Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

[Applause]

[Lolly Bowean]: Thank you,
welcome and congratulations.

[Jesmyn Ward]: Thank you.

[Bowean]: So I think that you're going to
open up with a reading for us.

[Ward]: Yes, I am. I thought that it would
be a good idea to begin from the beginning,

so I will read a short section from
the first chapter from Jojo's perspective.

Jojo is one of the three main narrators
in the novel.

He's a 13-year-old mixed-race boy growing
up in the modern South, and the novel

begins on his birthday as he is
following his Black grandfather out

to the animal pens behind their house
and his grandfather is basically

gonna slaughter a goat to cook it
for his birthday.

And so that's where we begin.
And then I'll read from two other sections

after that. One from Leonie's perspective--
Leonie is Jojo's mother.

She is not the best mother, but I'll
explain a little more about her

before her section. And then I'm gonna
read from Richie's section last,

and I'll explain that too, but I'm probably
still totally going to disorient you,

so I apologize.
[Reading from novel]: Chapter One: Jojo

I like to think I know what death is.
I like to think that it's something I can

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 Papa
at 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

as normal and born so Pop will think I've
earned these 13 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. I grab the door so
it don't slam, ease it into the jam.

I don't want Mam and Kayla to wake up
with none of us in the house.

Better for 'em to sleep. Better for my
little sister Kayla to sleep.

Because at nights when Leonie's out
working, she wake up every hour,

sit straight up in the bed and scream.
Better for Grandma Mam to sleep,

because the chemo done dried her up
and hollowed her out

the way the sun and the air do water oaks.

Pop weaves in and out of the trees,
straight and slim and brown

as a young pond tree. He spits in the dry,
red dirt and the wind makes the trees wave.

It's cold. This spring is stubborn.
Most days it won't make way for warmth.

The chill stays like water in a bad
draining tub.

I left my hoodie on the floor in Leonie's
room, where I sleep, and my tshirt is thin,

but I don't rub my arms. If I let the cold
go at my, I know when I see the goat,

I flinch or frown when Pop cuts the throat.
And Pop, being Pop, will see.

Pop picks the unlucky goat, ties a rope
around its head like a noose,

leads it out the pen. The others bleating,
rushing, buttin' his legs, lickin' his pants.

"Git, git," Pop says, and kicks them away.
I think the goats understand each other.

I can see it in the aggressive butts
of their heads and the way they

bite Pop's pants and yank. They know what
that loose rope tied around the

goat's neck means. The white goat, with
black splashes on his fur dances

from side to side, resisting, like he
catches a whiff of what he's

walking toward. Pop pulls him past the
pigs, who rush the fence and grunt at Pop

wantin' food, and down the trail toward
the shed, which is closest to the house.

Leaves slap my shoulders and they
scratch me dry, leaving thin, white lines

scrawled on my arms.

"Why you ain't got more of this
cleared out, Pop?"

"Ain't enough space," Pop says, "And don't
nobody need to see what I got back here.

You can hear the animals up front
from the road,

and if anybody come back here trying to
mess with my animals I can here 'em

coming through these trees."

"You think any of the animals would let
themselves get took?"

"No, goats is mean and pigs is smarter
than you think. And they vicious too.

One of them pigs will take a bite out of
anybody they ain't used to eatin' from."

Pop and I enter the shed. Pop ties the
goat to a post he's driven into the floor

and it barks at him.

"Who you know got all their animals
out in the open?" Pop says,

and Pop is right. Nobody has their animals
out in the open in fields, or in the front

of their property. The goat shakes its
head from side to side, pulls back,

tries to shrug the rope. Pop straddles it,
puts his arm under the jaw.

"The Big Joseph," I say. I wanna look out
the shed when I say it, over my shoulder

at the cold, bright green day, but I
make myself stare at Pop, at the goat

with its neck being raised to die.
Pop snorts. I hadn't wanted to say

his name. Big Joseph is my white grandpa,
Pop, my black one. I've lived with Pop

since I was born. I've seen my white
grandpa twice. Big Joseph is round

and tall, and looks nothin' like Pop.

