A review by xcampuskiddo
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

5.0

Incredible. A family comes to terms with three generations of racial history. This novel grapples with major themes, from drug use and incarceration to police brutality to interracial relationships and mixed-race children in a current-day Mississippi that is still struggling to come to terms with its own legacy of racial injustice. From a Black grandfather's time spent serving a Jim Crow-era jail sentence, to a Black mother's struggle to cope with the murder of her brother years before at the hands of a white boy, to a mixed-race son's determination to be a strong man for his sister and his grandparents, this novel sweeps the reader up into the long arc of history and carries them along on a swift and inexorable current to the culmination of all things. A hefty dose of spiritualism ties all of the threads together with the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in the deep South, and reminds us that the conditions of racism today did not arise spontaneously or in isolation; that police brutality has roots in the treatment of Black people before the Civil Rights era, that vigilante justice by white mobs perpetrated on Black individuals was a predecessor to the injustices that continue to be heaped onto Black people today, and that mass incarceration, though it happens to white people, as well, was used and continues to be used disproportionately as a method for oppressing and subjugating Black people. In a similar vein to Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, this is an absolutely breathtaking must-read for anyone who looks to hear Black voices elevated, fictionalized or not, in the telling of their own histories.