She brings her white trash friend so they can do a drug deal on the way to the prison. Leonie doesn’t set off on this trip alone. She doesn’t read the plants right, she doesn’t listen to Mam’s lessons on medicine, she seems incapable of hearing the basic needs of her children, like when they say, “Mom, we haven’t eaten in eighteen hours.” Leonie, Mam’s daughter, seems to screw this all up. For instance, Mam is able to listen to plants when they tell her what they cure. Pop and Mam both have what I would refer to as witchy tendencies, though there may be a term for their beliefs that was not obvious to me in the novel.

Everything about the trip sets off alarm bells in Pop’s head, so he packs a balancing bag in Jojo’s things: a feather for light feet, a tooth for strength, etc. When the novel starts, Michael is about to be released, and Leonie insists that her son and daughter leave their grandparents’ house to go on this trip across the state to pick Michael up. To support his family, Michael cooks meth in the back yard, which lands him in prison.

How she fell in love with the son of a hardened racist and accomplice to murder is flimsy, but it doesn’t matter. His mother, Leonie, is a young black woman incapable of earning the trust of her children because she fights so much with their father, Michael, a white man whose dad is a police officer who helped cover up the murder of Leonie’s brother. Jojo, a boy of thirteen, lives with his Pop and Mam (grandparents) and little sister, Kayla, in the deep South.

Sing unburied sing book review