Emancipating Faulkner: Reading Go Down, Moses and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Enslaved African Americans and their descendants live in the webbed narrative of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. However, the author’s representation of the enslaved—and the “curse” of slavery that their descendants bear—is filtered through the consciousness of another white southerner, Issac McCaslin. This master narrative of slavery does not allow black characters to escape their tragic fates. To offer a counter narrative of the enslaved and generational curses, contributor Sherita L. Johnson reads Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing as a lyrical key to Faulkner’s novel. The aesthetics of the enslaved—spirituals and blues traditions, for instance—appear as evidence of the “cultural legacies of slavery” in both novels and, yet, Ward’s narrative allows us to travel from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to the Delta (and perhaps other routes out of Yoknapatawpha), ultimately, to emancipate Faulkner from that slave past.