Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

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.

Pop becomes a kite later in the book when he holds Leonie back from continuing to slap her two children in the wake of her mother's, Philomene's, death. I wonder at the contrast of kites and birds as metaphors in this book. The Unburied are strange birds. How is kite better? Does it have more agency than a bird? Why not a kite for the unburied? They are the ones that seem to be more adrift and subject to the winds of chance than a bird would be.

Pop would make the meal, but I should have known that Mam couldn’t. She’s too sick with the cancer that came and left and returned, steady as the rising and sinking of the marsh water in the bayou with the moon.

Water and Cancer, Rising and Sinking, Nourishment and Famine, Waxing and Waning. Balance between opposites is the dance and poetry of this story.

Michael is an animal on the other end of the telephone behind a fortress of concrete and bars, his voice traveling over miles of wire and listing, sun-bleached power poles. I know what he is saying, like the birds I hear honking and flying south in the winter, like any other animal. I’m coming home.

Leonie only hears, understands and communicates with Michael. She can hear other creatures, but she cuts herself off from connection with anyone but Michael. It's the most unresolved portion of the story.

But then when I left, Jojo looked up from where he sat with Pop in the living room watching some hunting show, and for a flash, the cast of his face, the way his features folded, looked like Michael after one of our worst fights. Disappointed. Grave at my leaving. And I couldn’t shake it. His expression kept coming back to me through my shift, made me pull Bud Light instead of Budweiser, Michelob instead of Coors. And then Jojo’s face stuck with me because I could tell he secretly thought I was going to surprise him with a gift, something else besides that hasty cake, some thing that wouldn’t be gone in three days: a basketball, a book, a pair of high-top Nikes to add to his single pair of shoes.

Leonie only sees her children through the lens of Michael. They only have value as reflections of him. Jojo haunts her most when he is like his father Michael.

“You wondering . . . ,” she says, and stops. Her lips thin. That’s the place I see it most. Her lips, which were always so full and soft, especially when I was a girl, when she kissed my temple. My elbow. My hand. Even sometimes, after I had a bath, my toes. Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.

The gradual change and disappearance of a mother is hard to bear. It marks our days with greater certainty of what's to come.

I sit, cross my arms. It makes my breasts stick out a little. I remember the horror of them coming in, budding like little rocks, when I was ten. How those fleshy knots felt like a betrayal. Like someone had lied to me about what life would be. Like Mama hadn’t told me that I would grow up. Grow into her body. Grow into her.

Leonie resists change constantly. She does not know how to live in harmony. She only sees contrast. Existence is not so binary, rigid and definite. You cannot live between polar opposites unless you appreciate the space between.

The uncle had slapped his son across the face, once and twice. You fucking idiot, he’d said. This ain’t the old days. And then his cousin had put his arms up and mumbled: He was supposed to lose, Pa. A hundred yards off, the buck lay on his side, one arrow in his neck, another in his stomach, all of him cold and hard as my brother. Their blood congealing.

Does Joseph wish for the Old Days? This puts perspective on the false nostalgia of signs like a Confederate flag with the words "Heritage, Not Hate" underneath.

The woman that taught Marie-Therese—she could see. Old woman looked damn near White. Tante Vangie. She could see the dead. Marie-Therese ain’t never had that talent. Me neither. She dug her red fists into the dirt. I dream about it. Dream I can see Given again, walking through the door in his boots. But then I wake up. And I don’t. She started to cry then.

"Damn Near White" equated with privilege? Seeing as privilege? When you are beyond the reach of something, anyone closer to the object of your desire is suspect, cause for jealousy. Is someone who can pass for WHITE closer to anything other than difference?

Three years ago, I did a line and saw Given for the first time. It wasn’t my first line, but Michael had just gone to jail. I had started doing it often; every other day, I was bending over a table, sifting powder into lines, inhaling.

I crept into Mama’s bedroom and watched her sleep. Dusted her shrine: her rosary draped over her Virgin Mary statue in the corner, nestled among blue-gray candles, river rocks, three dried cattails, a single yam. When I saw Given-not-Given for the first time, I didn’t tell my mama nothing.

Leonie and Jojo share a habit of not-sharing. So many moments in this book where silence becomes a boundary, a weapon against the very person who wields it.

I see a shirtless man with a beard. He is tattooed, like Michael, but has shaved his head. There are tables with glass beakers and tubes and five-gallon buckets on the ground and empty cold-drink liter bottles, and I know I’ve seen this before, know that smell because when Michael built his lean-to in the woods behind Mam and Pop’s house, it looked and smelled like this. The reason he and Leonie fought, the reason he left, the reason he’s in jail. The man is cooking, moves as easy and sure as a chef, but there is nothing to eat here. My stomach burns.

Tattoos mark what would otherwise be unmarked. Lines on the body, like lines of grief, pain, age and sickness charting entropy. And then there's ever present hunger that evades any demarcation with its constant presence. Lines or not, people have to eat.

When we pull away from that sad circle of houses with all that plenty inside, Misty is bent down fiddling with Leonie’s floor mats, and the bag disappears. I slide a pack of saltines and two bottles of juice I stole out of that house into my own plastic bag. After we leave the half-burnt room of pine trees, and we’re back on pavement and the highway, Leonie turns on the radio and lets it play louder than she ever has. I open my stolen bottle and drink the juice down, then pour half the other bottle into Kayla’s sippy cup. I hand one cracker to Kayla and slide one into my mouth. We eat like that: one for me and one for her. I let the saltines turn mealy and soggy on my tongue before chewing and swallowing so I don’t crunch. I am silent and stealthy in another way. Neither of the women in the front seat pay us any attention. When I eat and drink, I have never tasted anything so good.

