Pop knows that Jojo does not have the stomach for it, so he says that he thinks he heard Kayla cry out in the house. Jojo looks up to Pop and wants to show him that he is ready to be a real man and can look death in the face and not flinch. With an absent father figure and a mostly absent and drug-addicted mother, Jojo has built a strong relationship with his grandparents, calling them Mam and Pop instead of by their first names, as he does with his mother.

I want Pop to know I can get bloody” (Ward 1). I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I’ve earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I’m ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. Pop asks for his help outside and Jojo says, “ I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger that’s how Pop walks. In the opening scene of the novel, it is Jojo’s thirteenth birthday.

They haunt the present and should never be forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant. Sing, Unburied Sing shows that suffering and injustice can never simply be confined to the past. Throughout the novel this theme is present, Jojo has no comprehension of the true world but the ghosts of the past do. I knew that hunger could hurt, could scoop me hollow as a gourd.” (Ward 185). I knew that leather could split flesh like butter. I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin.

As Richie puts it, “When I was thirteen, I knew much more than him. Leonie, the children’s hardly there and drug-addicted mother, wants to take her children on a road trip up to Parchman prison to visit her husband.ĭuring this trip across the state, Jojo learns things about himself and the unjust, racist, and violent world from which his family has tried to hide him. Jojo’s father, Michael, is serving a three-year sentence at this prison, soon to be released. Their grandmother, Mam, is dying of cancer and their grandfather, Pop, is afflicted by memories of his past, a past tied to the Parchman prison that the children and their mother set out to visit. The protagonists Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy from a mixed-race family, and his little sister Kayla live with their maternal grandparents. Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied Sing, is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, near the Mississippi River delta, and “.stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat.

Sing unburied sing cliff notes