"Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward

The Mississippi Delta, a hot, humid, green plants desert. White, for over two hundred years, the self-proclaimed masters of the country, nature and everything that lives there. Black, exploited for generations, stripped of their dignity, crushed. Individual fates and their interdependencies in which crystallizes the general. Stories of trips that lead to limits violence, suffering, poverty, small hopes, act big disappointment. Südstaatenepen with these elements, there are many and for a long time, but few are as shocking as powerful as realistic and as poetic as this.

The novel by Jesmyn Ward, who see some critics on par with Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, stirs, depressed, makes angry, be stumped back, but also ignited a flame of hope.

Three generations comprising staff from living and the dead. Two families live in separate, incompatible worlds. In the middle generation there is a connection between them, but instead of a bridge are a mess. For the ones have a dark, the other light skin, and that’s what counts in many places today in the southern United States.

“Big Joseph,” once the sheriff of the town, is a wealthy man, the one simple credo directs: “nigger nigger remain.” His son Michael finds him a relic of the past. His own view of the world is flexible enough that it impregnates the seventeen Colored Leonie in high school, stays together with her and a few years gets a second child later.

The two children, Joseph and Michaela with Christian names, Jojo Kayla and in everyday life, grow up with their dark-skinned grandparents, which they call “Mam” and “Pop”.

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While Jojo “Big Joseph” got in his whole childhood only two times to face and his mother Leonie is threatened with a gun when she wants to enter her father the terrain are Mam and pop for the boy the central caregivers. From them he receives love, care and wisdom. When he was eleven, Mam has cleared him, and to his thirteenth birthday – with the action of the novel begins – holds Pop it’s time to make a bold, responsible adults out of it. As a kind of rite of passage he slaughters a goat with him.

JoJo’s parents fall as educators of largely. Michael is often absent; he works on the oil rig “Deepwater Horizon” (where he witnessed the disaster of 2010) and must then spend a few years in the notorious state prison Parchman Farm in northern Mississippi. Leonie is a superficial, selfish person leading their lives carelessly and irresponsibly. With drugs of all stripes she closes her eyes. good hands with Pop and Mam because she knows her children, she is interested in is no longer even seriously ill for their needs than their mother and bedridden. That brother and sister like Siamese twins stick together, that Jojo would do anything for Kayla, Kayla that only in his arms well and cared feels triggers in their anger, perhaps because they could not find such security.

Jojo’s birthday party ends with a surprising call. Michael is released early. This brings a road trip between farce disaster, madness and absurdity into gear two days later. Against her will, the children have to pick up Michael. While Leonie stuffed all sorts of clutter in their already trashed Chevrolet, Jojo thinks precaution to the remains of the birthday dinner, Pop slipped him a voodoo small leather bag with a spring, an animal tooth and a river pebbles to, and the boy assured him that he can not stop what Pop has taught him, such as change tires. Will still need to Misty, Leonie are white colleague from the Country Bar-fetched, because even her husband sits in a Parchman. This and the common dependence on drugs of any kind linking the two women.

Two hour drive to the north, interrupted by a few stops for the dope supply. Kayla pisses the soul from the body after it has set off the floor of the car in her mouth (for lack of breakfast) any dirt. Incidentally, the trip to Parchman and back casually filled with narrative appetizers and memories that make up at the end of the consistent story puts together a color family, with human losses, bloody scars, pain, fear and suffering. It is the story of an entire people.

Tell all this will turn by Jojo and Leonie. But there is a third perspective. It belongs to those who died in the wrong, they were denied a funeral that you hid in some holes. As victims never gesühnter past crimes they raise an important, powerful narrative voice that will draw the reader to the apocalyptic final scene in the spell.

Such is “unburied” the child Richie. Because he was caught stealing food for his starving brothers and sisters, he was sentenced to forced labor in the labor colony. At twelve he was the youngest in Parchman. The crimes that were done to him and finally killed him are unspeakable. And “if someone dies on bad way … that even God can not mitansehn it remains the mind halfway there and wanders around, longs for peace as a thirsty man for water”.

So is it that even the rattle drought spirit Richie one of the party is wedged on the floor of the car between the front seat and Kayla’s car seat. Jojo has seen the dead and to communicate with them the rare gift. He knows Richie already from Pops told memories, because the time had a few years long in Parchman toil. The terrible details has Pop certainly saves his grandson, and even its history is a “moth-eaten shirt, shredded into shreds: the form is true, but the details are erased”. Now could Richie Jojo tell what Pop has left out, and Richie has even more questions of his past.

Another deceased, who accompanies the living, is Given, Leonie’s three years older brother. Has the “Big Joseph ‘second son on his conscience, because he shot him in the back at a hunt. An unfortunate accident, as it was called later. Given appear Leonie only if she is on drugs. He is concerned, exhorts them to change their behavior, their history differently continue living. Faithful he accompanied Mam on their slow way to the afterlife

The ghosts of all who never buried the dead -. Women, men, girls, boys and babies – squat like black silver crows in the branches of a tree, sing and cry, and her eyes speak what you can not put into words. Jojo is their vision not stand, will drive them with a stick, but he does not succeed. Only Kayla dahingebrabbeltes, unintelligible word jumble, its sung melody that intertwines with the rustling of the trees, the whisper of ghosts, takes away the fear. Relax, breathe a “yes” vote with Kayla a “home”.

A budding of hope is the rising generation. Jojo and Kayla, from their grandparents unconditionally loved and supported knowledge contribute to their lawless, abused ancestors in their souls. The insane drive is its own test in which they must overcome the fear of death. Kayla is almost destroyed by the emaciation of her weakened body, Jojo is placed by a policeman handcuffed and threatened with his pistol to the head. What saves her and gives hope for a future in a better society, their interconnectedness, its intuitive Care, their sense of responsibility. This book I have on the list to my 20 favorite books.