“[I]t was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.”

Jojo’s ability to hear the thoughts of animals is the first indication of his psychic abilities, which in turn reflect the spiritual order at the novel’s center: one in which humans are part of a larger, eternal whole that also encompasses all of nature. The details of Jojo’s power are significant as well. The voices Jojo hears belong to beings who can’t speak for themselves—animals, small children, the dead, etc. This perhaps helps explain the unusual amount of empathy and selflessness Jojo displays throughout the novel; he is uniquely tuned in to suffering that can easily be overlooked by others.

“You don’t know the sergeant come from a long line of men bred to treat you like a plowing horse, like a hunting dog—and bred to think he can make you like it. That the sergeant come from a long line of overseers. You don’t know them trusty shooters done been sent to Parchman for worse than getting into a fight at a juke joint. Just know the trusty shooters, the inmate guards, was sent there because they like to kill.”

Pop’s description of what it was like to arrive at Parchman is one of the clearest examples of the way in which past and present racism intertwine in the novel. Although Pop didn’t know it at the time, Parchman essentially functioned like a slavery-era plantation: The labor was forced and unpaid, the workers were (as a result of legal double standards) disproportionately black and harvesting cash crops like cotton, and the men supervising the inmates were often the descendants of plantation overseers. Furthermore, the entire system was based on the implicit threat of violence: Methods once used to keep slaves in line (whips, dogs, etc.