Abstract: Black women in
American literature carry what critics have long separated — race, gender,
class — as though these were distinct wounds. They are not. this paper
examines Jesmyn Ward's sing, unburied, sing (2017) through Kimberlé
Crenshaw's Intersectionality and Bell Hooks's politics of domination,
arguing that Ward's Leonie is the woman both feminist and racial criticism
keep missing — a black mother ground down not by one system of oppression
but by several, working together, all at once. Ward's Mississippi is not
merely a setting; it is a structure of violence that refuses to pass. The
novel's ghosts make this literal. Haunting here is not atmosphere — it is
argument. Drawing on Hooks's understanding of domination as simultaneously
racial, gendered, and economic, this paper contends that Leonie's
destruction is neither personal failure nor racial allegory alone, but the
lived consequence of intersecting oppressions that American culture
persistently misreads as separate. Ward's fiction insists otherwise. In
1962, Malcolm x observed that the black woman is the most disrespected, most
unprotected, and most neglected person in America. Ward's novel proves this
remains unfinished business — and that literature, at its most
uncompromising, can make visible what criticism has long preferred to keep
apart.
Keywords:
Intersectionality, Black Womanhood, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Bell Hooks, Jesmyn
Ward, African American Literature.
"The most disrespected person in
America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the
black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman."
Malcolm x delivered these words in 1962 at the Templar Hall in Los Angeles.
More than six decades later, Jesmyn Ward's fiction suggests the diagnosis
still holds. American literature has never been short of black female
characters. What it has been short of is a criticism willing to look at them
whole — to resist the habit of pulling race from gender, gender from class,
as though these were separable threads rather than a single, suffocating
knot. The result has been decades of readings that explain part of a black
woman's experience while quietly abandoning the rest.
Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing,
published in 2017 and winner of the national book award, arrives into this
critical failure with something close to impatience. set in contemporary
Mississippi, the novel follows a fractured family — Jojo, his mother Leonie,
his grandparents river and Philomena — across a landscape where the past is
not memory but presence, where the dead do not leave, and where being a
black woman means carrying burdens that no single theory of oppression has
yet learned to weigh correctly. Ward does not write thesis fiction, but her
novel thinks — rigorously, angrily, tenderly — about what it costs to be
Leonie: black, female, poor, addicted, and loved imperfectly by almost
everyone around her.
This paper argues that Leonie
represents precisely the figure that mainstream feminist and racial
criticism cannot see clearly — a woman whose suffering is not categorical
but compounded. Reading the novel through Kimberlé Crenshaw's
Intersectionality and Bell Hooks's politics of domination, this paper
contends that Ward's fiction does what theory has struggled to do: it holds
race, gender, and class together without collapsing them into each other.
Furthermore, the paper argues that Ward's deployment of haunting — literal,
ancestral, and political — is not a gothic flourish but a feminist argument
about the refusal of historical violence to conclude.
The critical vocabulary this paper
employs begins with Kimberlé Crenshaw's landmark essay "mapping the margins:
Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color"
(1991), which demonstrated that black women occupy a position in American
society that single-axis frameworks — whether antiracist or feminist —
structurally cannot address. Crenshaw's argument was not merely additive;
she was not suggesting that one simply add race to gender and arrive at a
complete picture. Her point was more unsettling: that the intersection
itself produces a distinct experience of oppression, one that neither
framework was designed to see. As Crenshaw writes, "the intersection of
racism and sexism factors into black women's lives in ways that cannot be
captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those
experiences separately" (1244). This is the diagnostic Leonie requires.
Bell Hooks sharpens Crenshaw's
diagnosis into something more structural. in Ain't I A Woman: Black Women
And Feminism (1981), hooks traced the historical erasure of black women
from both the feminist movement and racial liberation movements, arguing
that this erasure was not oversight but the predictable consequence of what
she would later call, in killing rage (1995), the "politics of
domination" — a system in which race, gender, and class function not as
parallel hierarchies but as interlocking ones, each reinforcing the others.
Domination, for hooks, is not accidental. It is maintained precisely because
it operates on multiple axes simultaneously, making resistance along any
single axis insufficient. Hooks writes in Feminist Theory: From Margin To
Center (1984) that "black women are in an unusual position in this
society, for not only are we collectively at the bottom of the occupational
ladder, but our overall social status is lower than that of any other group"
(70). Ward's novel, this paper argues, is a fictional inhabitation of that
position.
