“All the Life-Giving Waters of the World”

My summer reading of ocean novels continues, going South this week to the fertile and mysterious Gulf Coast.

If your father's name is River and your mother is referred to as "Salt Water Woman," it comes as no surprise that water flows through your body and soul.  In Jessamyn Ward's new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, the bayous and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi are not just landscape backdrop.   Water is a lead character, not just in daughter Leonie's life, but in her whole family's life of both despair and hope.

My own daughter left this book here after her last visit, and I was intrigued by the cover of this new novel by Ward, who has won the National Book Award and teaches Creative Writing at Tulane University.  But I was half way through the story before I realized this could be my ocean novel of the week. 

Frankly, that was about the same time I was considering abandoning the book, it was such a sad and depressing tale of racism, poverty, drug addiction, casual murder, child abuse, slow cancer death, horrible prisons, all of which was only reinforcing my generally stereotyped dismissal of any hope for the South.  I certainly didn't expect it to be my weekly ocean novel.

African American Leonie lives in southern Mississippi with her two young children at the home of her impoverished parents River and Mam, the Salt Water Woman, while her white husband is in prison.  Mam Salt Water is slowly dying of cancer, River is a proud but sad and silent man, who cares for the children and household and garden and animals. Leonie works at a bar and does drugs and barely notices her kids.  Her brother was killed by his white high school classmates some years earlier for not staying in his "place."  No one was ever charged.  The first person narratives alternate between Leonie and her 12 year old son Jojo, on the cusp of manhood and deeply loved by his grandfather River. 

Critics link the book directly with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I have not read.  But I have always liked the Faulkner quote that every novel has one of two plot lines, "A stranger comes to town, or, a person sets out on a journey."  Just as I was about to abandon this book, Leonie and the kids set out on a journey, to meet their husband/father as he is being released from prison.  A journey is always more interesting than staying at home, and the action picks up.  On the trip there is danger and more drugs and traffic stops.  Horrible heat and hunger and thirst for the kids.  Parchwood Prison.  We meet the father and some new characters along the way. 

And suddenly it is not just the depressing racist South, but fantastic voodoo spiritual South, as the novel dives into magical realism. Two deceased characters come along for the ride, the brother and a convict from the prison, also killed long before his time.  These two dead young men seek connection, peace, reconciliation, burial, release.  So does the dying salt water Grandmother.  Her voodoo spirit is strong but can't stop her death.  The two dead young men hover around the family, especially Jojo.   Leonie and her husband try to be a family, but succumb to drugs again.  It feels like drowning.  Jojo tries to be an adult. The ghosts and the voodoo spirits permeate the house and family, awaiting release. 

The writing picks up in this second half, and suddenly I couldn’t put the book down. The magical realism drew me onward, and in a curious way the dead ghosts were more compelling characters than the living ones, or their desperate search for release seemed more profound and possible than the addicts.  I could also detect a small glimmer of hope in the midst of that very un-magical highly real realism called modern southern poverty.  Jojo and his younger sister, who turns out also to have magical salt water flowing through her veins, might make it, if their grandfather River can stay alive long enough, and the spirits stay with them.  But Mother and Grandmother are gone, to drugs and death, drowned.

The title seems to be a reference to the opening lines of the Iliad, Homer asking the muse to sing of the unburied dead on the battlefield.  Their journey also has an Odyssey feel to it and reminded me of the Odyssey themes of the Southern film “O Brother Where Art Thou?”  (That's a good ocean novel, the Odyssey, lots of wet characters.  Might that be my next ocean novel?)

So where is the ocean in this novel?  What's her role?  In the other ocean novels I’ve read this summer the ocean character symbolizes the unknown, fear or violence, a dark home to scary creatures, a challenge to be conquered.  But the waters of the Gulf Coast in this novel are a welcome moist breeze, lush green magnolias, rooms that smell of salty ocean and blood, docks over the gentle waters where anyone rich or poor, black or white, can go fishing or necking, wet possibility.   Northern Mississippi by contrast, on the road trip, is dry pines and prisons, parched, death.  The prison is actually named Parchwood, and on the whole trip Jojo and his sister are parched, thirsty and ignored by their mother.

So unlike my first two novels, of women finding themselves by the sea, and the two novels by and about men conquering the world on the sea, in this novel of poverty and racism, the ocean here seems to represent hope, life after death, and healing.  Life is bad enough, we don’t need an ocean to conquer.  We need healing and hope. 

Hope:

River tells a friend about the ocean, “We got so much water where I’m from.  It come down from the north in rivers.  Pool in the bayous.  Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see.  It changes colors, like a little lizard.  Sometimes stormy blue.  Sometimes cool gray.  In the early morning, silver.  You could look at that and know there’s a God.”

Life after death:

One of the ghosts tells Jojo he wants to “cross the waters and be home.  To become the song, the sound.  Beyond the waters.”

Healing:

When high schooler Leonie first tells her mother she is pregnant, Salt Water Woman takes her into her lap, “shushing me like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me.  ‘Je suis la fille de l’ocean, la filles des ondes, la fille de l’ecume,’ Mamma muttered and I knew.  I knew she was calling on Our Lad of Regla.  On the Star of the Sea.  That she was invoking Yemaya, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.”

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter