Mapping the Lost Home: Psalm 137 and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

JESMYN WARD’S 2017 NOVEL, SING, UNBURIED, SING, TELLS THE STORY OF Jojo, a thirteen-year-old biracial boy in coastal Mississippi, and his family as they struggle to navigate issues of grief and addiction rooted in the generational trauma of racist oppression. When Jojo’s father Michael, a former meth cook, is released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, Jojo accompanies his mother Leonie, baby sister Kayla, and questionable family friend Misty on a road trip across the state to bring Michael home. Although the family is temporarily reunited, theirs is not a happy ending. Grandmother and matriarch Philomène dies of cancer; Jojo learns the horrific truth about his beloved grandfather River’s own time as a prisoner; and Leonie and Michael’s meth addiction intensifies. Anxious and restless, Jojo begins walking the woods near his home. In the final pages of the novel, such a walk leads him to something strange: a tree full of ghosts, with birdlike spirits perched two or three to a branch “all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves” (282). The vision, which Kayla also sees when she and River follow Jojo, evokes the horrors of lynching, the “strange fruit” of Abel Meeropol’s poem and Billie Holiday’s famous song. Readers might also think of the tree of crucifixion, or the baobab tree of African legend.1 Considered alongside the ghosts’ behavior, however—