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Jesmyn WardA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Jojo is the novel’s main character and one of its three narrators. The novel opens on his 13th birthday—a milestone often taken to mark the beginning of adolescence, and thus a child’s transition to adulthood. As the story unfolds, the question of what it means to be a man is never far from Jojo’s thoughts, and the novel itself is to some extent a coming-of-age tale depicting common teenage experiences—for instance, Jojo’s new interest in Misty’s breasts. Jojo also matures over the course of the novel, coming to understand (if not to like) the reasons for his mother’s irresponsible behavior.
In other ways, however, Jojo is already very mature by the time the novel opens. Because his mother, Leonie, was already a regular drug user by the time she had Kayla, Jojo has taken on a prominent role in raising his younger sister. What is noteworthy about this is not simply the unusual amount of responsibility Jojo proves capable of shouldering, but also the tenderness that characterizes his interactions with Kayla. Where Leonie is often frustrated by the realities of raising a toddler (tantrums, sickness, etc.), Jojo never loses patience with or resents his sister. The selfless love he provides Kayla with is in many ways the novel’s model for caretaking.
Jojo’s capacity for empathy perhaps stems partly from his psychic abilities; throughout the novel, he hears the voices of those who can’t speak for themselves, including animals and young children. He also discovers that he can see the dead and eventually uses this ability to try to help Richie, asking Pop to recount the circumstances of Richie’s death because Richie can’t speak to Pop directly.
Leonie is the mother of Jojo and Kayla, the daughter of Mam and Pop, and one of the novel’s narrators. Growing up black in rural Mississippi, Leonie has led a difficult life. She was a good student when young, but was subject to frequent bullying, from which her older brother Given tried to protect her: “I couldn’t count how many times he fought for us on the bus, in school, in the neighborhood when kids taunted me about how Pop looked like a scarecrow, how Mama was a witch. How I looked just like Pop: like a burnt stick, raggedly clothed” (37). As a result, Leonie takes Given’s racially-motivated murder especially hard and seeks solace in an obsessive relationship with Michael—the cousin of the man who killed Given.
Michael doesn’t share his family’s racism, and the love between the couple does prove to be genuine: Leonie and Michael remain together through two pregnancies and Michael’s imprisonment, all in the face of his family’s opposition. With that said, the fact that Leonie pursues a relationship with a white man related to her brother’s killer is arguably a sign of self-hatred. Her self-destructive tendencies become even more pronounced when Michael begins cooking meth; by the time the story opens, Leonie is a frequent drug user, and her mother’s death at the end of the novel only exacerbates her habit.
The cumulative effects of addiction, trauma, and an intense love affair with Michael make Leonie a negligent and often absent mother. What’s more, when she does try to care for her children, her attempts are tainted by her own immaturity; she especially resents the close relationship that has developed between Jojo and Kayla and tries at various points to claim Kayla’s love for herself. This speaks to what Mam eventually describes to Jojo as Leonie’s lack of a “mothering instinct” (233), or an ability to put aside her own needs and desires to care for others.
However, while Leonie doesn’t share her mother’s nurturing skills, she does have psychic abilities of her own. Like her children, Leonie can see the dead—specifically Given, who appears to her whenever she’s high. In one of her more selfless moments, Leonie uses her abilities to summon the spirit that will take her mother to the afterlife. However, in her grief over her mother’s death, she ultimately clings more tightly to drugs and her relationship with Michael. Leonie thus emerges as a deeply flawed but sympathetic character; although she’s capable of acting with compassion, she doesn’t seem able to shed her self-destructive coping mechanisms long enough to truly change.
Michaela (or Kayla, as everyone but Leonie calls her) is Leonie and Michael’s three-year-old daughter. She is generally a cheerful and loving child, although she throws occasional tantrums and can be stubborn and moody. This behavior, although typical for a toddler, tends to exasperate Leonie and thus highlights her shortcomings as a mother. Similarly, Leonie struggles to cope with Kayla’s sickness on the way to Parchman, first downplaying it and then insisting that her daughter drink a home remedy that Leonie only vaguely remembers how to make.
