"Ain't no more stories for you here": Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

"Ain't no more stories for you here":Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing Megan Ashley Swartzfager Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing Begins, in a sense, where Toni Morrison's Beloved ends.1 The novel, which earned for Ward her second National Book Award for fiction, grapples with the Beloveds—the persistent hauntings of slavery and other forms of racialized trauma—of an America that has attempted to bury slavery and its plurality of legacies beneath a formal history that proclaims the total and unmitigated success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The novel takes place in the rural Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where all of Ward's novels are set. This town is Faulknerian in the sense that it grew from the seeds of racism planted during slavery, making it a microcosm of post-slavery America. Bois Sauvage is the kind of place where a black man might be shot dead because of a bet gone awry, and where the authorities might agree to deem the incident a 'hunting accident.' A place where ignoring a No Trespassing sign can get you chased off a white man's property at the barrel of a gun. And where being black and poor or white and unlucky [End Page 313] might get you sent upstate to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which has evolved only superficially from the long-ago days when it operated like a plantation. (Smith)2 The novel is told in turns by the thirteen-year-old Jojo, Jojo's emotionally distant mother Leonie, and the ghost of Richie, a twelve-year-old boy who was incarcerated at Parchman Farm at the same time as Jojo's grandfather, Pop. Though Richie is the only ghost in the novel who speaks for himself, he is far from the only ghost. Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her murdered brother, Given, whose death at the hands of a white schoolmate was covered up as a "hunting accident" and who appears to Leonie when she gets high—an experience she seeks daily. These two young men—Richie and Given—are "unburied" in two senses of the word. First, the fact that they never achieved manhood, or the sense of community and love that Ward believes is essential to it, makes their deaths almost impossible to grieve, and this feeling is compounded by the fact that neither youth's untimely death receives adequate recognition. The justice system fails Given and his family, and Richie—who is killed by Pop in a protective act against the retributive violence of white guards and their dogs when Richie tries to run from Parchman—feels betrayed by the only father figure he has ever known and falls into the ranks of Parchman's innumerable Black victims. A lack of closure, of burial, allows these ghosts to haunt the living. Additionally, their stories, along with generations of trauma and slow violence, are exhumed—unburied—and brought to the foreground in a novel that begins with Jojo's quest for the same manhood that was denied Richie and Given. The intergenerational nature of the trauma that is exhumed in Ward's novel discloses the narrative's positionality in the evolving discourse on trauma. Literary conversations about trauma tend to focus on how trauma complicates the narrativization of experience. A member [End Page 314] of the Caruth school of trauma studies, Kristiaan Versluys writes about the cultural trauma of 9/11 and its representations in literature in his 2009 book Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel3 Versluys describes 9/11 as "ultimately a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems" that mirrors the physical collapse of the World Trade Center (2). In order to emerge from the semiotic rubble, people have no choice but to rummage through the symbols that the culture puts at the disposal of the distraught individual. Trauma leads to numbness, flashbacks, or nightmares. These intrusive symptoms can only be dealt with when a traumatic memory gets situated within a series of events. Trauma must be given...