Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Part of me went because I didn’t want him to turn my face red like hers. And part of me went because I was sick of that place. Because I wanted to go.”

Haha

Hogjaw.”

Was five hours before anybody found her,

“That’s enough time to run them fifteen miles to the edge of Parchman.

The w...

“It was enough time,” Richie says.

Simile. Extended.

Him talking to hisself the whole time.

His mama. Telling her he was coming home. That he wanted her to sing for him. Sing for your son, he said. Sing.”

“I stopped him,” Richie says.

when it came to Blue and Richie, they wasn’t going to tell no difference.

Simile metaphor

Simile lovely

Simile

What undergirds it: pain.

White men and boys gathering and swarming. Moving like one thing. To kill.”

I saw the bonfire they lit, and I knew what was happening.

They burned him, not lynch him. And dismembered. And skinned.

Richie blinks.

Simile

“One of the trusties told me later they was cutting pieces of him off.

skinning him.

Richie makes fists, lets them go.

“I said: It’s going to be all right, Richie. He said: You going to help me? Riv, which way should I go? I heeled the dogs. Held out my hands to him, light side out. Moved slow. Soothed him. Said: We gone get you out of this. We gone get you away from here.

I’m going home, Riv?

Richie roars.

“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out.

Smelled it when the warden told me I’d done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I’d led the dogs that caught and killed Richie.

When Given died, I thought I’d drown in

I hold Pop like I hold Kayla.

The animals are quieting in grunts and snorts and yips. Thank you, they say. Thank you thank you thank you, they sing.

Phantom Given.

Simile

Haha simile

Last time I saw him here, he was living.

Given-not-Given’s

I ain’t never seen Pop on the ground before if he wasn’t pushing a seed into it or wrestling some animal or pulling up weeds.

Pop seems to be sinking, Jojo holding him up.

Given bleeds. I don’t see wounds, but he bleeds anyway, from his neck, from his chest.

Haha

For dying. Always for that.

“The boy, the black bird,” she sobs.

“The black bird. The Black boy.”

Richie? Question

“He want Mam!”

no man wants to take Mama, but what she’s tasked me to do will usher her away.

I wonder at my short, round toddler with her toes grazing the door, at the future and what it will demand of me.

I am not prepared to see.

More honest - and more accurate - than she knows.

Simile extended - twice

Michaela