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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
The action of Sing, Unburied, Sing takes place in rural Mississippi. This state is one of the regions of the American South where Black people were most egregiously enslaved and brutalized. It has a legacy of racial hatred that has continued into the present day, where prisons like Parchman are disproportionately filled with Black inmates and where Black people are regularly subjected to discrimination by law enforcement officials and White supremacists. Jojo and his sister Kayla live with their grandparents in a small, predominantly Black town called Bois Sauvage. Their home and community feel isolated from the outside world. They barely make enough money to scrape by, and their poverty reflects the long-standing effects of racism and its economic effects on Black communities.
Although the novel is set in the present day, the past presses in constantly. Ward never allows the reader to forget the region’s history, whether the family members are home in Bois Sauvage or travelling to the State Penitentiary to pick up Michael. Mississippi State Penitentiary is also known as Parchman Prison. Jojo’s grandfather was also a prisoner at Parchman, and the prison’s effects on the lives of Pop, Michael, and their entire family ties the book’s contemporary setting to the era of Jim Crow. In this novel, Parchman is more than just a prison. It’s a sinkhole of Black pain and exploitation, a torture chamber that recreates the conditions of chattel enslavement in the 20th and 21st centuries. The prison system brutalizes Black men, forces them into unpaid labor, and exposes them to violence of all kinds. The novel shows this through Pop and Richie’s memories of being incarcerated there. The long-term effects of trauma on generations of Black Mississippians have soaked the ground with blood and sweat. Pop’s memories of his time there are so vivid that his stories feel like they’re happening in the present moment. For Richie, living and dying at Parchman has thrown him out of conventional time altogether. He’s trapped in a limbo between past and present, tied to the soil of Parchman in a way he can’t escape. The Mississippi landscape in this novel is not neutral. It reflects and enforces the state’s history and the suffering that comes with it.
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