He don't even look like Michael,
my father, who is lean,

and smudged with tattoos. He picked them
up like souvenirs from wannabe artists,

and out on the water when he worked
offshore, and in prison.

"Well there you go," Pop says.

[Ward, cont'd]; So the next section I'm
going to read from is from

one of Leonie's chapters. Leonie is one
of the other narrators in the novel.

As I said earlier, she is Jojo's mother.
She's somewhere in her twenties.

She is not the best Mother. She can be
abusive to her kids, physically abusive,

emotionally abusive.
She neglects them too. She is still

in love with Jojo's father, with Kayla's
father. Kayla is Jojo's little sister.

And both Leonie and Michael struggle with
substance abuse problems.

I think part of the reason that Leonie
struggles with them is because

she struggles to live with the grief
that she feels at the loss of her brother,

because her brother died when they
were both teenagers.

So, when Leonie gets high, she sees
a phantom of her brother.

And this is from a section of the book
where she's talking about

the first time that she saw her brother.

[Reading from novel]: Three years ago, I
did a line and saw Given for the first time.

It wasn't my first line, but Michael had
just gone to jail.

I had started doing it often, every other
day I was bending over a table,

sifting powder into lines, inhaling.
I knew I shouldn't've. I was pregnant.

But I couldn't help wanting to
feel the coke go up my nose,

shoot straight to my brain and burn up
all the sorrow and despair I felt

at Michael being gone. The first time
Given showed up,

I was at a party in the [Kill?], and my
brother walked through there with

no bullet holes in his chest
or in his neck.

Cold and long-limbed like always,
but not smirking.

He was shirtless and red about the neck
and face like he'd been running,

but his chest was still a stone.
Still as he must've been after

Michael's cousin shot him. I thought about
Mama's little forest. The 10 trees she planted

in an ever-widening spiral on every
death day. I ground my gums sore

staring at Given. I ate him with my eyes.
He tried to talk to me but I couldn't hear

him, and he just got more and more
frustrated. He sat on the table in front

of me, right on the mirror with the
coke on it. I couldn't put my face in it

again without putting it in his lap,
so we sat there staring at each other,

me trying not to react so I wouldn't look
crazy to my friends who were

singing along to country music, kissing
sloppily in corners like teenagers,

walking in zig zags, with their arms
linked, out into the dark.

Given looked at me like he did when we
were little and I broke the new

fishing pole pop got him. Murderous.
When I came down, I almost ran

out to my car. I was shakin' so hard,
I could hardly put my key into the ignition.

Given climbed in next to me,
sat in the passenger seat,

and turned and looked at me
with a face of stone.

"I quit," I said, "I swear I won't
do it no more."

He rode with me to the house, and I
left him sitting in the passenger seat

as the sun softened and lit the edges
of the sky, rising.

I crept into Mama's bedroom and
watched her sleep.

Dusted her shrine. Her rosary draped over
her Virgin Mary statue in the corner,

nestled among blue-grey candles,
river rocks, three dried cat tails,

a single yam.

When I saw Given, not Given for the
first time, I didn't tell my Mama nothing.

[Ward, cont'd]: And this third section
is from the third narrator in the book.

He's the ghost of a boy named Richie.
Richie served time in

Parchman Prison Farm, which is like
the Mississippi state penitentiary,

in the 1940s with Pop, Jojo's grandfather.
Richie doesn't know how he died, and

in this section he's...So, somewhere in
the middle of the book, Richie finds Jojo,

and Richie decides to follow Jojo,
because he can sense that Jojo is Pop's,

and Pop was Richie's friend and protector,
I think, when they were in Parchman Prison

together, and so in this section, Richie
the ghost is talking about what death was

like for him when he first died and then
woke up in the afterlife.

