Excerpt from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Please," I say. Pop beats the meat he still has left to add to the boil, making it soft and tender, and clears his throat. I put my elbows on the table and listen:

Me and Stag, we got the same papa. My other brothers and sisters got different daddies because my papa died young. Think he was in his early forties. I don't know how old he was because he ain't know how old he was. Said his maman and daddy avoided them census takers, never answered their questions right, changed the number of kids they had, never registered none of they births. Said them people came around sniffing out that information to control them, to cage them like livestock. So they never did any of that official stuff, held to the old ways. Papa taught us some of that before he died: some hunting and tracking, some animal work, some things about balance, things about life. I listened. I always listened. But Stag ain't never listen. Even when we was little, Stag was too busy running with the dogs or going to the swimming hole to sit and listen. And when he got older, he was off to the juke joint. Papa said he was too handsome, said he'd been born pretty as a woman, and that's why he got into so much trouble. Because people like pretty things, and things came to him too easy. Maman say hush when Papa say that, say Stag just feel things too much, is all. Say that make it hard for him to sit and think. I ain't tell them this, but I thought both of them was wrong. I think Stag felt dead inside, and that's why he couldn't sit still and listen, why he had to climb the highest cliff when we went swimming at the river and jump off headfirst into the water. That's why Stag went to the juke joint damn near every weekend when he got eighteen, nineteen, drinking, why he walked with a knife in each shoe and one up each sleeve, why he cut and came home cut so often—he needed that to feel more alive. And he could have kept it up if that navy man ain't came up in there, one in a group of White men from up north stationed out on Ship Island. Wanted to have a good time with the coloreds, I guess, but bumped into Stag at the bar, and they had words, and then the man broke a bottle over Stag's head, and then Stag cut him, not enough to kill him, but enough to hurt him, to make him slow so Stag could run, but his friends beat up Stag before he could get a clean break. I was at the house alone when Stag got here, Maman up the road taking care of her sister and Papa out in the fields. When all them White men came to get Stag, they tied both of us and took us up the road. You boys is going to learn what it means to work, they said. To do right by the law of God and man, they said. You boys is going to Parchman.

I was fifteen. But I wasn't the youngest noway, Pop says. That was Richie.

Kayla wakes up all at once, rolling over and pushing up and smiling. Her hair is everywhere, tangled as the sticker vines that hang from pine trees.

Her eyes are green as Michael's, her hair caught somewhere between Leonie's and Michael's with a hint of hay color to it.

"Jojo?" she asks. That's what she always says, even when Leonie is next to her in the bed. That's the reason I can't sleep on the love seat with Pop in the living room anymore; when Kayla was a baby, she got so used to me coming in the middle of the night with her bottle. So I sleep on the floor next to Leonie's bed, and most nights Kayla ends up on my pallet with me, since Leonie's mostly gone. There's something gummy on the side of Kayla's mouth. I lick the hem of my shirt and wipe her cheek, and she shakes my hand off and crawls onto my lap: she's a short three-year-old, so when she curls into me, her feet don't even hang over my lap. She smells like hay baked in the sun, warm milk, and baby powder.

"You thirsty?" I ask.

"Yeah," she whispers.

Excerpted from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2017 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.