Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel

The end took me out !!!

The grip of drug addiction is exposed, laid bare in this story set in the southernmost region of Mississippi. The poignantly rendered characters will tear your heart out, like Jojo and his grandfather who raised him, cast as the ones who stumble through the rubble of a life crumbling from addiction. Jojo, still a boy, is his sister’s mother figure, feeding her at night, singing to her. He says of his mother, who disappears for days, “Leonie kill things.” A summation that can be said for the affects of drug addition in families throughout America. When Leonie uses, she sees visions of her brother, “chemical figments” that “came to me every time I snorted a line, every time I popped a pill.” This Given, her brother who was murdered by friends, is her conscience, a reminder of the “before” Leonie, the one who was once strong and destined for better things. “He was watching me, like always. He had mama’s face.” These visions, a gift her dying mother shares, “..runs in the blood, like silt in river water.” They lend a supernatural component to the story, like angels who nudge us to dig deep, to unearth our better selves, to fight against the need for an anesthetic, for numbing oneself to the world that is ours now instead of living in pursuit of a better end. Leonie and her family are swept into the scorched-earth legacy of illegal drug proliferation in America, and Jesmyn Ward has magnificently laid this out for us to see, to know. One can’t help but reflect the broader picture, question who looked away while companies with predatory marketing practices enabled an epidemic of drug addiction that trapped our country’s poorest into a life of misery and hopelessness. In the headlines, four major companies, one a household name, agreed to pay $21 billion for the opioid crises. They can afford the cash outlay, but the lives of those caught in their webs of financial gain have been lost, whether they live or die. This affecting story is told with such courage and heart, it will break you. You will never again be able to look away, sink back into that safe-space comfort of unknowing.