Jesmyn Ward's "Sing Unburied Sing" Wins 2017 Nat'l Book Award

Jesmyn Ward (b MS 1977) just received her 2nd Nat'l Book Award for her brilliant & haunting novel  "Sing Unburied Sing" (2017).  She received a Nat'l Book Award for "Salvage the Bones" (2011).  Ward uses her home state and pulls from its past history of slavery, its present oppressive racial prejudice & in equality and stumbles towards a dismal future of mass incarceration & racial inequality.  In "Salvage" Ward's heroine is a young black teen without a mother subjected to neglect, abuse and sexual supplication in a futile search for tenderness.  "Sing Unburied Sing" the hero is JoJo a 13 year old boy.  His black mother Leonie & white father Michael are both in high school when she gives birth.  They also have a daughter Kayla who clings to her older brother for protection rejecting her mom.  JoJo gets his moral compass & familial love from his mother's parents Pop & Mam.Mam knew "Leonie never had maternal leanings."  Leonie leaves the raising of JoJo & Kayla to her parents.  Leonie and Michael stay with her folks.  His parents will have nothing to do with niggers & their son's mixed race abominations.   Leonie,  JoJo & Kayla share blood & the paranormal ability to see & converse with the dead; those who've not found solace in passing.  There are 2 ghosts tied to JoJo's family; Leonie's brother Given killed by his white classmates & Richie connected to Pop as a young boy while both were sentenced to the same brutal prison. The novel begins with Leonie's road trip to get Michael who is being released from prison.   Leonie's poor decision making & reckless parenting determines that JoJo & Kayla should come with her.  She brings her friend & co-worker, Misty who shares loving across color lines.  Misty's black boyfriend is in the same prison as Michael.  The disastrous trip includes a stop to at a crack house.  An officer pulls their car over on the return trip.  Leonie swallows a bag of meth to avoid arrest.  JoJo is the one the officer tackles & cuffs before begrudgingly releasing them.  Richie is an uninvited passenger returning with them from the prison.  He haunts JoJo relentlessly for answers from Pop. Ward divides her chapters into the different characters, including the ghosts but JoJo is the novel's reckoning voice.  The barbarities of past lynchings are present in the cover-up killing of Given, the oppression, inequalities & racial hatred that shackle us cutting deep within our psyche tethering our spirits to social demise.   Ward's writing is in league with Angelou, Baldwin, Faulkner and Morrison with her painful prose and stagnating social commentary.  After slavery, "White people couldn't get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying for it." "It ain't natural for a colored man to master dogs.  A colored man doesn't know how to master because it ain't in him to master."   This is a masterful work by Ward well deserving of this year's Nat'l Book Award.