Fourteen people wedged into the house – Jesmyn, her parents, two sisters and a brother, a cousin, her grandmother’s four sons and three daughters, plus the matriarch herself. When her father lost his job at the local glass factory, her family moved in with Ward’s maternal grandmother. Growing up, young Jesmyn wore hand-me-down clothes and ate meals stretched by food stamps. “I feel like in every book that I commit to telling the truth about the place that I live in, and also about the kind of people who live in my community,” Ward said on the radio show Fresh Air. She is the only woman in American letters to have two. It won Ward her second National Book Award in November. Sing, Unburied, Sing becomes a road book and a ghost story and a tale of sibling love. Jojo’s own father, Michael, is being released from prison, so his drug-addled mother, Leonie, packs the family and a friend into a car to head north to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary. His black grandfather, Pop, is one source his white grandfather, who won’t acknowledge him, is another.
The story centers on Jojo, turning 13 as the novel opens and trying to understand what it means to be a man. That appreciation burnished Sing, Unburied, Sing into what Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates calls “a beautifully rendered, heartbreaking, savage and tender novel, a tour de force of exquisite language in the service of honoring the dignity and worth of its memorable cast of children, women and men.”
Growing up in this community taught me to appreciate storytelling, taught me to appreciate language.” “Growing up here taught me to appreciate beauty, the beauty of the bayous and of the forests and of the Gulf. “Growing up in DeLisle, Mississippi has influenced me in many ways,” Ward told the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her a fellowship last year. The ghosts in Ward’s most recent novel – Sing, Unburied, Sing – evoke the hauntings found on many of Toni Morrison’s pages. The vividness of Bois Sauvage and its inhabitants has provoked critical hosannas, and comparisons to William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The novels of Jesmyn Ward create a fictional place – Bois Sauvage – rooted in her rural hometown on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
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