As a result, it’s Jojo who largely serves as Kayla’s parent, and the relationship between the siblings is at the heart of the novel’s depiction of selfless love; Richie at one point describes Jojo as holding Kayla “as if he thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from the adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves” (133). The bond between the siblings may also reflect their shared psychic abilities; like Jojo, Kayla can see the dead, and at the end of the novel brings comfort to them by singing to a tree full of trapped ghosts (285). In this way, Kayla serves as a symbol of hope for the future: She shares traits with many of her ancestors while also displaying an ability to put the past to rest.
Richie is one of the novel’s three narrators and features prominently in Pop’s stories of his time in Parchman. He was imprisoned at just 12 for stealing to feed his siblings, and his young age made him unsuited to the hard labor performed by inmates at Parchman; it also exposed him to possible rape at the hands of predators like Hogjaw. Richie’s only friend and protector in Parchman was Pop, but even he ultimately proves unable to save him. Richie is coerced into running away from Parchman by a violent inmate named Blue, and Pop tracks down and kills the boy to prevent him from being more brutally murdered by a lynch mob.
For most of the novel, Richie himself can’t remember the circumstances of his death. He continues to feel a connection to Pop, however, and follows Jojo back from Parchman because of this: “The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River’s: indomitable as cypress. He is River’s child” (133). Although Richie at times appears to be a menacing figure—most obviously when he tries to claim Mam’s soul for himself—his actions as a spirit stem largely from confusion, fear, and loneliness; he remembers feeling cared for by Pop and is desperately trying to find a family or home to belong to. Although Richie has not managed to cross the waters to the afterlife as the novel ends, the way in which he and other ghosts like him respond to Kayla’s song suggests that he may one day find peace.
Michael is Leonie’s boyfriend and the father of her two children; the two began dating as teenagers, roughly a year after Michael’s cousin shot and killed Leonie’s brother Given. Michael himself is disdainful of his family’s racism, and his obvious love for and protectiveness of Leonie offer some hope that society may likewise be able to move beyond the legacy of racial violence. As Leonie puts it, Michael “[s]aw past skin the color of unmarked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw [her]. Saw the walking wound [she] was, and came to be [her] balm” (54).
In other ways, however, Michael and Leonie’s relationship is deeply unhealthy. In fact, their very devotion to one another is problematic; their relationship is so passionate and all-consuming that neither seems able to spare much love or attention for their children. With that said, it’s possible that Michael’s immature behavior, like Leonie’s, stems partly from trauma. His fight with his father and Big Joseph’s generally violent demeanor imply he might have been abused as a child. Later on, Michael worked as a welder on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, losing not only his job but also 11 coworkers in the 2010 explosion and “[coming] home with his severance money and nightmares” (92). It was at this point that Michael began using and cooking meth, resulting in his eventual imprisonment. As the novel ends, he and Leonie have retreated even further into their shared addiction to forget the pain of their pasts.
River (or “Pop,” as he’s known to everyone but Richie) is Leonie’s father and Mam’s husband. He also serves as a father figure and male role model for his grandson Jojo; the novel opens, for example, with Pop’s mental and physical toughness on display as he shows Jojo how to slaughter a goat. At the same time, Pop is deeply compassionate and sends Jojo away without fuss when it becomes clear the goat’s death has upset him. The action of the scene, as well as the tenderness Pop displays throughout it, foreshadow the eventual revelation that he killed Richie in a final act of love and protection.
Pop’s own incarceration in Parchman was racially motivated; he was only a teenager at the time, but was accused of sheltering his older brother after Stag got into a fight with a white man. Not surprisingly, Pop remains wise to the ways racism operates long after he’s released, warning his son Given against getting too close to the white boys on his football team. He also seems unhappy about Leonie’s relationship with Michael; his insistence that she doesn’t need to pick Michael up from Parchman herself perhaps implies that he views her as unhealthily devoted to her boyfriend, or suspects that the relationship between them is not one of equals.
