Sing, Unburied, Sing

After a sleepless night listening to Richie singing, Jojo finds Richie sitting in a tree and brings him with him to Pop. Jojo asks to hear the end of Richie’s story, but Pop hesitates: “I look at him and raise my eyebrows. Tell him without saying it: I can hear this. I can listen” (250). 

Pop says that one day, a prisoner named Blue took Richie and ran away after raping and beating one of Parchman’s female inmates; Richie elaborates that Blue threatened violence if he didn’t comply. Pop continues, saying that he took the dogs to track down Blue and Richie, but by that point, they had made it outside the limits of Parchman. There, they came across a white girl whom Blue attacked. She managed to get away (partly, Richie explains, because he intervened), and a lynch mob formed. The mob found Blue first, mutilating and killing him. Knowing the mob would do the same to Richie, Pop tracked the boy down and stabbed him, “[holding] him till the blood stopped spurting” (255), then set the dogs on the corpse to conceal what had happened.

As Richie listens in horror, Pop tells Jojo he’s never been able to forget the smell of Richie’s blood: “Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn’t speak.