To these two frameworks this paper
adds Avery Gordon's concept of haunting from ghostly matters: haunting
and the sociological imagination (1997). Gordon argues that haunting is
not a supernatural curiosity but a social phenomenon — the way in which what
a society has done but refuses to acknowledge returns, insistently, in the
lives of those it has harmed. "haunting," Gordon writes, "is one of the
modalities in which historical violence makes itself known" (18). Ward's
ghosts, this paper argues, operate precisely in this register.
Existing scholarship on Ward has
addressed her use of the southern gothic, her engagement with black
masculinity, and her place in the tradition of African American nature
writing. What has received less sustained attention is the specifically
intersectional logic of her female characterization — the way Leonie in
particular embodies a critique of single-axis critical frameworks. This
paper enters the conversation at that gap.
Leonie is not built for easy
sympathy. Ward seems to have decided this early. She is inattentive,
addicted, and in a relationship with a white man whose family would rather
she did not exist at all. Readers expecting a recognizable black female
protagonist — enduring, dignified, holding things together — will not find
her here. That discomfort is deliberate. It is where the novel's real
argument starts.
Ward makes this visible from the
novel's opening pages. Jojo, Leonie's thirteen-year-old son, has effectively
raised himself and his toddler sister Kayla because, as Ward shows us
bluntly, "most nights Kayla ends up on my pallet with me, since Leonie's
Mostly Gone" (23). It is a single line, but it carries the weight of
everything the novel is going to say about Leonie. She is not occasionally
absent. She is structurally absent — a mother whose failures are so routine
that her children have reorganized their entire emotional lives around them.
And yet Ward refuses to let this
stand as simple condemnation. When Leonie snorts cocaine at a party, the
novel makes the cause plain:
I bent to the table. Sniffed. A clean burning shot through my bones, and
then i forgot. The shoes I didn't buy, the melted cake, the phone call. The
toddler sleeping in my bed at home while my son slept on the floor. (35)
The drugs do not make Leonie
irresponsible. They make her forget that she already is — and the novel
insists on the distinction. There is poverty in those shoes she cannot buy,
racial grief in the phone call she cannot make to Michael's white family,
and gendered isolation in the silence that surrounds her. The cocaine is not
a character flaw. It is a response to a life under compounding pressure.
A reading of Leonie that centers race
alone produces a partial figure — a black woman damaged by a racist society,
which is true but insufficient. It cannot account for the specific texture
of her failure as a mother, or for the way her gender shapes how her
community receives her addiction differently than it would a man's. A
reading centered on gender alone fares no better — it recovers her
vulnerability to patriarchal violence but loses the specific weight of
Mississippi's racial history on her body and her choices. A reading
organized around class illuminates her poverty but cannot explain why she is
seen the way she is by both black and white characters in the novel.
Crenshaw's Intersectionality does not
simply add these readings together. It asks instead what is produced at
their crossing — what kind of subject emerges when race, gender, and class
arrive simultaneously rather than sequentially. What emerges in Leonie's
case is a woman who is legible to almost no one in the novel, including
herself. Her relationship with rick, her white boyfriend whose world was
never built to include her. She is not simply a black woman in a
relationship with a white man — she is a poor black woman who gets nothing
from that relationship, not acceptance from his world, not belonging in her
own. In a moment of desperate social navigation, Ward shows Leonie
contemplating calling Michael's parents, only to shrink from it: she does
not want to be received as merely "his son's black Babymama" (50). She falls
between categories because she lives between categories, which is precisely
Crenshaw's point.
Ward makes the racial hostility
Leonie faces from Michael's family shockingly visible. When Leonie drives
past big joseph's house hoping for some smallest gesture of acceptance for
Michael's children, what she encounters instead is a man who reaches for his
rifle. She drives away raising her middle finger, thinking of given: "his
arms are crossed on his chest, his smile white in his dark face. We are all
laughing" (53). The memory of given — whole, alive, laughing — comes
precisely at the moment of big joseph's violence. Ward places these two
images side by side deliberately. The white man with a rifle and the dead
black brother are not separate moments. They are the same story told twice.
The confrontation at big joseph's
house later sharpens this further. When Michael brings Leonie and the
children to his parents' home, big joseph does not bother with subtlety. He
calls Leonie a "nigger bitch" and tells Michael he "told you never to sleep"
with her (169). What strikes the reader is not the racism itself — that is
expected — but the way Leonie processes it. She thinks: "I would throw up
everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and
esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin.
