WHAT WILL NOT STAY DEAD

WHAT WILL NOT STAY DEAD

In rare instances, the first and the final sentences of a novel are a perfect frame for the narrative.  One might argue this is true for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and  in her third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (New York: Scribner, 2017) Jesmyn Ward has  chosen her sentences well:  "I like to think I know what death is."…….Home, they say. Home.

The distance between Ellison's history-invested narrative and Ward's experiential aesthetic is vast, in part because she writes within a tradition of African American women's fiction, within the tradition of Toni Morrison, Octavia Vernon,  and Gloria Naylor and in part because her themes emphasize dread, the death-oriented qualities of everyday life, poverty,  and the psychosexual risk of being Southern.  Her themes are troubling and  quintessentially American.  She exploited them powerfully in Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and Salvage the Bones (2011), and she reconfigures them with equal power in Sing, Unburied, Sing.

 Powerful writing should be acknowledged and rewarded,  but power alone doesn't ensure that a novel will in time assume the status of a classic.  Think of Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills,  Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence,  and  Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. . Many a powerful novel is in the museum of American literary history, occasionally read by scholars and university students  and infrequently glanced at by the educated reading public.  Perhaps  such a fate awaits Ward's third novel.  If it does, the novel will be read by the right people.

The right people are not "ideal" readers, and they are rarely professional critics whose opinions might count for something in someone's mind.  They are readers who use literature --fiction, nonfiction, mashed-up genres --as tools for critical thinking.  Like Virginia Woolf's common readers, they are secure and stand by and behind the combinations of ideas which emerge from the process of reading.  When they engage Sing, Unburied, Sing,  they recognize Ward's intervention in what Charles Mills has identified as America's foundational racial contract and in the conversations Americans have habitually had since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson and are having with vicious alacrity since the advent of the Age of Trump.  Ward has strengthen the possibility of continuing barbaric social discourses in the ambience of aesthetics.

The best  readers of Sing, Unburied, Sing will discover one of the "keys" for unlocking the multi-leveled "meanings" of the novel in the first chapter, page one.  No dawdling here; we get to the point.  Jojo, one of the three narrators, on his thirteenth birthday  relates a story about his black grandfather's slaughtering a goat. Is this the Mississippi version of bar mitzvah?  Jojo's wanting Pop to know he's come of age, "ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities"  ? (1).  Jojo's white grandfather, Big Joseph, is a man who "believes in niggers"  (53).  These are all the clues the right people need, especially if they are Mississippians. Death is home; home, death.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            September 30, 2017