Sing, Unburied, Sing as a Coming-of-Age Novel

Sing, Unburied, Sing opens with the protagonist, Jojo, turning thirteen. The next day, Jojo, his beloved younger sister Kayla, and his absent mother Leonie leave their family home to pick up his father, Michael, from prison. The novel then unfurls at break-neck speed. Ward confronts heavy themes of addiction, grief, and generational trauma, while taking the reader on a vivid and magical journey through rural Mississippi. Amidst the dangerous, adult world we are thrust into with Jojo, one can forget that Sing, Unburied, Sing is, at its core, a coming-of-age story. Ward adapts this mode of storytelling to draw much-needed attention to the loss of innocence caused by the poverty and racism many black teenagers face while growing up in the American south. 

Set far from the backdrop of a typical American suburb, there is no gossipping, detention, or first kiss that catalyzes Jojo’s maturation. Jojo’s coming-of-age is forced onto him early, and focuses on the demands that he gain an understanding of his family’s suffering and their relationship to death. Jojo begins the novel by saying “I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight” (1). Jojo was not sheltered from death as a child: he watches his grandfather slaughter animals, he is aware of the young death of his uncle, and he is witnessing the graphic decline of his grandmother’s health. However, his naïvité is exposed when considering his grandfather’s upbringing, as well as during his confrontations with the ghost of a young boy, Richie. When Leonie leaves Jojo home alone when he was nine, Leonie defends herself by saying “You was shucking oysters down at the docks when you was his age, Mam changing diapers” (16). When Jojo asks Pop to tell him the story of his time at Parchman, it is revealed that Pop was only fifteen when he was imprisoned at the brutal work camp (22). 

Pop was not the youngest inmate at Parchman, and took a twelve year old boy named Richie under his wing. Richie died trying to escape, and Jojo’s coming-of-age is also signaled by his ability to see Richie’s ghost following his thirteenth birthday. His mother Leonie’s own jarring transition to adulthood is symbolized by her ability to see her brother’s ghost after she begins to do hard drugs (34). When Richie’s ghost appears, he tells Jojo that he doesn’t know anything about love, home, or time, and says that “Jojo is innocent…when I was thirteen, I knew much more than him” (183-185). Richie wants Jojo to help him “remember”, and get Pop to tell Jojo the part of Richie’s story his childhood self had never heard (240) At the novel’s close, Jojo’s coming-of-age is tested and proven when he gets to Pop to say he killed Richie out of mercy. He shows a deep understanding and acceptance of his family, saying “I think I understand.. I feel it in me, too… a deep unsettling” (279). A coming-of-age marked by unsettling and traumatic circumstances, the story of Sing, Unburied, Sing, is ultimately the story of Jojo’s lost childhood innocence.