Although Pop doesn’t have the psychic abilities of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, he shares Mam’s spiritual worldview and often speaks of it to Jojo; when Jojo leaves for Parchman, Pop is also the one who provides him with a gris-gris bag—an assortment of talismans meant to represent and maintain spiritual balance in the bearer and the world at large.
Philomène is Leonie’s mother, mostly referred to as “Mam” or “Mama.” She is a deeply caring and maternal woman who mothered Jojo and Kayla in the face of Leonie’s neglect. As the story opens, however, Mam is sick with cancer and no longer able to take an active part in her daughter or grandchildren’s lives (though she still provides them with advice and encouragement). In the novel’s final pages, suffering from extreme pain, she asks her daughter to help summon the spirit that will take her to the afterlife; Leonie reluctantly agrees, and in the last moments of Mam’s life, she’s finally granted her longstanding wish to see the spirit of her son Given.
As the events surrounding her death demonstrate, Mam shares her daughter and grandchildren’s psychic abilities, though not their ability to see the dead. Instead, Mam hears the “voices” of people’s bodies—a skill her aunt taught her to use for medicinal purposes. As a result, Mam has an extensive knowledge of herbs, plants, and home remedies, and she works as a midwife and voodoo healer. However, her attempts to train her own daughter in these skills largely fail, because Leonie lacks Mam’s nurturing temperament. Nevertheless, Mam loves and accepts her daughter for who she is and urges Jojo to do the same even while recognizing Leonie’s failings: “[S]he love you. She don’t know how to show it. And her love for herself and her love for Michael—well, it gets in the way. It confuse her” (234).
Given was Leonie’s brother, named for the fact that his parents hadn’t thought they’d be able to have children until he was born. He was a talented football player who likely would have gotten a college scholarship, but he died when he was a senior in high school: On a hunting trip with his teammates, Given made good on a bet to kill the first buck with nothing but a bow and arrow, and Michael’s cousin shot him in anger. Big Joseph and the rest of the family passed off Given’s murder as a hunting accident; the fact that they were able to do so is an indication of how deeply embedded racism is in the contemporary United States, and the justice system in particular (47).
Given was a protective older brother with a “joke in every line of him” (265), and Leonie never really moves past his death; she even resents her own children for sharing the close sibling relationship she once had with her brother. Given also appears to Leonie whenever she’s high, and while she initially passes these visitations off as hallucinations, it gradually becomes clear that Given’s spirit is in fact lingering around the family. At the end of the novel, Given—now visible to Jojo as well—escorts Mam to the afterlife, fighting off Richie’s efforts to claim her. After this, he disappears forever, implying that he’s at peace.
Misty is Leonie’s friend and fellow bartender. The women’s shared drug habit is at the heart of their friendship, along with the fact that they are both in interracial relationships: “[Misty’s] boyfriend was Black, and this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly” (35). Like Michael, Misty’s boyfriend Bishop is imprisoned in Parchman, and she tags along to visit him when Leonie goes to pick up Michael.
Despite the similarities between Leonie and Misty, however, there is also a great deal of resentment involved in the relationship. Leonie is jealous of Misty’s whiteness and the privileges it confers: “Her freckles, her thin pink lips, her blond hair, the stubborn milkiness of her skin; how easy had it been for her, her whole life, to make the world a friend to her?” (91). Furthermore, Misty is even more immature and self-centered than Leonie, complaining repeatedly about Kayla’s illness because of the inconvenience it causes her. With that said, Misty’s behavior perhaps reflects her own experiences as a child; unlike Leonie, who at least had loving and supportive parents, Misty was ignored and abused by her mother, who once beat her for bleeding through her clothes while on her period.
