Yvonne. "Men We Reaped." Christian Science Monitor, 2 Oct. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA344528608&it=r&asid=5dcf5c368734c25f7dd02b33ebfcb051. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A344528608
Book World: A powerful new story
Ron Charles
(Aug. 30, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Ron Charles
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner. 304 pp. $26
---
Six years ago, a young, relatively unknown writer from Mississippi published "Salvage the Bones." In lush prose that felt determined to sprout off the page, the novel described a poor African-American family struck by Hurricane Katrina. From its modest beginnings, "Salvage the Bones" went on to win the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and to establish its author, Jesmyn Ward, as one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country.
Now Ward is back with a new novel called "Sing, Unburied, Sing." Again, she tells a tragic story about an African-American family challenged with dissolution, but the threats here are more complex and even more tenacious than the tempest that clawed through Louisiana and Mississippi. (Excerpts of the novel appeared earlier this year in Oxford American.) Working on a wider scale, Ward employs several strangely tethered narrators and allows herself to reach back in time while keeping this family chained to the rusty stake of American racism.
The novel is built around an arduous car trip: A black woman and her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father. Ward cleverly uses that itinerant structure to move this family across the land while keeping them pressed together, hot and irritated. As soon as they leave the relative safety of their backwoods farm, the snares and temptations of the outside world crowd in, threatening to derail their trip or cast them into some fresh ordeal.
The first voice we hear belongs to the convict's son, Jojo. Harsh circumstances have forced Jojo to shoulder far more responsibility than any 13-year-old should, but he's risen to the challenge. "I like to think I know what death is," he begins, and despite a touch of naive bravado, it's clear that he does know. He's also becoming aware of the bruised lives all around, a burden of perception that fascinates and terrifies him, while giving his narration an eerie quality of precocious insight.
Jojo has been raised by his black grandparents, whom he idolizes, and his erratic mother, Leonie, whom he dislikes and distrusts. Care for his 3-year-old sister has fallen largely to him, and he devotes himself to her with ferocious determination. He knows all too well how endangered he and his sister are whenever their drug-addled mother pretends she can care for them.
That tension between Leonie and her teenage son runs throughout the novel as the narration passes back and forth between them. Selfish and embittered, Leonie is rarely a sympathetic character, and Ward draws us deep into the bile of a mother who sometimes hates her children, often resents their claims on her and even relishes the chance to mistreat them. But in Leonie's doleful confessions, we get a fuller sense of her shame and disappointment than her judgmental son can imagine at his age. Her failings, which she knows are numerous, have been aggravated by addiction and grief and a racist culture that offers her no opportunity and little justice.
Driving to the state penitentiary several hours away, Leonie wants to imagine they can be a viable family again, but her mission is poisoned from the start by negligence and her own felonious cravings. She risks her children's safety in a series of crises that hurtles the novel forward toward calamity.
But the story's countervailing movement links these precarious lives to the past. These are people "pulling all the weight of history," and Ward represents those necrotic claims with a pair of restless ghosts, the unburied singers of the title. Readers may be reminded of the trapped spirits in George Sanders' recent novel, "Lincoln in the Bardo," but Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is a more direct antecedent. In this "death-crowded household," Leonie is haunted by her brother, who was shot by a white man in a hunting "accident." Jojo, meanwhile, can see and hear the agonized spirit of a boy who was imprisoned with his beloved grandfather decades ago when Southern jails were essentially a system of legalized slavery. (How much has changed?) The fact that Leonie and her son share this spectral affliction without knowing it or being able to comfort each other is just one of the novel's many painful ironies.
If "Sing, Unburied, Sing" lacks the singular hypnotic power of "Salvage the Bones," that's only because its ambition is broader, its style more complex and, one might say, more mature. The simile-drenched lines that sometimes overwhelmed Ward's previous novel have been brought under the control here of more plausible voices. And the plight of this one family is now tied to intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking out to the yard, Jojo thinks, "The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves."
Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted nation.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "Book World: A powerful new story." Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502342732&it=r&asid=4420c87a8f06a8af676b9339c26f17e5. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502342732