I Checked My Privilege After Reading "Sing, Unburied, Sing"

Caption: The book "Sing, Unburied, Sing" is on top of a blue lace shawlette that I knitted in knitting class at Home Ec with the help of Amy Gullen, my knitting teacher. I'm mostly done reading the novel by Jesmyn Ward for "Now Read This," a book club sponsored by National Public Radio and the New York Times.

A Facebook acquaintance bragged that someone had called her out on her white privilege and she was glad, she listened, and she survived. I said no one better call me out on my white privilege because I've suffered enough. That was before I read most of Jesmyn Ward's novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing." I always seem to misquote the title when I refer to it. I slip up and call it, "Cry, Unburied, Cry" because it's not a happy book. It's bone-dry, vomit-wet, blood-wet, hungry-dry, and pain-wracked. The narrative thread running through it makes it beautiful, haunting, and compelling, but it's so thin and fragile that you're not always sure it holds together and tells you a story. It must though, because I keep reading it.

My favorite part is the ghost of Given.

Leonie, the mother of the children, is on drugs. According to one of her children, "Everything she touches dies." The real mother of the story is Mam, the grandmother, but Mam dies. The siblings, the ones that live, nurture younger siblings. But they're still all dependent on crazy, drug-ridden Leonie and their some time father Michael (when he's out of prison).

Mississippi bayous and a Mississippi prison are the setting for this book. So is a car full of the odor and colors of a young child's repeated vomiting during a long road trip to the prison to pick up the children's daddy, Michael.

Apparently, in the 1930s and 40s, Mississippi reinstated slavery by arresting black boys and men for minor crimes and sending them to prison. These boys and men were put out in the hot sun to work the fields for nothing, just like slaves were before emancipation. A 12-year-old boy could be stretched out and beaten nearly to death for having an old hoe break on him while he was working.

The black adult prisoner who cleans the boy's wounds at night better be careful no one catches him doing it. If the man is good with the dogs and he's put in charge of the dogs that chase runaways, white prisoners are outraged. A white man with no knowledge of how to work with dogs is put over him, because "a black man don't know how to be a master; he only knows how to be a slave." The previous dog handler ran away and the dogs wouldn't chase him because they loved him. He'd treated them well.

When I was a social worker, my black clients from Chicago were originally, most of them, from Mississippi. When I first started working with them as a social worker in Iowa City and Coralville, Chicagoans would return to Mississippi to visit relatives. Later, they returned to Chicago to go to funerals.

Given where they came from, I understand why they left Mississippi. Our daughter visited Mississippi once to stay with a friend working for Americorps. A white man taught her to shoot a gun. He pointed to a black man who was evidently his assistant and said, "He mine." The "owner" felt a certain sense of obligation, though. The white man built a coffin for one of the black man's relatives. It's surprising how long racism, even pseudo-slavery in its most naked form has lasted, because Sarah, our daughter, couldn't have visited Mississippi too long ago. She's 28 and I would guess she visited in her late teens or early 20s. So some white man referred to a black man in Mississippi and said, "He mine" in 2009?

Continued racism against people of color makes Martin Luther King Day a day unlike any other. When I first reacted to the idea of being called out for my white privilege, I thought, "no one really knows what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes. I've suffered."

But I've never suffered like the people in "Sing, Unburied, Sing" have suffered. I'm alive, for one thing, although my younger brother didn't make it, and I never got over losing him the way I did. Maybe that helps me understand the novel. I have a ghost in my life too, but his name isn't Given. It's Hugh.