And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn't be nothing no
more" (168). The desire for self-erasure is not weakness. It is the body's
honest response to being told, by the family of the man she loves, in front
of her children, that she should not exist. No single framework — race,
gender, or class alone — can hold the full weight of that moment.
Ward refuses to resolve this. She
does not redeem Leonie cheaply, nor does she condemn her. when pop, her
father, looks at her struggling on the road trip, he watches her "like he
looks at one of his animals when something's wrong with them" (39) — a look
of diagnosis without tenderness, of a man who sees the problem but has long
since stopped knowing how to address it. The novel insists that its reader
sit with a black woman who cannot be rescued by any single political or
critical framework — and that insistence is itself a feminist act.
If Crenshaw gives this paper its
diagnostic lens, hooks provides its structural explanation. The question
Crenshaw's framework raises — why does Leonie's intersectional position
produce such particular devastation — is the question Hooks's politics of
domination answers. domination, for hooks, is not a set of prejudices held
by individuals but a self-reproducing architecture, built across centuries
and maintained across generations through institutions, culture, and the
internalization of inferiority by the dominated themselves.
Mississippi in Ward's novel is not a
backdrop. It is this architecture made visible. Parchman farm — the
Mississippi state penitentiary — sits at the center of the novel's
geography, and Ward's description of it through rivers' memory is precise:
"Parchman the kind of place that fool you into thinking it ain't no prison,
ain't going to be so bad when you first see it, because ain't no walls"
(25). The absence of walls is not freedom. It is a more sophisticated form
of containment — the kind that makes the imprisoned internalize the
boundaries that trains them to surveil themselves. Hooks would recognize
this immediately as domination's most efficient mode: not the violence that
marks the body but the conditioning that disciplines the spirit.
River survived Parchman. The novel
treats this as both remarkable and quietly gendered. He carries his trauma
with a coherence the narrative grants him but withholds from Leonie — and
Ward is precise about why. Hooks argued in Ain't I A Woman that black
men, despite racial oppression, have historically held gender privilege
within black communities. That privilege determines who gets to be read as a
survivor and who gets read as a wreckage. River endures and is respected.
Leonie unravels and is abandoned. Same community, same history, different
verdicts. The variable is gender.
Ward is especially alert to how
racial violence reproduces itself across generations through black women's
bodies. Given, Leonie's brother, is shot dead by a white man who faces no
serious consequence: "hunting accident, big joseph told them" (48), and the
law collapses into whiteness, as it always has. But the burden of this
murder does not fall equally across the family. River grieves with the
contained dignity of a patriarch. Philomena plants a tree every year, her
grief organized and ceremonial. Leonie falls apart. She becomes, in the eyes
of everyone around her, a cautionary tale rather than a victim — and that
reclassification is itself a form of racial and gendered violence. As hooks
writes in Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center, the dominant
culture consistently reads black women's responses to oppression as personal
pathology rather than political symptom (70).
Philomena adds another layer. she is
the family's quiet center — the woman who raises Jojo because Leonie cannot,
who tends her garden, who prays to Oya and saint Teresa, and whose endurance
is the novel's most familiar figure of black womanhood. But Ward does not
romanticize this. Philomena endures because the architecture of her world
has left her no other option. Hooks's insight that the myth of the strong
black woman is itself a form of domination — a way of naturalizing black
women's suffering as strength rather than addressing its causes — resonates
here with particular force.
The most formally distinctive element
of Sing, Unburied, Sing is its ghosts. Leonie sees her dead brother
given. Jojo encounters Richie, a child who died at Parchman decades before
Jojo was born. Ward treats them with the full weight of realist fiction —
they speak, they remember, they want things. Understanding why requires
stepping outside the gothic tradition and into Avery Gordon's sociological
understanding of haunting.
Gordon argues in Ghostly Matters
that haunting is how societies live with what they have done but will not
acknowledge. The ghost is not a remnant of the past — it is the past's
insistence on remaining present, on not being filed away into history. "to
be haunted," Gordon writes, "is to be tied to historical and social effects"
(190). In Ward's Mississippi, the effects in question are specific: the
violence of Parchman farm, the murder of black men and boys who were
"supposed to lose" (48), the slow destruction of black families through
poverty, incarceration, and grief passed down like inheritance. These are
not ancient injuries. They are ongoing ones wearing historical costume.
Richie's ghost is central to this
paper's argument. Pop's account of him at Parchman is devastating in its
precision: "Richie was the youngest boy I ever saw up in Parchman. There was
a couple thousand men separated into work farms over all them acres" (25).
