Kruse's Keys: Read "Sing, Unburied, Sing" to Hear Firsthand the Dueling Sirens of Death and Hope

Let me start by wholeheartedly endorsing LISTENING to Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” The publishers have enlisted three separate narrators to read the alternating characters and it takes the listening experience to another level.  In a sense it’s almost a throwback experience to the old pre-tv radio story times in which one is immersed into the story.  

Early on in "Sing, Unburied, Sing," the young son of a barely-there-back-country-voodoo-meth-addicted mother, makes the damning pronouncement that his mother Leonie "kills things." And indeed, death hangs heavy in this novel and a sense of dread is immediately present as the Ward reveals a forgotten place in the backwoods of the South where everything is upside down, where everything is in decay, and where death is not a permanent state but rather is transitory. I'd liken this novel to Daniel Woodrell's revelatory "Winter's Bone" in that it unveils a segment of America that is largely forgotten, ignored, and written off.

Ostensibly, this is a fairly straight forward narrative. Single mother Leonie, her two children, and her junkie friend embark on a road trip to pick up Leonie's boyfriend when he gets out of jail. The story's depth emerges as Ward reveals that three of the characters can see certain wandering dead ghosts--ghosts that it turns out are looking for answers. Ward's literary mastery is evident, though, in the way in which this novel doesn't become a some supernatural story. She's able to do this because she's created characters with whom she so deeply empathizes that their visions don't seem fantastical but seem instead real and necessary as this family tries to come to grips with its past as they are mired down in a present quagmire.

Were one wanting to pair this novel with a piece of non-fiction, I'd recommend Isabel Wilkerson's stunning history of the black America's "Great Migration" out of the Deep South that began in the 1930s (my review of "Warmth of Other Suns" is here). For in Ward's recounting of the grandfather's ("Pop') time at Parchment prison, the reader is reminded that just 75 years ago in America, blacks were still de facto slaves in much of the south as they endured imprisonment without trial, and death came without a second thought from the white ruling class.

"Sing, Unburied, Sing" came at an important time in an America that is deeply divided--largely because people don't want, or take the time, to know each other, to know each other's history. Ward bestows humanity on a family whose tragedies most often wouldn't merit more than a passing mention on the backpages of a local newspaper. Her novel has empowered these voices, past and present, to sing out and tell their story.

Key Quotes:

• “Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants [...] since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways.” 
• "Leonie kills things." -Jojo
• "And then Leonie laughs, and even though it's a laugh it doesn't sound like one, there's no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won't grow" (Chapter 6) -Jojo
• "It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can't hit" -Leonie (Chapter 8)
• "Michael takes my face in his warm real hands and his lips meet mine and I am opening all over again losing language losing words, losing myself in that feeling that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled." -Leonie after getting high (Chapter 8)
• Maybe I wouldn't cry, Maybe my heart wouldn't feel likes it was a bird, richoted off a car midflight, stunned and reeling." -Jojo after cop handcuffs him (Chapter 9)

Key References (For Further Study):

• https://www.npr.org/2017/09/06/547560046/sing-mourns-the-dead-both-buried-and-unburied
• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/tracy-k-smith-on-sing-unburied-sing-jesmyn-ward.html?_r=0

Salvage the Bones: Read It Because: You will be reminded of both the devastating scope and power of Hurricane Katrina but also of the largely forgotten swathes of the American population

Our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Read It Because: You will be reminded of both the devastating scope and power of Hurricane Katrina but also of the largely forgotten swathes of the American population.

There are some great books that I read and I think to myself: I could write something like this someday (as an aspiring writer).  These storylines and worlds are one which I have lived or could imagine living.  Salvage the Bones is NOT one of those books.  Jesmyn Ward creates a world and captures its dialogue and cultural inner monologue with a level of detail and tenderness that will keep its characters alive in your thoughts long after you've finished the novel.

It's been more than a decade since the costliest hurricane in the US history ravaged the United States. I missed this weighty novel when it was published in 2011, joining an expansive family of "Katrina fiction."  While the hurricane plays a pivotal role in the story, its presence remains lurking on the periphery for the bulk of the narrative.  Instead, Ward draws the reader inside the community surrounding a poor backwoods southern family.  It's easy to forget that these communities still exist at this level of poverty in America--in that vein it reminded me of Winter's Bone (I only saw the incredible movie, but I've heard the book upon which the film was based is equally amazing).

Ward's artistry is most strikingly displayed in how she somehow manages to humanize a character that dogfights his nursing pitbull.  Don't think that's possible?  I dare you to read the book and disagree!

Ultimately, Ward pens a timeless tale about family, loss, longing, love and death that stands as a masterpiece for the foreseeable future.

Salvage the Bones: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

You have 8 highlighted passages

He is really the color of the red earth after someone has dug in it to plant a field or pull up stones or put in a body. It is Mississippi red.Read more at location 131

Manny was holding the ball as tenderly as he would a pit puppy with pedigree papers. I wanted him to touch me that way.Read more at location 151

I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain.Read more at location 851

Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck. It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer.Read more at location 1289

There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.Read more at location 1357

“Why?” Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearm. They are gripping Daddy’s wrist, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?Read more at location 1885

The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness.Read more at location 1907

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.Read more at location 3691