[Reading from novel]: I know Jojo is
innocent, because I can read it in the

unmarked swell of him. His smooth face,
ripe with baby fat. His round, full stomach,

his hands and feet soft as his younger
sister's. He looks even younger when

he falls alseep. His baby sister has
flung herself across him,

and both of them slumber like
young feral cats.

Open mouths, splayed arms and legs,
exposed throats.

When I was 13, I knew much more than him.
I knew that metal shackles could

grow into the skin. I knew that leather
could split flesh like butter.

I knew that hunger could hurt,
could scoop me hollow as a gourd,

and that seeing my siblings starving could
hollow out a different part of me too.

Could make my heart ricochet through
my chest desperately.

I watched Jojo and Kayla sprawl, sleep,
and wonder if I ever slept like that

when I was young. I wonder if Riv ever
looked at me and saw a wild, naive thing

in the cotton next to him. I wonder if he
felt pity, or if there was more love.

Jojo snores to a snort and stops, and I
feel something in my chest,

where my heart would be if I was
still alive, soften toward him.

I did not understand time either,
when I was young.

How could I know that after I died,
Parchman would pull me from the sky?

How could I imagine Parchman would pull me
to it and refuse to let go?

And how could I conceive that Parchman
was past, present and future all at once?

That the history and sentiment that carved
the place out of the wilderness, would

show me that time is a vast ocean,
and that everything is happening at once?

I was trapped, as trapped as I'd been in
the room of pines where I woke up.

Trapped as I was before the white snake,
the black vulture came for me.

Parchman had imprisoned me again.
I wandered the new prison,

night after night. It was a place
bound by cinder blocks and cement.

Watched the men fuck and fight
in the dark, so twisted up in each other

that I couldn't tell where one man ended
and another began.

I spent so many turns of the earth
at the new Parchman.

I watched for the dark bird,
but he was absent.

I despaired, burrowed into the dirt, slept
and rose to witness the newborn Parchman.

I watched chained men clear the land and
lay the first logs for the first barracks

for gunmen and trusty shooters. I thought
I was in a bad dream. I thought that if I

burrowed and slept and woke again,
I would be back in the new Parchman.

But instead, when I slept and woke,
I was in the Delta, before the prison.

And native men were ranging over that
rich earth, hunting and taking breaks

to play stick ball and smoke.
Bewildered, I burrowed and slept and woke

to the new Parchman again, to men who
wore their hair long and

braided to their scalps. Who sat for hours
in small windowless rooms,

staring at big black boxes that stream
dreams, their faces in the blue light

were stiff as corpses. I burrowed,
and slept, and woke many times

before I realized, this was the
nature of time.

[Ward cont'd]: Thank you.

[Applause]

[Bowean]: First, thank you, for that,
it is such a gift to hear an author

actually read the words, and I don't know
about the audience, but I definitely could

feel haunted to hear it in your own voice
as you wrote it.

You selected what you were going to
share about these character today.

Tell us why you picked those particular
stanzas that you wanted to share.

[Ward]: I think that each section that I
read from is representative of what

each character's major struggle is.
So we begin with Jojo in the moment where

he is confronting death, and he's thinking
about death, and he's thinking about

what it means for something to live
and then die. And he's at this moment

in his life where he's 13, his
grandmother's sick and I think that

he knows that she will dies soon. And so
death is something that he's

definitely thinking about.
And then of course there's the spector

of his uncle that he's probably grown up,
his whole life,

hearing stories of his uncle. And so again
he's thinking about death,

he's wondering if there's anything that
comes afterwards, right?

And at the same time though, he's also
trying to figure out what it means to be

a man, and how a man conducts himself
in the world. What it means to be a man

in America. What it means to be a Black
man in America. What it means to be

a Black man in the South, versus what it
means to be a white man in America,

what it means to be a white man
in the South. I think that's why he thinks

about Michael. That's why he thinks about
Big Joseph, his grandfather.

