"Sing, Unburied, Sing:" Giving Voice to the Ghosts of the Past

I had just finished reading Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, about a black family pinioned beneath the brutal legacy of slavery, poverty and racism in 1940s Mississippi, when I saw Ira Berlin's obituary in the Washington Post. It shocked me. It was such a sorrowful juxtaposition. Ira was a friend from graduate student days at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and few scholars knew the history of this legacy better than Ira.   

Ira was founding director and lead scholar of the Freedman and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, a pioneering documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom told from the slaves' points of view. The documents are all from the National Archives. I worked on the project briefly. So far, six volumes of FREEDOM: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, have been published, along with several award-winning books and articles. 

In these volumes, Ira Berlin and his team of historians have given voice to the 4 million slaves in the American South who put their own freedom on the agenda of the Civil War. 

After the horror of the bloody war came the horror of Reconstruction, when a new form of human bondage emerged, as vicious as any on Earth.  The freedpeople's struggle to survive against the odds and to achieve full emancipation continued well into the 20th century. The transition from slavery to freedom is a long and winding road that traverses the soul of America to this day. 

Jesmyn Ward's novel takes place in the 1940s South, a brutal era of injustice and oppression. As the Freedom History Project gives voice to slaves, Ward gives voice to the descendants of slaves who had to fight every day just to survive. Fear, terror, and death were constant companions. 

Sing, Unburied, Sing takes place in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, a poor Mississippi coastal town based on the real place Ward grew up and still lives with her children, in DeLisle, Miss.  "The southern Mississippi landscape is part of her, with its snaking bayous and dense tangles of trees." (Emily Kask, NPR). 

The story follows the tangled lives of a mixed-race adolescent boy named Jojo, wise for his age and the caregiver of his toddler sister Kayla; Leonie, Jojo's drug-addicted mother, visited by the ghost of her brother Given, shot dead by a white man; Jojo's wise grandfather Pop, his model and mentor, and his grandmother Mam, a spiritual healer slowly dying from a painful cancer; and the restless ghosts of the long dead who make their presence known.   

Ira Berlin made it his mission to share the history of these ghosts and their slave ancestors, to give them the agency they were denied when they were alive. 

Jesmyn Ward, through fiction and story-telling, shares that mission.  The past is not dead in Ward's novel. It is ever present.  And it is a heavy burden to bear.  

The story is built around an arduous car trip to Mississippi's notorious Parchman Penitentary to pick up Leonie's white boyfriend Michael. Leonie insists that her son Jojo and toddler Kayla join her to meet their father. She wants it to be a family trip, but by now we know with Jojo that it will be something else. And it is. Fraught with danger, tension, and disharmony, seemingly endless, one disaster after another. The ghosts are along for the ride. They are never far away. The voices of the "unsung."  

The ghost character Richie, who appears only to Jojo, in a determined but not  threatening way, is a 12-year-old boy, one year younger than Jojo, who had been imprisoned and brutalized at Parchman when Pop was also there. Pop did his best to shield the innocent young boy from the jail's terrors, where the prisoners were treated like slaves. "They were worked and worked and worked and worked, and they were starved, and they were beaten. They were tortured."  Parchman was an American Gulag.

Ward gives Richie a voice, insistent and poignant, a voice needing desperately to be heard. Richie needs to know how he had died, he has to know, so he can "go home." He demands answers from Jojo, who finally draws the truth from his grandfather. 

As Pop tells the long-buried secret about how Richie died, painful beyond measure, Jojo looks out the window of the old homestead his grandparents had built with their hands and hearts, always with a mixture of fear and hope. "The branches are full. They are full of ghosts, two or three, all the way to the top, to the feathered leaves."  They are the ghosts of the sinned-against, the raped and murdered, the mutilated and the hanged.  Little Kayle sees them too, and tells them "Go home." 

We weep at the brutal clarity. 

