Unburied Psychopomps

JESMYN WARD — SING, UNBURIED, SING — 2017

Three generations of people sometime in the second half of the 20th century. The date is not important, except that it has to happen when the anti-Black systematic lynching and killing must have been replaced with the new prison slavery that is still quite effective in US prisons. And keep in mind that it is still dominant to believe that if one is Black, then one is guilty of anything you can imagine for only one causal reason: that one individual is Black. This bias is constantly present in this novel, to the point of becoming nauseous. How can a society, a white society mind you, a white nationalist society if you want to be clear, be that much biased on the racial question? I will not tell the story and I will only make some remarks on this book that is definitely a book that should become a classic of Black Literature, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Three generations are brought together. The oldest generation, the grandparents, are white on the young man and father’s side, Michael, and black on the young woman and mother’s side, Leonie. We will learn right at the end that the white grandparents had banned their white son who married a black woman he had impregnated out of pure desire and domination justified by her desire to be dominated by this young white man. It is completely perverse. These two young people got two children, the third generation, Jojo and Michaela, shortened to Kayla. When the novel starts, Michael is going to get out of prison, the famous Parchman prison in which the prisoners, mostly Blacks, are obliged to cultivate cotton on a farm owned by the prison itself, under the surveillance of armed guards and with the secondary protection of dogs taken care of by a couple of prisoners, if one prisoner escape. Michael had been sent to this prison for slightly more than two years, officially two years, but there are always some prolongations, aren’t there? His crime was a “hunting accident” in which he killed a black man who had dared to win a bet with this Michael, to kill a stag with a bow and arrow before the young white man can do the same with his rifle. The dead black man is Leonie’s rather late brother, Given, a late child from the black grandparents, Leonie’s parents. The “incident” was registered as a hunting accident and it was worth two years in the local…