Plenty. Jojo is a king with crackers, while the little boy with snot in his nose is unable to appreciate his plenty. He has no access to the true joy of something. Jojo does.

Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he’s trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.

Leonie craves connection with her children and cannot escape her self-imposed imprisonment to get to them.

But it didn’t cure it. Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

Does Ms. Ward believe in the power/wisdom of plants?

I find wild blackberries. Mama always told me they could be used for upset stomach, but only for adults. But if there was nothing else, she said I could make a tea and give it to kids. Not a lot, I remember her saying. From the leaves. Or was it from the vine? Or the roots? The heat beats down so hard I can’t remember. I miss the late-spring chill.

Leonie is so frustrating, but her inability to find the remedy reminds me of my own ineptitude.

This is the kind of world it is. The kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down.

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.

Give him some old bread. I figured he couldn’t crunch like he needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles. Leonie kill things.

I realize there is another scent in his blood. This is where he differs from River. This scent blooms stronger than the dark rich mud of the bottom; it is the salt of the sea, burning with brine. It pulses in the current of his veins. This is part of the reason he can see me while the others, excepting the little girl, can’t. I am subject to that pulse, helpless as a fisherman in a boat with no engine, no oars, while the tide bears him onward.

The dead are robbed of even more agency than the living.

We got so much water where I’m from. It come down from the north in rivers. Pool in bayous. Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see. It changes colors, he said, like a little lizard. Sometimes stormy blue. Sometimes cool gray. In the early mornings, silver. You could look at that and know there’s a God, he said to me as the other gunmen coughed and tossed. Maybe one day, when you and me get out of here, you could come down and see it, Riv said.

Water is the king of elements in this story.

Today when Jojo came to Parchman, I woke to the whispering of the white snake, which had dug a nest down into the earth with me so he could speak to me in my ear. So he could curl about my head in the dark and whisper, If you would rise, I can take you across the waters of this world to another. This place binds you. This place blinds you. Keep the scale, even if you cannot fly. Go south, to River, to the face of the waters. He will show you. Go south. He curled around my neck and startled me to climb up and out of the dirt, to rise to the smell of Riv’s blood, thick as the fragrance of spider lilies in flower. When I saw Jojo and Kayla in the parking lot, the snake transformed to a bird on my shoulder before flying away on a wave of wind, speeding south on a lonely migration. As Kayla whines in her sleep and Jojo rubs her back to quiet her, a shadow alights and crosses over them. Up in the sky, the scaly bird drifts, shining a dark light.

Beautiful fragment of a metaphor woven into the scales, wings and flight of a snake/bird.

I let the water carry me. It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light. I remember it clearly because I never did it again, scared by that paralyzing ascent. This is what it feels like to wake with my head in Michael’s lap, his fingers still on my scalp, the car rumbling, light slanting sharp through the window. This is what it feels like to rise from a dark deep place. I lift up a little and put my forehead on Michael’s thigh and groan.

Leonie is like the living dead. Her rise here is so like Richie's rise from the roots of the tree where he was killed.

her. Dragged it out behind the house, into the woods, and burned it. Told me not to come back there, but I saw the smoke. Heard the flames slapping. Sometimes, at night, after Kayla done fell asleep on my shoulder, so deep her head’s heavy as a cantaloupe, I walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water and I hear Pop through the door, hear his voice threading through the keyhole. Once I heard him clear through the wall. First I thought he was praying, but then, from the way his voice whipped up and down, I knew he wasn’t. Sound like he was talking to somebody. I asked him the next day, when I got home from school and he was sitting in his usual spot, waiting on the porch with Kayla sitting next to him on the swing. “Pop?” He was shelling pecans. He looked up at me, but his hands kept working, kept breaking the shell into shards, prying the meat free. Every other half he’d get, he’d pass it to Kayla, and she’d pop the whole thing in her mouth, smile at me when she chewed. “Was you talking to somebody last night?” He paused, half a pecan in his hand. Kayla patted his arm, prodding. “Pop,” she said. “I want it, Pop.” He passed it to her. “Did Leonie call?” I asked. “No,” he said. “I should’ve known,” I said, and spat off the porch into the sand. I wished she was there, imagined what it would feel like if I spat right at her. If she’d even notice. “Don’t,” Pop said, and went back to shelling. “She’s still your mother.” “Michael?” I said. Pop brushed the bitter dust that rinds t...

The push and pull between Jojo and his absent parents-- painful as the separation between husband and dead wife, pecan meat and shell, nourishment and hunger.

“I hear it. Sometimes. 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. Beyond the waters.” “But?” “I can’t.” “Don’t—” “I can’t. Come inside. I tried. Yesterday. There has to be some need, some lack. Like a keyhole. Makes it so I can come in. But after all that—your mam, your uncle. Your mama. I can’t. You’ve”—he makes that breath-sucking sound again—“changed. Ain’t no need. Or at least, ain’t no need big enough for a key.”

What about River's need for Philomene, isn't that a hole?

And the branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves. There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but look as people.

The Unburied revealed.

Eyes blink as the sun blazes and winks below the forest line so that the ghosts catch the color, reflect the red. The sun making scarlet plumage of the clothes they wear: rags and breeches, T-shirts and tignons, fedoras and hoodies. Their eyes close and then open as one, looking down on me, and then up at the sky, as the wind circles them and moans, their mouths gaping now, the airy rush their song, the rush: Yes.

This could be a painted moment. A tree filled with half-bird/half-human creatures blended from contrasting colors, shadows and shapes.

“Let’s go,” I say. Knowing that tree of ghosts is there makes the skin on my back burn, like hundreds of ants are crawling up my spine, seeking tenderness between the bones to bite. I know the boy is there, watching, waving like grass in water.