For Ward, Mississippi poisons bodies and imaginations alike. The division between carceral and civilian life is also porous. It’s a brutal place, “a place for the dead”, one that has three cemeteries on site. He enters a world where the division between plantation, labour camp and penal colony is blurred as prisoners spend their days planting, weeding and harvesting crops. One of its characters, a 12-year-old who is caught stealing salted meat, is sentenced to three years at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm (the eerie blues and spirituals of some of its inmates were recorded between 19 by folklorist Alan Lomax). The landscapes it describes with forensic ferocity are toxic. Sing, Unburied, Sing is most effective as a poetic critique of US history. Their son Jojo acts as a bridge between grandparents Pop and Mama (the former afflicted by memories the latter dying of cancer) and his toddler sister.

This family is headed by Leonie, a mother at 17, hooked on drugs, married to a white man named Michael whose cousin killed her brother and who is himself completing a jail sentence. Jesmyn Ward’s gnarly, freighted novel is a portrait of a broken family living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. If this sounds apocalyptic, it’s representing the slow apocalypse being experienced by black America. Not much later he’ll be eating the goat’s liver in a plate full of gravy. Soon the youngster is throwing up in the grass. The smell “overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit”. There are terrible bleating and gurgling sounds.

His grandfather is showing him how to kill a goat: how to slit its throat, how to slice its stomach and reach in for its intestines. A teenager named Jojo finds himself in a place of dirt and mud and slime and blood. S ing, Unburied, Sing begins as it mostly means to go on: in blackness.

Sing unburied sing novel