ABSTRACT
Around halfway through Jesmyn Ward’s most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), the text raises the threat that the self-destructive logic towards which its narrative lurches might take out the character at its heart:
Jojo raises his arms to a cross. The officer barks at him, the sound raw and carrying in the air, and Jojo shakes his head without pausing and staggers when the officer kicks his legs apart, the gun a little lower now, but still pointing to the middle of his back. I blink and I see the bullet cleaving the soft butter of him. I shake.
(Ward 2017: 164) By this gut-wrenching moment in the novel it has become apparent that thirteen-year-old Jojo, although just one of three narrators, is the one who matters the most: from the direction of his eyes to the feel of his mouth, the reader’s intimacy with the perspective of this young black boy testifies to his role as the text’s material and moral centre. His and our exposure to the potentially annihilating effects of police violence also signals Ward’s engagement with the politics that animate Black Lives Matter – that rallying cry that has gestured in recent years towards the formation of a new movement that might act as both continuation of and corrective to the African American civil rights struggle of previous generations. Where Ward’s twenty-first century literary contributions have come to be emblematic of this new generation of black politics and thought, Toni Morrison’s work, straddling the distance between the 1970s and our contemporary moment, celebrates, explores and unravels the legacy of the civil rights movement that culminated in the 1960s. Her most recent novel, God Help the Child (2015), like Sing, Unburied, Sing, settles on the figure of the child as the vehicle through which America’s painful racial dynamics are narrated. This chapter examines Ward’s and Morrison’s latest novels as contributions to a specifically black literary tradition that has not only constituted a key site of exploration for the black freedom narrative; it has also functioned as one of its most significant voices.