Sing, Unburied, Sing

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Jojo ”

Jojo comforts Kayla, making up stories until they arrive at the home of Michael’s lawyer, Al, where they plan to stay the night. Al greets the group warmly as Leonie hands over the bag of meth.

Leonie is reluctant to accept Al’s offer of dinner, but lets Jojo eat while she boils the blackberry roots and leaves into a tea. Jojo watches anxiously as she forces Kayla to drink the mixture, remembering a concoction she once prepared for him: “Leonie must have picked the wrong plant, or prepared it wrong, because whatever she gave me made me even sicker. She poured the gritty, bitter mess by the back steps, and a few days afterward, when I had worked whatever she gave me and the bug out of my system, I found a stray cat dead, carbuncular and rotting, by the steps” (116). Misty and Al convince Leonie that Kayla is just carsick, and the three of them disappear into the kitchen to get high; Jojo then makes Kayla throw the mixture.

Lying next to Kayla that night, Jojo recalls Pop talking about the day Richie was whipped for breaking his hoe, and the way Pop nursed him afterwards. The following day, Kinnie ran away from Parchman—an event that would result in Pop being placed in charge of the prison dogs.

By morning, Kayla is feverish but no longer throwing up, and the group drives to Parchman. While Misty visits her boyfriend and their parents passionately embrace, Kayla draws Jojo’s attention to some “birds”: “I look out at the fields but I don’t see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, picking at the ground, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground” (125). Jojo remembers what Richie said after being whipped: “It’s too much dirt […] It’s everywhere. In the fields. Not just my back, Riv. It’s in my mouth so I can’t taste nothing and in my ears so I can’t hardly hear and in my nose, all in my nose and throat, so I can’t hardly breathe” (126). Back in the car, Michael asks about Kayla’s sickness moments before she again vomits. As Jojo hugs Kayla, a boy appears outside the car window and says, “I’m going home” (131).

Chapter 6 Summary: “Richie”

Richie recognizes Jojo as “River’s” by his looks, “scent,” and protective demeanor towards Kayla (133). Curling up on the floor of the car, Richie thinks about waking up after his death in a stand of pine trees. As he struggled to find a way out of the trees (and to remember how he came to be there), a white snake approached and offered to help. It then turned into a vulture-like bird and gave Richie a scale that let him fly. Once in the air, however, Richie suddenly remembered Pop tending to his wounds and crashed into the cotton fields of Parchman. Pop wasn’t there, and Richie didn’t know how to find him “until the scaly bird returned and led [him] to the car, to the boy the same age as [him] sitting in the back of the car” (136).

Richie thinks about all the things he could tell Jojo, including the way Pop used his position as dog keeper to try to help Richie: “He saw how sick I was after I got whipped. He thought if I were left to my despair, my slow-knitting back, I would do something stupid. You smart, he said. Little and fast. He told the sergeant that I was wasted in the fields” (138). Eventually, however, the warden placed a new white inmate named Hogjaw in charge of the dogs. When Hogjaw tried to lure Richie into the woods with him, Pop arranged for the boy to be transferred back to the fields. Richie wants to tell Jojo “how his pop tried to save [him] again and again, but he couldn’t” (140). For the moment, however, he remains silent.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Leonie”

Back at Al’s, Leonie gives Kayla a bath while Al and Misty go to buy medicine. Irritated by Kayla’s crying and by Jojo’s careful observation, Leonie makes a jab about his weight: “It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for. Never Mama for” (147). Leaving Kayla in Jojo’s care, Leonie and Michael get high and have sex. Given appears shortly afterwards and stands outside the children’s room, but Leonie ignores him.

When it’s time to leave, Leonie wakes Jojo and Kayla up, jealous of the way they’re wrapped around one another in sleep. As Michael drives, Leonie recalls the time before she became pregnant with Jojo: “I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him” (153). Mam disapproved of how single-minded Leonie’s love for Michael was, but comforted her daughter when she became pregnant, offering to induce a miscarriage. Despite her misgivings, however, Leonie told Mam she wanted the child.

Leonie dozes off and wakes to Michael telling her there’s a police car nearby: He doesn’t have a license, so he and Leonie awkwardly switch places while the car is still moving. The car’s swerving attracts the police’s attention, and with no time to hide the meth they’re carrying, Leonie swallows the bag whole as the cop pulls them over.

