Here we examine issues of race, drug abuse, treachery, prison, death, grief, letting go, and growing up, all woven into a pattern that is just as beautiful as it is starkly upsetting. Weaving magical realism, the complexities of human pain, and the realizations of a child transitioning into adulthood, Jesmyn Ward captures a world that practically sings, its beauty and ugliness branded into an irresistible, painful keening. Now, he’ll tell his story and haunt him until he tracks down the answers, answers which lead back to Pop’s Parchman days. So when a dusty car full of toddler sick and an exhausted thirteen year old boy arrives, he follows the white man in and finally, someone does see him.
Most of all, he just wants the answer so he can go on. Waiting at Parchman for someone who can see him, who can hear and interact with the spirit world, he wonders how it happened and who betrayed him. But thanks to her, the murderer is still in their life, the long ago “accident” a constant retelling that only the meth can ease. It doesn’t help that Big Joseph, her on-again-off-again white boyfriend’s estranged racist father, is responsible for the accident in the woods and the cover-up that left Given dead and her family grieving. But the solace of drugs and the fact that only they allow her to meet and talk with her dead brother Given, distill her desires to be better into something that only tastes of bitterness and failure. Leonie wants to be a better mother – she truly does. Along the way, he thinks of returning to Pop and Mam with longing and relives Pop’s old stories of Parchman Prison – stories that circle without ever divulging the fateful ending. Yet here he is now, stuffed into a hot car, filled with arguments and the smell of sickness, dreading the reunion of parents he avoids, acting as the surrogate father for his needy sister. With the love of two devoted grandparents, Mam and Pop, Jojo has grown into nearly a man, receiving the love his strung out, self-obsessed mother cannot give him. Present day ghosts and the madness of a disorganized, racially indistinct family claw at thirteen year-old Jojo as he takes his toddler sister and follows his meth addicted black mother on a road trip to reclaim his absentee white father from prison in Sing, Unburied, Sing.
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