Big Joseph is Michael’s father. Jojo calls him his “White grandpa” but has hardly ever seen him: Big Joseph is deeply racist and despises his son’s relationship with Leonie (4). The fact that he was at one point the town sheriff is an indication of the bias at work in the American criminal justice system: He used his clout, for instance, to help cover up his nephew’s racially-motivated murder of Given. At the time the novel takes place, he remains a cruel and violent man, threatening Leonie with a rifle and brawling with his own son.
Maggie is Joseph’s wife. Although outwardly welcoming, she doesn’t seem happy to see Leonie and her children when Michael brings them to the home; it’s possible she shares her husband’s racial prejudice, but she nevertheless tries (unsuccessfully) to smooth things over between Joseph and Michael.
Stag is Pop’s brother. Unlike Pop, he was restless and rebellious from a young age, “[a]nd when he got older, he was off to the juke joint” (18). The boys’ parents attributed Stag’s behavior variously to his good looks or to “feel[ing] things too much” (18), but Pop himself believes Stag acted out to quell his sense of being dead inside. Regardless, Stag was eventually arrested for brawling with a white man, resulting in both his and Pop’s imprisonment in Parchman. Perhaps as a result of his time in prison, Stag has gone “sick in the head” by the time Jojo knows him: “Whenever I saw him, I couldn’t never take out any sense to anything he said; it was like he was speaking a foreign language, even though I knew he was speaking English” (14).
Al is a lawyer who represents both Michael and Misty’s boyfriend Bishop. Jojo describes him as a “big man” who wears his hair in a ponytail and “smells sweet and wrong at the same time, like sweet liquor that done sat out in the heat and started turning to vinegar” (111-12). Al is kind and welcoming, letting Misty and Leonie stay with him and even cooking for them; he also mentions that he’s representing a teenage client pro bono. Like Misty and Leonie, however, Al is addicted to meth and spends the night getting high with the women while Jojo looks after his sick sister.
Hogjaw was a convicted murderer and a white inmate at Parchman: “They called him Hogjaw because he was big and pale as a three-hundred-pound pig […] He had the jaw of a hog that would gore” (139). When he arrived at Parchman, the warden made him supervisor of both the prison dogs and of Pop and Richie. After Hogjaw tried to lure Richie into the woods—presumably with the intention of raping him—Pop arranged for Richie to be sent back to work in the fields.
Blue was an inmate at Parchman at the same time as Richie and Pop. He “wasn’t right in the head” (250), and ultimately beat and raped a female inmate before trying to escape. He pressured Richie into coming with him, which indirectly resulted in the boy’s death; when Blue attacked a white girl, a lynch mob tracked him down and brutally murdered him, and likely would have done the same to Richie if Pop hadn’t killed the boy first.
Kinnie was a white inmate at Parchman with a history of prison escapes: “[H]e put more than one lawman in the dirt. Poor White people all over the South loved him for it, loved him for spitting in the eye of the law” (75-76). Despite his record, he was tasked with training and caring for the prison dogs, and when he saw how much the dogs liked Pop, he made him a dog runner. Kinnie eventually succeeded in running away from Parchman, partly because the dogs he’d trained refused to track him.
“Sunshine Woman” was a prostitute who sometimes visited the inmates at Parchman while Pop was imprisoned there. She was black and at one point told Pop and Richie about a recent lynching, advising them to go north when they were released; Pop responded by scolding her for scaring Richie.
The policeman who stops Leonie’s car on their way back to Bois Sauvage embodies many of the prejudices of the broader criminal justice system; his suspicion of Michael (a man with a criminal but nonviolent record) and Leonie and Jojo (both of whom are black) nearly causes a routine traffic stop to escalate into bloodshed.
Carlotta and Fred are the couple who provide Leonie and Misty with the drugs they carry north to Parchman. Jojo at one point sees Carlotta beat her young son for breaking the TV; later, he sees Fred in the yard cooking meth.
By Jesmyn Ward