The Pressures of Motherhood
Throughout the story, Jojo has a clear expectation in his mind for what a mother should be. He looks to Mam, a supportive, loving, and healing confidante, as the archetypal mother figure. Jojo's own mother, Leonie, is quite different from Mam. Leonie experiences intense grief over the loss of her brother, Given. She also struggles to support her family while her husband, Michael, is in prison. Leonie's battle with drug addiction causes her to make brash and self-focused decisions, which often negatively impacts the people that surround her.
Jojo's feelings towards Leonie also reflect how he has been influenced by societal expectations of motherhood. While Michael is equally as negligent as Leonie, Jojo is far more affected by his mother's absence than his father's. Because Jojo has been harmed by Leonie's negligence, he is unable to understand that Leonie suffers. As the novel progresses and Jojo is awakened to the suffering in the world, he begins to empathize with Leonie and better understand her.
Circular Time
Ward makes a clear point to reject the notion of a perpetual, linear structure of time. Instead, her story offers the idea that time is a circular system in which the same events are repeated according to a cyclical pattern. While the main events of the story occur right around Jojo's birthday, the narrative weaves seamlessly between events and characters that have existed in "years prior." Connections exist between characters that are not alive at the same period of time: Leonie communicates with Given while Jojo develops a relationship with Richie. In this way, connections traverse the borders that conventionally separate generations and geographies. People and ghosts exist and coexist, amplifying the needs of one another.
While the generally accepted worldview is that "progress" occurs as we move forward in time, Sing, Unburied, Sing offers a perspective that challenges our singular focus on the future. While slavery has been abolished by the time Jojo is alive, the story centers around Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The re-emergence of Richie's character underscores that despite the abolishment of slavery, there continue to be systems in place that profit from the oppression of Black people. In this way, the novel prompts the reader to develop a more critical perspective and look to the "past" to build a more mindful "present."
Differing Notions of Family
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a family story. The tale follows Jojo and his sister, parents, and grandparents and their lives in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. While the story focuses on Jojo's nuclear family, Ward explores the concept of heritage and uses it to connect Jojo to a larger, more communal sense of family. Pop teaches Jojo about his personal connections to slavery, which connects him to a larger Black community in Mississippi. Mam teaches Jojo about voodoo and African-derived spiritualism, which connects Jojo to his African roots and the diaspora community.
Throughout the story, Jojo is put in a variety of situations in which he considers what it means to be a part of his own family. Jojo, Leonie, and Kayla are rejected by Michael's family due to their race. Although Jojo has been named after his paternal grandfather, he fails to see any semblance of familial affection and instead is confronted by intense hatred. Later in the novel, when Jojo encounters Richie, he finds that Richie is jealous of Jojo's own blood relationship with Pop. While at Parchman, Richie had considered Pop a paternal figure. Richie's relationship to Pop feels threatened by Jojo's presence. In addition, Richie expresses a desire to be a part of Jojo's family. This prompts Jojo to recognize the love that holds his family together instead of choosing to focus on the negative aspects of his intra-family dynamics.
The Persistance of Racial Injustice
Anti-Black violence permeates Sing, Unburied, Sing. Although slavery has been abolished by the time of Jojo's adolescence, the novel highlights systemic oppression and its continuity. There are parallels between Pop's experience at Parchman and the plantations of the slavery era. Later, the novel highlights a striking similarity between Richie's premature imprisonment and the attack on Jojo by the policeman.
While racism is shown on a systemic scale, it is also depicted through the attitudes and behaviors of the novel's white characters. Big Joseph lashes out at Michael because he has created a mixed-race family. Later, Misty makes racially insensitive comments to Leonie that highlight the disparate privileges that distinguish them. Jojo's experiences throughout the novel underscore the traumatic effects of racist society on Black children. Jojo feels neglected by the world that he lives in, which causes him to feel inferior and unsafe.
The Inevitability of Death
In the opening pages of the novel, the reader becomes aware that Mam will soon die of cancer. However, Mam approaches her own death in a way that seems to forgo feelings of earthly attachment or anxiety. Instead, Mam recognizes that death is an inevitable part of life, and she seeks to prepare for it in the most holistic way possible. While Leonie and Jojo struggle to reconcile Mam's ease with their own fears of her death, they are able to learn from their experiences with ghosts and the 'continuity' of life after earthly departure.
As discussed in an earlier section, the novel highlights the interconnectedness of life and death, ghosts and spirits. In this way, death is represented as something that is not only inevitable, but as something that is omnipresent and dynamic. While death remains relatively unknown, the narrative proposes that the dead play an integral role in life as we live it. Ward frames death as a way to open up discussions about historical suffering and oppression. In her depiction of death, Ward encourages the reader to honor the legacies of those that have passed and continue to value and celebrate their lives.
The Importance of the Natural World
The idea of a social hierarchy goes hand-in-hand with colonialism. As settlers displaced indigenous populations and cleared land for civilization, they underscored the belief that profit usurps nature and communities. Sing, Unburied, Sing, turns the social hierarchy on its head, suggesting that humans are not "better than" the animals and plants that they live among. As Jojo and his family carry on life in their rural community, their daily practices show how they live harmoniously with nature.
At numerous points throughout the plot, the characters turn to the natural world for comfort and release. Nature is an omnipresent, positive power whose needs are greater than their own human desires. The family's relationship to nature is also rooted in their shared sense of spirituality. The gris-gris bag that Mam and Pop give Jojo contains numerous elements that are found in nature—a feather, a rock, and an animal tooth. In this way, natural elements are believed to possess a protective power that should be honored and respected rather than conquered.
Loss of Innocence
As Jojo nears his thirteenth birthday, he symbolically transitions from childhood to adolescence. This is an important shift, since Pop recognizes that Jojo needs to learn more about his Black lineage and the history of systemic oppression. Pop aims to teach Jojo about his own past in order to protect Jojo from the world's injustice.
Pop's desire to divulge his past coincides simultaneously with Jojo's odyssey-like trip to Parchman. During his travels, Jojo is exposed first-hand to drug addiction, domestic abuse, and police violence. While he had previously judged his mother for her negligent behavior, he slowly begins to understand the circumstances that fuel her addiction and the difficulties she encounters as a Black single mother in Mississippi.
Jojo's experience with Parchman parallels Pop's own experience at the penitentiary decades prior. Pop was wrongfully imprisoned at Parchman when he was only fifteen years old. While there, Pop observed how Black inmates were intentionally targeted and detained in order to "protect" white society. Pop was subject to intense hours working in fields, and he watched as his fellow inmates were physically and emotionally abused.
As the story progresses, Pop tells Jojo the story of his own "loss of innocence." In the novel's climactic moment, Pop reveals that he killed Richie in order to protect him from being brutally lynched by a white mob. When Jojo hears this story, he realizes the intergenerational connections between his own coming-of-age and those that came before him.
