Pop explains that Stag’s parents lied to the census takers to avoid being controlled and treated like “livestock” by government authorities. During slavery, black people were spoken of-and treated-as having the same status as animals whose only value lay in their ability to work and create profit for their “owner.” As the book shows, such thinking has continued long after the abolition of slavery. As the book reminds readers, a recurrent motif in anti-black racist rhetoric is the comparison of black people and animals.
However, the connection between humans and animals is not always presented in positive terms. In the afterlife, the division between animal and human is seemingly even less strong than it is in the mortal world, suggesting that the hierarchies according to which people value different forms of life are misguided. At the very end of the novel, Jojo witnesses a large group of ghosts sitting in a tree who seem halfway between people and birds. When Kayla sees the ghost of Given, she calls him both “black bird” and “Black boy.” As a ghost, Given appears to Kayla as something not quite animal and not quite human. It could also be interpreted as a reference to West African religions that imagine gods taking on animal forms.
After Richie dies, he encounters a mysterious hybrid snake-bird who tells him: “There are things you need to see.” This mystical encounter emphasizes the idea of a community that includes animals and humans who are both living and dead. Thus, through communion with nature, the characters are reminded of their place in the greater order of things-including the past, present, and future, and the community of the living as well as the dead.Ĭertain animals take on particular significance in the novel’s exploration of death and the afterlife. When Leonie wants to cure Kayla’s nausea, she uses blackberry leaves as a natural remedy. When Michael wants to bond with Jojo, he takes him fishing. The gris-gris bag that Pop gives Jojo contains a rock, a feather, and an animal tooth, suggesting that tokens from nature have a kind of spiritual power to protect the living. Indeed, the natural world is often presented as a source of relief, comfort, and solace to the characters. Jojo and his family live in a rural part of Mississippi, and Jojo is extremely comfortable in nature.
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, the boundary between human existence and the natural world is not a strict one––and at times, it seems barely to exist at all.
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