Sing, Unburied, Sing: Similes 5 key examples

The simile Ward uses here compares Leonie’s cruelties to Jojo to grit stuck in an open wound. The image here, like a skinned knee, is unpleasantly raw. A grazed knee already hurts, but leaving grit stuck in it or adding more to it makes the injury even more painful and annoying. The grit irritates and infects the wound and won’t go away. By making this comparison, Jojo makes it clear to the reader that Leonie’s comments do more than sting in the moment. Leonie’s meanness doesn’t land on a neutral emotional surface—it hits Jojo where he already feels hurt and vulnerable. Her words don’t just upset him. They grind into an area of Jojo that is already sore, and they stay there, impossible to clean out or ignore. As much as he has tried to create a distance between them, Jojo is still a child and Leonie is still his mother. The “little mean things” she says remain with him and keep hurting long after she says them. The repetition of “gathered and gathered” is also a reflection of how long this has been happening. Leonie’s words accumulate in Jojo's "skinned" psyche, layer by layer, until the grit becomes part of his wound. 

Jojo can’t usually understand much of what animals are trying to communicate. Like any human he can make guesses from context, but there’s no way to know if he’s right. However, in this moment he doesn’t piece together the meaning slowly or try to guess. Instead, the simile compares Jojo’s recognition of the animals’ communication to the act of reading a sentence. By saying he understands the "sentence" in the same way he might if he "looked" at it, Ward implies that this knowledge feels built-in for Jojo. Just like he doesn't remember learning to read, this new sense of comprehension appears from some part of him that exceeds thought or memory. The way Ward describes this sense of understanding also points to the idea that meaning can exist without language. Jojo senses emotion or intent from the animals even if he cannot translate each sound.

This sudden connection unsettles him, and it makes it even harder for him to help Pop when they need to slaughter the same animals he "understands." The sense of kinship the "understanding" brings makes the task feel far more brutal and personal, because the animals are no longer silent or separate. They “speak,” and Jojo hears them, even when he wishes he didn’t

The things that happened to Richie when he was Jojo’s age are almost too horrible to be repeated. However, Ward makes the reader feel the full weight of the violence and prejudice Richie and Pop experienced through the bloody, painful similes she uses here. The simile describing how blows from a leather belt could “split flesh like butter” makes the bodies of the men of Parchman seem unexpectedly vulnerable and delicate. Richie also describes himself and his siblings as being “hollowed” by starvation, like “gourds.” The hunger they were subjected to made them feel empty, but seeing their family members suffer and die also damaged their hearts. There's a general sense of exposure and feeling physically unsafe throughout this passage, as if physical and emotional pain for Richie have always been interchangeable.

The hyperbole in this passage gives the audience a heightened sense of the longstanding effects of Richie's trauma. He says that he remembers his heart “ricocheted” through his chest like a bullet might. Of course, this is an exaggeration for effect, but the hyperbole helps show how extreme the pressure on him feels in the moment. Memories like this one are brutal and intrusive. Richie’s comparison between himself and Jojo is also an abbreviated version of the daily cruelties Richie faced. Although he doesn’t want Jojo to suffer the same things that happened to him, Richie does feel resentful of Jojo’s comparatively easy childhood.

The tactile imagery in this quotation begins at the edges of Richie’s body, in his toes and feet, then builds upward until it reaches his throat. The feeling grows hotter and more intense as it moves up through his body, becoming “fire in [his] bones” that ripples through his entire skeleton. The reader can trace the path of sensation as Richie describes it, as though it’s coming up through the floor and entering Richie’s body through the soles of his feet. The feeling is so intense that it also changes from one kind of sensation to another. The tactile imagery of the stinging itch of the news becomes auditory. By the time it reaches his ribs, it's untethered and consuming, like a "screaming note" as it nears the top of his body. Richie himself doesn’t scream aloud, here. The scream is internal, and it builds up inside him until he knows he’s going to try and run away from Parchman.

The first simile that Mam uses compares Jojo to a camel. She’s suggesting that she hopes he will carry the love she has given him wherever he goes, the way camels carry reserves to survive in the desert. Though camels store fat, not water, the image still fits Mam’s purpose because it's about storing something good for as long as possible—also, she might be referring to the fact that camels carry bags and other necessities for human travelers as they cross deserts. She has given Jojo as much care and love as she could while she was alive, and she wants him to be able to survive by drawing on those resources when she is gone. The camel simile also shows that she’s feeling worried. Unlike Mam's usual direct tone, it sounds uncertain, to the extent that she questions it out loud after saying it. She corrects herself with her second simile, in which she compares the reserves of love and strength she has given to Jojo to a well from which he can draw “water” when needed. Mam hopes that she has placed something steady inside Jojo because she knows that, with her gone, his environment at home will be both less loving and less stable.