Delta Ghosts Miriam R. Kramer Jesmyn Ward’s complex National Book award winner, Sing, Unburied, Sing, lends itself to an alternative form of book review. She pens a tale that offers the reader rich treasures of myth, symbol, and folklore while building its story. Its plainspoken cast of characters, bedeviled by love and suffering, stumble along paths built on the shaky bedrock of racist history. Woven with gorgeous, often painful images, Ward’s narrative takes circuitous routes to reach her novel’s ambiguous conclusions. Ward’s tale focuses on a sensitive biracial boy, JoJo, who has grown up in the Mississippi Gulf Coast swamp hamlet of Bois Sauvage with his sister, (Kayla) Michaela. His Black drug-addled mother, Leonie, yearns for his White father, Michael, in prison for cooking crystal meth. She ignores her children while working a low-level job and taking drugs. His upright and loving maternal grandfather, Pop, wrongfully imprisoned in Mississippi’s Parchman prison as a younger man, teaches him how to take care of livestock and a homestead. His spiritual but practical grandmother, Mam, infused with Voodoo and Catholic ritual, takes care of him and his sister at home, mixing up folk remedies for pain and sickness from her gardens and woods. When Michael’s sentence is up, Leonie and a friend take the children to pick him up at Parchman prison in Faulkner-fecund Mississippi, far away from the Gulf Coast. Her mother, Mam, is dying of cancer, and Leonie leaves Pop there to take care of her. JoJo becomes his sister Kayla’s primary caretaker on the trip as he is at home, protecting her from her neglectful, conflicted mother. This road trip awaken demons in Leonie and her son. Leonie sees her love Michael as her only sun, the compass of her life, even though his White cousin shot her Black brother…