Ghosts in Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

This chapter examines the corporeal legacies of Jesmyn Ward’s third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Like her other writings, it reaches into US (southern) history and memory to lay bare the legacies of racial violence that still striate the nation’s landscape. Through multiple first-person narratives, Ward follows Jojo, his sister Kayla, and mother Leonie as they drive to Parchman prison to pick up Leonie’s boyfriend. This journey through the delta landscape is also a journey into the region and nation’s past. The entangling of the prison and the plantation haunt the novel, and the ghosts of Parchman linger both literally and metaphorically. This chapter argues that Sing, Unburied, Sing illuminates the historical injuries and injustices done to Black lives in the region and nation’s past, which are made manifest in representations of embodiment. If the ghost, as Avery Gordon argues, is an index for the past’s presence—a way of seeing how that which is invisible actually structures social life—then the ghosts of Parchman prison reveal much about race in contemporary America. Depicting how Blackness is haunted both by captivity and the possibilities of fugitivity, Ward’s novel traces a memorative line through the heart of Mississippi and the nation.