When death comes for Mam, he is "pulling all the weight of history behind him."  And we can feel it. Leonie summons the gods to take Mam away, just as Mam had asked her to do, immersed in the ritual her mother taught her. Another ghost is in the room, the ghost of Mam's son and Leonie's brother Given.  Jojo watches. He asks what Leonie is saying but she doesn't answer him. She knows this about Jojo and his question: "He doesn't understand what it means to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods. To let her go." 

Adrienne Green in a review in the Atlantic, summed the novel up beautifully. 

"Sing, Unburied, Sing is, ultimately, about a journey home, one where the characters find “something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease.” Bois Sauvage and Parchman and Mississippi are all dwellings in their own right, but they’re overcast by an unshakable sorrow. Ward’s meditation on death isn’t meant to expose brutality for its own sake, but to illustrate how her characters, how people, grapple with history. It’s an unending process, she suggests, from which even the deceased aren’t shielded."

Sources/references:

* Emily Kask, "Writing Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward Salvages Stories of the Silenced," NPR. 

* Ron Charles, editor of Bookworld, illustrations by Alla Dreyvitser/Washington Post, review of Sing, Unburied, Sing. 

* Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate, book review in The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2017. 

* Adrienne Green, "Jesmyn War's Eerie, Powerful Unearthing of History," The Atlantic, Sept. 27, 2017.

*  Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Here's a great list of PUBLICATIONS
Series 1, volume 1, The Destruction of Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 896 pp.

Series 1, volume 2, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South, ed. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 814 pp.

Series 1, volume 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, ed. Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville (Cambridge University Press, 1990). 975 pp.

Series 2, The Black Military Experience, ed. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1982). 896 pp.

Series 3, volume 1, Land and Labor, 1865, ed. Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O'Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 1,073 pp.

Series 3, volume 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867, ed. René Hayden, Anthony E. Kaye, Kate Masur, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O'Donovan, Leslie S. Rowland, and Stephen A. West (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 1,070 pp.

Other Volumes   Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War, by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 243 pp.

Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (The New Press, 1992). 571 pp.

Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland (The New Press, 1997). 259 pp.

Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War, ed. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 192 pp.

Articles in Scholarly Journals

Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Writing Freedom's History,” Prologue: Journal of the National Archives 14 (Fall 1982): 129–39.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie Rowland, and Julie Saville, “Writing Freedom's History: The Destruction of Slavery,” Prologue: Journal of the National Archives 17 (Winter 1985): 211–27.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, “The Terrain of Freedom: The Struggle over the Meaning of Free Labor in the U.S. South,” History Workshop, no. 22 (Autumn 1986): 108–30.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Radical History Review, no. 42 (1988): 89–121.
Text of article (pdf)

• Reprinted in Black Women in United States History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al. (Carlson, 1990).
• Reprinted in African American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861–1900, ed. Donald G. Nieman (Garland, 1994).

Ira Berlin, Wayne Durrill, Steven F. Miller, Leslie S. Rowland, and Leslie Schwalm, “‘To Canvass the Nation’: The War for Union Becomes a War for Freedom,” Prologue: Journal of the National Archives 20 (Winter 1988): 227–47.
Text of article (pdf)

Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O'Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Between Emancipation and Enfranchisement: Law and the Political Mobilization of Black Southerners during Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1867,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 (1995): 1059–77.
Text of article (pdf)

Articles in Magazines for General Readers and/or K–12 Teachers

Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, “The Moment of Freedom,” Southern Exposure 10 (September/October 1982): 60–64.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Francine C. Cary, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Family and Freedom: Black Families in the American Civil War,” History Today 37 (January 1987): 8–15.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Missing: A Freedman Seeks His Family,” American Visions 3 (February 1988): 8–9.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Emancipated Citizens,” Constitution 6 (Fall 1994): 78–87.
Text of article (pdf)

Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, “The Underground Railroad: Travels above Ground,” Potomac Review 24 (Fall 1999): 33–36.