One of the reasons that I wanted to write
about a mixed-race boy specifically

is because I knew that he would be
wrestling with these different ideas

concerning masculinity. And concerning
man-hood. And I felt like if he had these

very different models for that in his
family it would do much to

increase the stakes for him in a very
intimate way.

I wanted to read from that particular
section in Leonie's chapter because

I think that she's the kind of character
that you meet and it's very easy to

dislike her, but I think that when you
learn more about her, and you learn more

about her past and about the fact that
she lost a sibling, and that she is

carrying that grief with her but yet her
character flaw is that she can't sit with

that grief and in sitting with that grief
learn how to live with that grief, and

become a healthier human being. I think
that that makes her a very sympathetic

character, especially because you can tell
that she's aware of the ways that she's

not being the best mother for her children
or not being the best

daughter to her parents. She's being
irresponsible often. But she can't do

anything about it. And so I think that
that section that I read from shows

how here in this moment she actually sees,
I mean, Given is a ghost here but I think

that his presence could also be read as
just a symbol of her grief and how it's

ever-present for her and it haunts her
and it follows her. So that's why I wanted

to read that section. And with Richie,
I wanted to read the section

that I did because originally,
Richie didn't come to me as a character

until, I was like five chapters into
the book, I discovered Richie's character.

And the reason that I discovered that I
found Richie's character is that I was

researching Parchman Prison. And Parchman
Prison is an actual prison in Mississippi.

A lot of people are surprised to
find that out. It basically was a working

plantation in the 1930s, in the 1940s,
in the 1950s, and it was basically

populated, I'd say, 90 percent of the
inmates were Black men and Black boys.

There were some Black women who were sent
there too and a very small population of

white men. But mostly it was peopled by
black men and black boys who were

basically re-enslaved. They worked
in the fields. They were beaten with whips.

They were shackled one to the other and
they were made to lay railroad track and

clear tracks of forest.
They were re-enslaved.

And I found out, when I was doing that
research that boys as young as 12 and 13

were charged with petty crimes like
loitering and vagrancy and they were

sent to Parchman Prison where they were
re-enslaved, and I was so horrified

at the fact that that had happened, and
that I didn't know about it.

I'd never learned about it in school.
I was raised in Mississippi, I took

Mississippi history, I never knew that
children like Richie existed, and I was

horrified by the fact that they had been
erased, in some respect.

They had been erased from history,
and I was horrified that I didn't know

about it, and I was horrified that these
children had been tortured and had endured

so much and they had been silenced.
All that suffering had been erased.

I keep using the word erased but that
really affected me. And so I read about

kids like Richie and I thought: I have
to write about this. I have to write

about a boy like this. A boy who was
one of these kids. I wanted to give him

agency, and I wanted him to be able to
interact with other characters in the

present. And I figured the only way that I
could do that was, I had to make him

into a ghost. So I wanted to read that
particular section because I feel like

Richie is struggling with his past. He's
struggling with the history of Parchman

Prison. He's struggling with the horror
of that place, and in many ways its

doomed him to wander the earth in this
kind of purgatory. And to reckon with the

horror of that place day in and day out.
And so that's why I wanted to read

from that section.

[Bowean]: The character of Richie, you've
learned about him through research so you

came to him later. Alice Walker said that
when she wrote The Color Purple, that her

characters just came to her in a vision.
How did you meet Jojo and Leonie?

Who are they to you? And how did you
come to them?

[Ward]: I'm not a plotter. I don't plot
my fiction. I begin each novel with a

vague idea of who the most important
characters are. But I do have to say that

Jojo came to me first. I was just casting
about for new novel ideas, this was in

maybe 2009, I just completed a rough draft
of Salvage of the Bones, and I was anxious

about what my next project might be.
I was trying to figure that out.