He was twelve years old, imprisoned for stealing food because "everybody was
poor and starving, and even though white people couldn't get your work for
free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for
it" (25). He did not end up at Parchman because he was dangerous. He ended
up there because the economic and racial structure of Mississippi made his
hunger a crime. His haunting of Jojo is Ward's insistence that this history
is not over. Richie himself confirms this when he tells Jojo: "sometimes I
think it done changed. And then i sleep and wake up, and it ain't changed
none. It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when
the scales change, but the inside always the same" (140).
The tree at the end of the novel,
full of ghosts who speak with their eyes, carries the weight of every
unanswered atrocity. Ward lists their deaths without softening: "he raped me
and suffocated me until I died. I put my hands up, and he shot me eight
times. She locked me in the shed and starved me to death" (225). These are
not metaphors. They are the accumulated dead of American racial and gendered
violence, each one unnamed, each one still present. Ward's tree is her most
direct feminist argument: that the violence done to black women and black
children in America is not individual tragedy but collective and continuing
crime.
What makes Richie's haunting
particularly precise as a feminist argument is the way it connects
individual deaths to structural continuity. When Richie reveals himself to
Jojo at the Parchman fields, he speaks with a voice that carries both
childhood and historical weight: "i'm going home" (110). He says this
repeatedly throughout the novel — to river at Parchman, to Jojo decades
later — and each time the words carry a different impossibility. Richie has
no home to go to. Parchman took it. The racial and economic structure of
Mississippi put him there at twelve years old for stealing food, and the
violence inside Parchman ensured he never left. When he appears, and Jojo
sees "a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck" leaning into the
car window (110), Ward is doing something precise: making the past
physically present, refusing the comfortable distance that historical
narrative usually provides. Richie is not a symbol. He is a twelve-year-old
boy who cannot find his way home, and the reason he cannot is the same
Jojo's grandfather spent years at Parchman and the same reason Leonie's
brother was shot with no one held to account. The machinery does not change.
Only the faces do.
Leonie's haunting by given works
differently but makes the same argument. Given appears to her only when she
uses drugs — "this given that came to me every time I snorted a line, every
time I popped a pill" (35) — and Ward's formal insistence here is
unmistakable: trauma and its chemical management are inseparable for this
woman. The first time given appeared, she was "at a party in the kill, and
my brother walked through there with no bullet holes in his chest or in his
neck, whole and long-limbed, like always" (49). She is not chasing a high.
She is chasing her brother. She is trying to live in a world where given is
still alive, because the one where he is dead has given her nothing to
survive with.
There is something else worth saying
about given's ghost. He appears to Leonie but not to anyone else in the
family until the very end of the novel. That loneliness is deliberate.
Leonie carries her grief privately, chemically, invisibly — the way black
women have always been expected to carry things. Nobody asks her what she
lost when given died. Nobody sits with her in it. The ghost is Ward's way of
insisting that Leonie's grief is real, that it has a face and a name, even
if the world around her has moved on. A woman whose grief is invisible to
everyone except herself is not suffering a personal tragedy. That is a
social one. Gordon's framework clarifies why Ward needs ghosts at all. A
realist novel about Leonie's life might produce sympathy or condemnation. A
haunted one produces something harder to dismiss — the sense that what
happened to given, to Richie, to every black person the Mississippi soil
holds, is not finished. The ghosts are Ward's refusal to let structural
violence stay buried — which is, this paper argues, a profoundly feminist
refusal.
A paper organized around oppression
risks leaving its subjects without agency. Ward does not make this mistake,
and this reading should not either.
Jojo is the novel's most sustained
figure of refusal. He is thirteen, caught between a mother who cannot mother
him and a grandfather who loves him with a ferocity that is partly guilt. He
has every reason, by the novel's logic, to be broken. He is not. Ward shows
us the texture of his resistance in small, specific moments — the way he
holds Kayla through the long car journey, the way he makes her vomit up
Leonie's poorly-made medicine because "I knew what Kayla was saying. I knew"
(100). He hears the toddler's voice in his head — "I love you, Jojo. Why you
make me, Jojo?" (100) — and acts on what he hears, not on what Leonie wants
him to do. This is not heroism. It is a thirteen-year-old boy deciding,
quietly, that he will not become what the world around him expects.
