Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

it’s the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life. I grimace,

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.

follow the trail of tender organ blood Pop has left in the dirt, a trail that signals love as clearly as the bread crumbs Hansel spread in the wood.

But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it

Sometimes he’ll tell me the same story three, even four times. Hearing him tell them makes me feel like his voice is a hand he’s reached out to me,

think Stag felt dead inside,

Parchman the kind of place that fool you into thinking it ain’t no prison, ain’t going to be so bad when you first see it,

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. I had to, or being in jail for them five years woulda made me drop in that dirt and die. Richie ain’t had near that time. It’s hard enough for a man

the singing is my favorite part of my birthday,

There’s no happiness here. “Happy birthday, Jojo,” Pop says, but he’s not looking

Given because it rhymes with your papa’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your papa was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us.

Given-not-Given, this Given that’s been dead fifteen years now, this Given that

came to me

hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see.”

first heard the voices when she came to puberty.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at

things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once

He shot the nigger. This fucking hothead shot the nigger for beating him. And then,

Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.” The box fan hummed. “You understand what I’m telling

“You need a balance of spirit.

Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout. Even

she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced

Richie’s

Richie,

For Oya of the winds, of lightning, of storms. Overturn our minds. Clean the world with your storms, destroy it and make it new with the winds of your skirts. And when I asked her what she meant, she said: Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth. “Saint Teresa,” I mutter. “Oya,” I say,

fille de l’océan, la fille des ondes, la fille de l’écume, Mama muttered, and I knew. I knew she was calling on Our Lady of Regla. On the Star of the Sea. That she was invoking Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with her shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving

giving waters of the world.

like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived . . . it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.” “So what?” I whisper. Michael starts the car and pulls out of

place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song.”

time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once? I was trapped, as trapped as I’d been in

down from the north in rivers. Pool in bayous. Rush out to the ocean, and that

south, to River,

are all drowning.

The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.”

“Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” Mam looks

They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them.

comes from the water. It

most beautiful song I have ever

can’t understand a word. I am gasping w...

forgiveness and love that I hear the song again; I know that singing. I have heard it from the golden place across the waters. A great mouth opens in me and wails; I am an empty stomach. The scaly bird lands on the windowsill

Thank you, they say. Thank you thank you thank you, they sing.

and speaks. “Not.” Michaela’s little song sinks. “Your.” Mama begins to fight me. “Mother.”

Given’s hand flutters above her face like he is a groom and Mama is a bride and he has pulled the veil from her

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

“Your words. They let in a river. That’s what took her and Uncle Given away.” “Yes.” He doesn’t understand

what it means, to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods. To let her go. Pop is sliding his way up the door

When the sun. Sets. When the sun. Rises. The song. In snatches. The stars. A record. The sky. A great record. The lives. Of the living. Of those beyond. See it in flashes. The sound.