Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead.

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.

I could feel him there, knew that he would carry me after they let me loose from the earth.

There are so many stories I could tell him. The story of me and Parchman, as River told it, is a moth-eaten shirt, nibbled to threads: the shape is right, but the details have been erased. I could patch those holes. Make that shirt hang new, except for the tails. The end. But I could tell the boy what I know about River and the dogs.

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 head and let it fall back so they can look upon each other with love, clear and sweet as the air between them. Mama bucks and goes still. Time floods the room in a storm surge. I wail.

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

We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.

When I first started sending out work, I kept encountering the idea that people wouldn’t read about the kind of people I was writing about—that this kind of work wouldn’t find an audience. People in power probably assumed that because I was writing about poor black southerners, no one would want to read about them. It feels good to get this kind of recognition now and to know that many will read about the kind of people I’m talking about and find the stories universal in some way.