I was just trying to figure out, who can I
write about next? Because that's the

question I ask myself. Not what can I
write about next but who can I write about

next, and Jojo came to me. He was this
little, vulnerable 13-year-old kid who is

trying to navigate growing up as a Black
boy, because when other people see him,

they read him as a Black boy, they see
him as a black boy. So I was trying to

figure out what that means in the modern
South. And there was just something about

him and the place that he was in and the
moment that he was in in his life that

made me want to write his story.
Even though it took me,

probably five years to figure out, maybe
a little less, maybe four years to figure

out exactly who he was and who the people
were around him. So Jojo came to me first.

Then the next character who came to me
was Pop. Maybe because of his importance

to Jojo, because that's his grandfather,
that's his caretaker, that's his father,

that's his role model. So Pop came to me
and began to tell his own Parchman stories

and then only after I figured out who Pop
was could I then find my way to Leonie.

She was harder to decipher. It took me a
while to begin to understand who she was

and what motivated her. And Given was the
key to that. Given and Mam, her mother.

They were the keys. So for me, it's like
a chain. I meet one character that leads

me to another character, which leads me to
another character, which leads me to

another character,
and each of those characters

teaches me something about the others.

[Bowean]: With Jojo, because in previous
books that you've written, you've taken on

the voice of women. With Jojo, you're
taking on not only a male voice but the

voice of a young boy. Was that a challenge
for you? And in many ways Jojo is the

only character that is easy to love
in Sing. Is that deliberate because he's

so young and he's at the cusp of a certain
decision in his life?

[Ward]: I think so. I loved him from the
beginning. I love all my characters but

some of them, for whatever reason, are
easier to love than others. I felt that

way about Esch in Salvage the Bones.
I loved her from the very beginning.

There was something very sympathetic about
her. I think part of me wanted to save her.

I wanted to pull her up out of the moment
she was in, out of the situation that she

was in, and I felt the same for Jojo.
It's not hard to love him, and I think

It's especially easy to love him because
he's a child, he's a 13-year-old child

who is burdened with adult burdens.
The world that he has to maneuver and the

responsibilities that he has to shoulder,
these are things that normally adults have

to deal with, and yet this child has to
deal with them. I think that makes him

easy to love. He wasn't difficult to
write for me and maybe the reason why he

wasn't difficult to write is because I
loved him and because I felt such sympathy

for him. Now, that's not to say that
I didn't revise the book 15 times before

I sent it on to my editor, because I did.
And so when I write a first draft, most of

it is very intuitive. I find my way to the
story through the...you know I immerse

myself in the characters and I just
follow where the characters lead me

in that world. When I'm done with the
rough draft and it's time for me to go

back in and revise, then that's when I
begin to think about, say,

Jojo's character development. Is he enough
of a boy? Does he think about sex as much

as he needs to think about sex? Does he
move through the world like a 13-year-old

might? I think about all those things when
I go back in and revise.

One revision, I revise by...concern. So
if one of my concerns is Jojo's character

development, and whether or not he's
enough of a 13-year-old boy, then I devote

one whole revision to just concentrating
on that aspect, and I revise the entire

manuscript just concentrating on getting
that right. And then when I'm done,

I check that off of the list and then I
move on to my next issue. And sometimes

that's, you know then it's Pop's character
development, or Leonie's.

And so I do think about voice, or whether
a character is acting in appropriate ways

for who they are when I go back and revise
but I try not to think about those things

in a first draft.

[Bowean]: Now, you said that when you were
developing the character that you were

thinking about his family, you were thinking
about how he would respond to certain

situations, and Jojo, and his mother
Leonie, there are a lot of real hard

issues that are raised in this book.
Earlier you mentioned grief. This is a

family that is very grief stricken, not
just Leonie from the loss of her brother

Given, who continues to reappear, but Jojo
becomes haunted by grief, the loss of his

grandmother. His Pop is kind of haunted
by grief. You also talk about, there are

certain threads that run through this book
that run through all of your work,

injustice being one, Given was killed and
no one was held accountable for it.

For me in many ways, Given's story
reminded me of Trayvon Martin's story,

which you write about in your anthology.
Can you talk about addressing race and

poverty and injustice and worth in your
books, and why you wanted to address

that in this story?