The policeman questions Leonie, who makes the mistake of telling him they’re traveling from Parchman. The officer handcuffs both her and Michael, but when he tries to restrain Jojo, Kayla won’t let go; Jojo reaches for the gris-gris bag in his pocket, and the policeman pulls his gun and forces Jojo down onto the ground. He then searches the car and Jojo’s pockets, “shoving [the gris-gris bag] back in Jojo’s face like it’s a rotten banana peel” (166) before letting the family go. By the time the cop leaves, Leonie is again having visions of Given.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Jojo”

Richie warns Jojo, “They going to chain you” (169), as the police pull the car over. Terrified on Kayla’s behalf, Jojo reaches for the gris-gris bag in the hopes that it will give him courage: “I should soothe Kayla, should tell her to run back to Misty, to get down and let me go, but I can’t speak. The bird crawling up into my throat, wings spasming. What if he shoots her?” (170). Once back in the car, Richie relies to talk to Jojo, asking what Pop has said about him.

Leonie is sick, so after two hours of driving, Michael pulls into a gas station and instructs Jojo to buy milk and charcoal. Jojo is reluctant to leave Kayla alone with Richie, but eventually agrees when Richie explains Kayla is “too young” (174) to suit his purposes. After Jojo buys and crushes the charcoal briquettes, Michael mixes it with the milk and forces Leonie to swallow the mixture. Meanwhile, Jojo sneaks Kayla a lollipop he secretly bought. Richie asks whether Leonie is Jojo’s mother, and Jojo denies that she is as she “vomit[s] so hard her back curves like an angry cat’s” (179).

Jojo sings Kayla nursery rhymes to distract her as Richie continues to talk about Pop and Parchman: “They beat you in there. Some people look at boys our age and see somebody they can violate. See somebody who got soft pink insides. Riv tried to keep that from me” (180). Ultimately, however, Richie says he couldn’t cope with imprisonment and tried to run away; he assumes that this is how he died, but can’t remember the specifics, which he hopes Pop can provide. This, Richie says, is “how [he] get[s] home” (182). Jojo doesn’t understand what Richie means by this, so Richie tries to clarify: “The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song” (183). Jojo asks what else he doesn’t understand, and Richie replies “home,” “love,” and “time” (183-184).

Chapters 5-8 Analysis

Up until Chapter 6, the novel’s supernatural occurrences—Jojo hearing animals, Leonie seeing Given, etc.—were ambiguous enough that a reader could chalk them up to imagination or hallucination. Richie’s appearance as a narrator not only refutes this idea, but breaks up the pattern Ward has previously established of alternating between Jojo’s and Leonie’s points of view. As a result, Richie’s introduction may seem abrupt or even jarring, but its very suddenness holds an important clue as to the nature of ghosts in the novel. If, as the novel frequently suggests, the overarching spiritual unity of all things is similar to a “song,” spirits like Richie are “wrong keys” that don’t fit into the music’s pattern (282).

Notably, however, this discordance isn’t Richie’s fault. As Mam will eventually explain, ghosts are the result of violence: “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” (236). Ghosts like Richie are therefore a symptom of broader societal ills—most notably, the violence of white supremacy, which is ultimately responsible for both Richie’s imprisonment and his death.

Another way in which Ward dramatizes the effects of systemic poverty and racism is through a motif of poisoning, pollution, and sickness. In some cases, there is a very literal relationship between the two, as the circumstances surrounding Michael and Leonie’s drug use demonstrate: Michael begins cooking and using meth when he loses his job on Deepwater Horizon after the oil spill, effectively poisoning himself in response to a toxic society that prioritizes profit over people and the environment. However, the motif also functions in more abstract ways. Images of vomiting and choking are common throughout the novel and suggest the way in which characters are forced to “swallow”—that is, internalize—the harmful consequences of racism and poverty.

The poisoning motif is also the flip side of the novel’s interest in feeding as a form of caretaking. Because it involves providing nourishment to someone who for one reason or another is in a state of dependency, feeding is a particularly selfless expression of love: Jojo, for instance, doesn’t benefit from the time he spends ensuring that his toddler sister gets enough to eat. Ward also suggests that love, like food, can be banked in anticipation of coming hardship; Richie, for instance, describes himself as “swallowing” (139) the moments when Pop tended to his wounds, presumably to draw strength from them going forward. Within this context, poisoning represents a distortion of healthy caretaking. This is nowhere clearer than in this section of the novel, when Leonie tries to treat Kayla’s nausea with the blackberry tea. Good as her intentions are, Leonie lacks both the practical knowledge and, Ward implies, the basic temperament to care for her daughter in this way; her self-centeredness taints her interactions with her children both literally and figuratively. As Jojo says of the neglect that led to the death of a pet fish: “Leonie kill things” (108).