Of course there isn’t anything to be found in the car, per se, though Leonie is indeed hiding something from the police. A gun is pointed at him, one that he can’t ever again forget: “It is a tingle at the back of my skull, an itching at my shoulder.” Ward cracks the situation open like a mirror as her characters are pulled out of the car and all of them, even the child JoJo, are cuffed.

Again, it would be easy for a lesser writer to make this a self-important set piece, dead as any flogged horse could be. The climax of this book takes us to an encounter with the police that, after several years of headlines about police brutality, feels unnervingly familiar. A plot point here, for example, turns on the cost of the gas it takes to drive to the prison, a question that many novelists would not even bother to ask setting up a similar situation. There is something about her depiction of the working class, in particular, that seems lived-in, in a way that feels desperately needed in the cohort of Big American Books. If anything, there are times the reader wants Ward to elaborate more, not less. She is as economical a writer, in her own way, as Hemingway, using only the necessary number of words. But not in Ward’s, a 2011 winner of the National Book Award. There are writerly hands in which such a device, with all its clear invocations of the South’s racial history, might rapidly prove blunt and insufferable. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.” She still feels that Michael sees past her “skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Absence has not diminished Leonie’s consuming passion for him. He has been gone three years when the novel opens, but is about to be released. Her focal point instead is JoJo’s father, Michael, who is incarcerated upstate for drug-related crimes.

She lives with her own parents and largely lets them parent her children. JoJo’s mother, Leonie, had him young, and to a degree not often portrayed in fiction she is ambivalent, even hostile to, motherhood. But as is somewhat unusual for novels about preternaturally observant children, Ward explicitly spells out for us why he is this way.

JoJo is, in other words, that cliché, an old soul. I like to think it is something I could look at straight.” But its moral anchor is a young boy named JoJo, a biracial child in Mississippi who is essentially without parents and who, at the age of 13, will still begin his monologue by gravely observing, “I like to think I know what death is. Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” is a multivocal book, switching voices from chapter to chapter.

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