Summary
It’s Jojo’s thirteenth birthday. Jojo is half-Black and half-white, and he lives with his Black grandparents and his mother. His grandmother, Mam, is asleep in the house—she’s bed-bound due to her chemotherapy treatment. Jojo’s baby sister, Kayla, is also sleeping. Careful to not wake his family, Pop, Jojo’s grandfather, asks for his grandson’s help on the farm.
Jojo follows Pop as he picks an “unlucky goat” from the pasture. Pop is a father figure in Jojo’s life, since Jojo's biological father, Michael, is in prison. Jojo watches painfully as Pop wrestles the goat and then slits its throat and stomach. Jojo is deeply affected by the brutality of the goat’s killing, and when Jojo is asked to clean out the insides of the goat’s stomach, he is overcome by the pungent smell. He runs out of the farmshed and vomits.
Pop tells Jojo that he hears Kayla crying. He sends his grandson inside to check on her, but Jojo finds that she is sleeping peacefully. Jojo thinks about the salad days of the past, before Leonie, his mother, began using drugs and Michael was in prison. Jojo recalls a time in which he stepped on the lid of a can when his mother abandoned him at home. It was after this incident that Jojo began calling his mother by her first name instead of “mom.”
Pop begins to tell Jojo about his time in Parchman, the prison. Pop explains that he and his brother, Stag, were sent to Parchman after Stag got into a fight with a white man at the bar. While there, Pop met Richie, a twelve-year-old boy who was imprisoned after he stole food for his starving family. Pop recounts the harshness of prison life and its direct descendence from slavery. The inmates, most of them Black, were forced to work in the cotton fields while the white guards subjected them to brutal attacks.
Leonie arrives home for Jojo’s birthday celebration. Instead of buying a birthday cake, she has purchased a baby shower cake. During Jojo’s birthday, Leonie receives a call from Michael, who tells her that he’s coming home from prison. The narrator switches from Jojo to Leonie, who is now working a shift at a bar. Leonie snorts cocaine with Misty, her coworker. Every time that Leonie gets high, she hallucinates that her brother, Given, is with her.
Given was a popular football player, well-liked by both his Black and white peers. One day, Given went hunting with his white teammates, one of whom was Michael’s cousin. Given won a bet, and Michael’s cousin shot and killed Given out of jealousy. The incident was covered up as a hunting accident, and the cousin went to Parchman for three years. Soon after Given’s death, Michael apologized to Leonie for his cousin’s actions. The two began dating, although Michael’s racist family did not approve of his relationship. Leonie drives to Michael’s parents' house to let them know that she will pick him up from prison. Upon her arrival at the house, Leonie sticks her middle finger up at Big Joseph–Michael’s father.
Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla head to Parchman to retrieve Michael. Misty, Leonie’s coworker, joins them on their trip, as her boyfriend is also imprisoned at Parchman. While in the car, Jojo notices that Mam and Pop have packed a gris-gris bag for him. Jojo thinks about his grandfather’s horrific stories about Parchman and recognizes the gris-gris bag as a symbol of familial protection. Meanwhile, Leonie and Misty stop by a house, and Jojo and Kayla are brought inside. There, they witness a violent scene–a child is beaten with a bat after he breaks the television. Jojo soon realizes that the people in the house are cooking meth, and Leonie and Misty are picking up.
Analysis
In the first section of the story, the reader is introduced to Jojo and his family. Jojo has a close relationship with his grandparents, and he is somewhat estranged from his mother, Leonie. As a biracial child growing up in Mississippi, Jojo is forced to confront the politics associated with his identity. Pop, Jojo’s grandfather, clearly believes that it is time for his grandson to learn about his family’s painful history. The opening scene, in which Pop encourages Jojo to slay a goat, establishes the novel as a coming-of-age story.
The death of the goat also introduces the motif of animals into the story. As Jojo looks deep into the eyes of the animal, he ponders its innocence while also considering its unfortunate fate. Jojo recognizes something of himself when he comes in contact with the goat. This moment can be interpreted as the beginning of Jojo’s loss of innocence and his transition from boyhood to manhood. Jojo’s inability to clean the goat symbolizes his sensitivity and his hesitancy to accept death as a part of life.
Following the goat incident, Pop begins telling Jojo about his past. He begins by explaining his wrongful imprisonment and the cruelty he endured while at Parchman, the state penitentiary. Pop explains the American prison system and its inextricable ties to slavery. Pop tells Jojo about Richie, a boy who was sent to Parchman when he was Jojo’s age. In this anecdote, Pop tells Jojo that incarceration was created and enforced in order to protect white society and control Black men, regardless of their age.
In this section, we also learn about Jojo’s complicated relationship with his mother. Jojo recalls a traumatic memory in which Leonie abandoned him; after this particular moment, he lost his trust in her and began to distance himself from her. Their fraught relationship is further underlined by the fact that Jojo refers to his mother by her first name. Throughout the story, Leonie is depicted as careless and self-destructive. Jojo is bothered by her behavior at his birthday, and he worries about how she will behave upon Michael’s prison release.
The novel is organized by chapters that oscillate between different first-person narratives. Jojo, Leonie, and Richie are the three principal narrators, and their varying perspectives allow the reader to understand the complicated interiorities of each character. While Jojo is often intolerant and aggravated by his mother, Leonie’s narration allows for the reader to empathize with her addiction and understand her grief. Later in the story, Richie’s narration depicts Jojo as an innocent, awkward, and unsure adolescent. In this way, Ward encourages the audience to deeply understand each character’s background and interpret the story beyond what is merely written on the page.
