A Second National Book Award for Jesmyn Ward?

Jesmyn Ward is already on the long list for the National Book Award though her latest novel, after NBA winner "Salvage the Bones," has only been out for a few weeks. This is a remarkable testament to the consistent quality of Jesmyn Ward's skills, the way her narrative voice evokes all the joy, heartbreak, and anguish of a certain southern time and place and people. In thirteen-year-old JoJo, Ward has given birth to a character so anxious and watchful yet so loving and selfless that you want to wrap him up in your arms and take him home with you.

JoJo and his baby sister Kayla are the mixed race children of Michael, serving a three year stint at Parchman Farm, part of the infamous Mississippi state prison system, and Leonie, an addict who is so involved in her own needs that those of her children go unheeded. But for Leonie's parents, with whom they live, JoJo and Kayla would likely have been caught up in the foster care system a long time ago. But Pop and Mama, steadfast grandparents who lead by example, are working through their own crisis. Mama is at the end of a long struggle with cancer, Pop is trying to be all things to all people, and Leonie is off on binges for days or weeks at a time.

Not a single word is misplaced in this tight little novel that toggles back and forth between Leonie's and JoJo's points of view, between the present and years ago when Pop was also at Parchman. There he befriended a child named Richie who, like oh so many black boys in minor trouble, were housed and used in the cotton fields as slave laborers. Richie appears as an unquiet spirit, still wandering the land in search of the answers to his death appearing to JoJo who, like his mother, has a sixth sense. Please don't be put off by the use of ghosts to speak of past atrocities. The trope works. The unburied sing.

In exquisitely wrought prose, Ward sanctifies the relationship between JoJo and Kayla. She is everything to him. She is his reason for living, the vessel for his love, and Leonie can't stand it. She is unreasonably, but not inexplicably, filled with rage over the state of her life. When Kayla screams for JoJo and only JoJo to satisfy her needs, Leonie is both relieved and infuriated. She intuits but doesn't admit that her children feel safer with each other than with her even though she yearns for some semblance of family with Michael and their kids.

Naturally race plays a central role here, Michael is white and his family refuses to accept his black wife and children. But more than the personal, it is the long view of the south and racial injustices that interest Ms. Ward. She fuses the stereotypical story of poor black families just trying to survive with the untold stories of the past that history would prefer to bury. Her ghosts speak eloquently of a time we persist in believing and hoping is behind us. Though we now know that it may never be behind us, Ward gives us a glimpse of hope in "Sing Unburied Sing" that she didn't offer in "Salvage the Bones." 

I predict that multiple awards will be forthcoming for this crushingly beautiful novel. Grab it now before the holds list grows too long.

Ginny Gall - Or Another Term for a Long Season in Hell

Common wisdom tells us that if we truly want to know another person, culture, or way of life, we must walk a mile in those shoes. If Ta-Nahisi Coates' version of being a black man in the United States (http://bit.ly/1JLnMVb) is too harsh, and you would prefer to do your learning through fiction, then have I got the book for you!

 

 

 

The richest, lushest novel that I've read so far this year comes from an author, Charlie Smith, with whom I wasn't familiar, though he's won prizes galore. He is renowned as both a poet and a novelist so you shouldn't be surprised at the pure lyricism of his writing style. Even when the tale itself is teeming with brutality, cruelty, sorrow, and unspeakable yearning, it is so beautifully told that you simply cannot put it down.

 

I fell in love with Delvin Walker from the moment his mother, Capable Florence, pushed his "gummy little bushy-haired head" out of her body while climbing the back porch steps of her Chattanooga, Mississippi, shack. It was July, 1913, and though they were free blacks on paper, Jim Crow laws insured that there were no opportunities for women like Cappie who turned tricks in the old slave quarters to feed her brood of babies.

 

But Cappie had a gift that she shared with Delvin, stories. Tales of knights and palaces and kings lulled Delvin to sleep in the afternoons. By the age of four he was teaching himself to read from the funny papers left outside the general store. He dreamed that he would travel, see far-flung places, and succeed in the white world. Yet we sense, from the first paragraph of this incredible book, that life won't be easy for this dreamy, naïve boy.

 

Smith is so damn good that he lures us with his mesmerizing words (at least the optimists like me) into believing that maybe this time things can be different. After Cappie disappears, a loss that will haunt Delvin all his days, a wonderfully interesting man rescues Delvin, taking him in, teaching him to love Shakespeare, and to honor the living and the dead. Mr. Oliver, you see, runs the town's only Negro funeral home and he bestows a selfless generosity on young Delvin that of course, is too good to last.

 

Whispers of lynchings, followed by the burning of a Negro church, and an ugly incident with some white boys, which may or may not have ended in a death, set Delvin on a lifelong path of running, returning, and running again. Riding the rails from state to state, Delvin falls in hopeless love with a woman he can never win, learns the truth of America's black history from a professor with a traveling museum, and has his spirit crushed but not broken in a prison cell.

 

This masterful novel, written by a white man from Georgia, is truly a gift for anyone who wants to spend some time inside the mind,  body, and yes, the shoes, of a man who, because of the color of his skin, will never reap even the simplest American benefits, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.