River too refuses — not dramatically
but persistently. He survived Parchman by holding onto what Parchman could
not reach. Pop tells Jojo:
I forgot it all and bent and stood and bent and stood and only thought of my
mother. Her long neck, her steady hands, the way she braided her hair
forward to cover her crooked hairline. The dream of her was the glow of a
spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming. It was the only way I could
untether my spirit from myself, let it fly high as a kite in them fields.
(26)
What Parchman could not take was his
knowledge of who he was before it. Patricia Hill Collins, in Black
Feminist Thought (1990), describes this as the capacity of oppressed
people to maintain an inner life that domination cannot fully colonize.
Collins writes that "oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation
of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language of the
dominant group" (xii). Ward's characters resist even this — they speak to
each other in registers the dominant world cannot hear or will not bother to
learn.
Even Leonie, the novel's most damaged
figure, carries within her a stubborn refusal to disappear entirely. At the
moment of her mother's death, she whispers an invocation — "enter. Dance
with us" (215) — calling the old gods into the room to ease Philomena's
passage. She does something she has never done before in the novel: she acts
as her mother's daughter, drawing on a tradition of black feminine spiritual
knowledge passed down through the women in her family across generations. It
does not redeem her failures. But it is hers, and it matters. These moments
of refusal do not lighten the novel's darkness. Ward is not consoling
anyone. But she is insisting, firmly, that black life is not exhausted by
what presses against it.
This is true of Philomena too. Her
final days offer the novel's most quietly devastating image of black women's
resistance. Dying, in pain, unable to lift herself from the bed, she still
insists on agency — on choosing the terms of her own departure. She tells
Leonie: "like i drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you'll
help me draw it back so i can walk in the next" (175). The language of the
veil is not accidental. it connects Philomena's dying to a tradition of
black women's spiritual knowledge — the mystères, oya, maman brigitte —
passed down through the women of this family across generations, surviving
slavery, Parchman, poverty, and loss. Philomena's final act is not
resignation. It is a claim. She is refusing to let her death be something
that happens to her, making it instead something she does, on her own terms,
drawing on resources that the dominant culture cannot see, cannot tax, and
cannot take. That Ward gives Philomena this moment — and makes Leonie the
one who helps her through it — is the novel's most intimate feminist
statement. Two black women, one dying and one broken, holding a knowledge
between them that no amount of domination has managed to erase.
Malcolm X said it in 1962. Ward
proves it is still true in 2017. That gap — fifty-five years — is not
progress. It is the same wound, still open, still waiting to be addressed.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel that knows the structure of black
women's oppression from the inside. It does not explain it from a distance.
It lives inside it and refuses to pretend that any single framework —
racial, feminist, economic — is adequate to what it finds there.
This paper has argued that Leonie is
the figure intersectional criticism was built to see — a black woman whose
experience of oppression is compounded rather than categorical, and whose
literary representation demands a criticism willing to hold multiple
frameworks simultaneously without forcing their resolution. Crenshaw names
what is at stake. Hooks explains why it persists across generations. Gordon
illuminates why Ward needs ghosts to tell this story — because the violence
at its center is the kind that realism, left to itself, is tempted to put
behind it. the tree full of ghosts at the novel's end — women and men and
boys and girls, each one killed by a violence the dominant culture
reclassified as accident, or justice, or nothing at all — is Ward's final
insistence on this point. They are still there. They are still speaking. The
question the novel poses to its reader, and to the critical tradition that
has for too long read black women in fragments, is whether anyone is
listening.
What Ward's novel ultimately offers
African American feminist criticism is not a new answer but a more honest
question: not what oppresses black women, which we already know, but what it
actually feels like to live at the crossing — where race and gender and
class do not take turns but arrive together, every day, without apology.
Leonie is Ward's answer to that question. She is not easy to love. She was
never meant to be. She was meant to be seen.
1.
Collins, Patricia Hill.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, And The Politics Of
Empowerment. Routledge, 1990.
2.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé.
"Mapping The Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, And Violence
Against Women Of Color." Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, 1991, Pp.
1241–1299.
3.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly
Matters: Haunting And The Sociological Imagination. U Of Minnesota P, 1997.
4.
Hooks, Bell. Ain't I A
Woman: Black Women And Feminism. South End Press, 1981.
5.
---. Feminist Theory: From
Margin To Center. South End Press, 1984.
6.
---. Killing Rage: Ending
Racism. Henry Holt, 1995.
7.
Malcolm X. "Who Taught You
To Hate Yourself?" Speech Delivered At Templar Hall, Los Angeles, 22 May
1962.
8.
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing,
Unburied, Sing. Simon And Schuster, 2017.