The officer lets Jojo go, and Richie asks Jojo if River had ever told his grandson about Richie’s story.

He thinks about Kayla and the possibility of her being harmed. While the police officer stands at Leonie’s window, Richie warns Jojo that they will “chain him.” Jojo is asked to exit the vehicle, and he worries that he will be subject to police violence. Fearing arrest for her possession of meth, Leonie swallows the entire stash whole. In the concluding section, I identify the way Ward navigates these interwoven parts in a world that continues to blend and create intersectional cultural identities.While Leonie is driving Michael home from Parchman, they get pulled over by a police officer. As part of the discussion, I will be including critical work from scholars such as Kathleen Brogan, who clarifies between traumatic memory and narrative memory, as well as Gabriele Schwab, who observes transgenerational effects in both survivors and perpetrators of trauma. These two sections work together to prove how Ward’s novel engages with the transfer of trauma across generational lines and how she then offers a way to mend it at both an individual and collective level. To accomplish this approach, this thesis separates the analysis into two distinctly gendered sections: the first section unpacks the relationship between African-based spiritualism and female-centric conjure work in the family line, whereas the second section analyzes how trauma shapes black masculinity and how repression perpetuates transgenerational trauma.

While this association is apparent in Ward’s novel, this thesis applies the aforementioned modes of scholarship alongside African-based spiritualism to investigate further the inclusion of ghosts. Often, these ghosts are symbolic of transgenerational trauma in fictional works. Trauma, and its subset transgenerational trauma, have often been a focal point for critical analysis of other African American texts that engage with ghosts and hauntings, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This thesis explores how ecocriticism and trauma theory intersect within Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to tackle the complex act of collective healing.

Sing unburied