I first fell in love with Jesmyn Ward’s prose when I read her 2017 National Book Award winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it over the years. Jojo struck my heart at the very beginning. I do love a vulnerable character, a young character forced to grow into their adulthood at a much too young age, because this is the reality for so many children, a reality that “society” prefers to ignore. And therein lies one of the novel’s many values—its power to connect with the morals and mortalities readers bring to it.
We meet Jojo in the opening lines, a dark and uncertain space:
I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that’s how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I’ve earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I’m ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody. Today’s my birthday…. (1)
In the first chapter, Jojo delivers truths of his circumstances—single mother of color, incarcerated white father, marginalized southern community, disjointed extended family. Jojo’s support exists within his grandparents, a truth I know well, a support system with a shelf life, also something I know well. Ward sculpts an extraordinary tension in these first few lines, all of which is built on morals and mortalities, the former forcing a judgment on the scene, a thirteen year old boy asked to witness and participate in the slaughter of a goat, the latter, inevitability of death for both humans and beasts. The narrator, again, as with all the works this Moral Authority series explores, withholds judgement, inviting the reader’s judgement and empathy instead, delivered in gorgeous language, rich and textured.
Who Gets To Decide What Is Real?
Ward does not stop at death and slaughter, she invites the reader into a world of marginalizations, incarcerations, addictions and hauntings, and this I must admit is my perfect honeypot. I am tempted by the margins of what is real and not real, the living and the dead, that in-between space where twilight and bedevilments conjure something that lay dormant in the back of the mind until unveiled by an expert wordsmith. And Ward is this wordsmith.
“I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.”
Jojo shares with us a moment of desire and uncertainty: “I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.” In these lines, Jojo yearns for maturity, the emotional tools needed to navigate such weight, the courage to “look at [death] straight.” The heartbreak is that no one ever looks at death “straight” in Jojo’s expectations of himself. But he is too young to know that the adults around him are as uncertain and fearful of death as he is. Adults learn to mask the uncertainty and the fear.
Jojo learns to mask his fear, too. He confesses to his readers a desire to be stronger than he feels himself to be. The irony is that he is the strongest character in the novel. He has extraordinary courage and wants for more. And when he encounters death in the shape of a deceased boy, he faces it with more maturity than I, and perhaps you, ever could? Jojo’s experience is real for him, no matter who believes him. No matter who sees it. And this question of reality hits home. So often children are not seen, not believed. They live complete lives within themselves, never to be seen by others.
Wielding Moral Authority
I fear for Jojo. I am fearful for and angry at his mother, Leonie, and his father, Michael, too, as they fight, consumed by their relationship, neglecting him. Their love and hate and neglect root somewhere in their shared fallibility of being human in impossible circumstances.
This hypervigilance I have for Jojo’s safety and his parents’ growth from the very opening is no doubt Ward’s intention, wielding the reader’s moral authority, extracted in just two lines. I am always amazed at a writer’s ability to conjure such care and tension and investment in so few words. Jesmyn Ward is a marvel in this.
