Sing, Unburied, Sing

Leonie leaves Mam’s bedroom to find Given waiting outside and Pop and Jojo talking in the yard: “I can’t hear anything from this far away, but Given can, and whatever he hears makes his head shake faster and faster” (260). Suddenly, Given begins bleeding as he appears to struggle with an invisible force. When Leonie reaches towards Given, he disappears.

Kayla is in the living room, crying and talking about a boy and a black bird. Leonie tries to soothe her, but Kayla insists the boy “want[s] Mam” (262). Leonie returns to Mam’s room to find her mother twisted in the sheets and lying partly off the bed. She goes to help her, but Mam says it’s “too late” (264): An angry spirit has come to claim her. Given is also in the room, arguing with something on the ceiling only he, Kayla, and Mam can see. He says that Mam isn’t the entity’s mother, then turns to Mam and urges her to come with him. As Leonie prepares the altar, Mam begs her to say a litany. For a moment, Leonie sees “a boy with the face of a toddler” (267)—Richie—on the ceiling. Pop and Jojo burst into the room, Jojo telling Richie to leave. His forcefulness gives Leonie strength, and she begins praying to Maman Brigitte. Jojo, however, begs Leonie to stop, saying she doesn’t understand what she’s doing. 

As the rest of the family watch, Given approaches Mam, who goes still. Jojo lashes out at Leonie, accusing her of letting Mam die. Leonie admits that she did, but says that Mam had asked her to: “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” (270). Leonie demands to know what Jojo wants of her, hitting him when he retorts that she “can’t give [him] nothing” (271). Pop pulls Leonie off Jojo. Outside on the porch, she’s joined by Michael. Leonie begs him to take her away, and Michael agrees to a short drive: “But I know that if I continue to ask, sour the air of the car with pleases, he will drive to Misty’s, get her to call her friends up north, call Al, make one last call to Pop to say: Just a few days” (274).

In the weeks after Mam’s death, Leonie is hardly ever home: “She come back every week, stay for two days, and then leave again. Her and Michael sleep on the sofa, both of them fish-thin, slender as two gray sardines, packed just as tight. They don’t move when I walk past them out the door in the morning” (277). Jojo sometimes hears Pop speaking at night and asks him whether he’s talking to Leonie or Michael on the phone; later, Jojo realizes Pop is actually talking to Mam.

Jojo believes he understands Leonie better than he once did, because he himself feels restless much of the time. He goes for frequent walks in the woods, sometimes seeing either a white snake or a black bird. 

One day, he finds Richie sleeping at the foot of a tree. Angry that he can see Richie but not Mam, Jojo demands to know what he’s doing. Richie explains that he once believed he could “[c]ross the waters” and “[b]e home,” but that he now finds himself as “stuck” and “lost” as ever (281-82). Richie says that Jojo now understands life and death, and Jojo realizes that the tree is full of the spirits of people who died violently: “There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. […] They perch like birds, but look as people” (282). 

Jojo returns to the house, where he finds Pop and Kayla sitting on the porch. He tries to persuade them to go inside, but Kayla fusses and demands to be let down from Pop’s arms. She then walks toward the tree, telling the spirits in it to “[g]o home” (284). The ghosts initially don’t respond, but when Kayla begins to sing, they “smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” (284). As Jojo picks Kayla up and goes inside, he hears voices saying, “Home” (285).