Blurred Time and the Constancy of Injustice

    Throughout Sing, Unburied, Sing, the pervasiveness of racism is made obvious as Ward writes of the struggles faced by every generation in the novel. As Ward pieces together the characters’ pasts and presents, we can see that many of the characters face the same struggles, regardless of the progression of time, due to the ubiquity of racism, poverty, and injustice. Ward displays the constancy of racism by manipulating time in the character’s perspectives. Readers, like the characters, experience the repetition of racism across timelines: Pop’s time in prison, Leonie’s adolescence, Jojo’s early childhood, and the present day. The effect of blurred time in presenting the cyclical and ever-present struggles is especially obvious in Richie’s chapters.

    As a ghost, Richie is able to look between times and identify the change undergone at Parchman, or as he sees it, lack thereof. Richie, as he travels in his afterlife, says, “And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?” (Ward 186). Parchman, through all the time that Richie has traveled, has not changed in its treatment of the men there. Men are treated as animals, regardless of the time passed outside the walls of Parchman. Parchman, as an institution, represents the real ways in which the violence and racism from the time of slavery have persisted in the American prison system. Beatings and whippings, forced field work, and hunting escaped prisoners with dogs are all tactics and actions that reek of slavery, despite the time that has passed between slavery and Pop’s imprisonment at Parchman. This stagnancy is not exclusive to the prison, as we see the same racist actions be echoed in every generation and in each characters’ lives, imprisoned or free.

    Ward intends to show the echoes of racism inside and outside the prison, in the past and in the present, through comparisons between characters and their similar experiences with injustice. For example, just as Richie is unjustly imprisoned in his time at the age of twelve, Jojo, at thirteen, is wrongly shackled when the police officer pulls over the car in which his parents are harboring drugs. Another example of the permanence of racism across time is the resemblance of Given’s murder to the violent lynchings that took place during Pop and Richie’s adolescence. The presence of slavery in America’s past still looms large over the present day; slavery and racism continue to shape America. Ward’s manipulation of time and the parallels drawn between events occurring in different generations indicate to the reader that the occurrence of racist violence is not dependent on the year, but rather a constant of life. With the blurred and complex timelines the story follows, especially in Richie’s perspective, it becomes more difficult for the reader to distinguish the year, as Ward demonstrates that racism remains consistent through every generation.