Ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing and the strength of Ward's vision of her characters

It's in part a tribute to and recognition of Jesmyn Ward's excellent writing, but as I approach the end of Sing, Unburied, Sing I continue to wonder whether she really needed to include not one but two ghosts in this novel. We get in the final chapters not only the voice of Richie - who narrates two (or three?) of the chapters and who seems to have appeared to the 13-year-old Jojo because he has wakened from the dead and wants to know what J's grandfather (Pop, aka River/Riv Red) did to save him from abuse in prison but also the appearance - to Jojo and his mother, Leonie - of the ghost of the dead/murdered uncle/brother Given, who comes to the Stone household to escort the spirit of the dying grandmother to the world of the dead. OK, Ward tells this beautifully and rhythmically and it's possible to get caught up and lost in the beauty of her prose - and evidently the life of the spirit is important either to Ward or to the impoverished black community of Southern Missisippi or both - but as one who can't help but re-write the work of others (sorry) I wonder about this novel with the absence of Richie and, to a lesser extent of the spirit of Given. If Richie were not in the novel as a ghost, it would fall on Pop to tell Jojo of Richie's fate and of his ghastly role in Richie's death (I won't give that away) - and I think that would be a more powerful, dramatic scene, forcing Pop to a moral reckoning and forcing Jojo to rethink his relationship to his grandfather, maybe for the better. Similarly, why do we need the spirit of Given? His death has caused a terrible animosity between the to halves of Jojo's family - the white father's and black mother's families, to be precise - and somehow I'm hoping that in the final two chapters this rift will be closed and that the 2 families may reconcile. Hoping - but I don't actually foresee a happy ending, and that's to Ward's credit as well: She completely understands her characters, she empathizes w/ them, but she never romanticizes them: Near the end, after the grandmother's death, the daughter/other (Leonie) and the son/father (Michael) head of to get high once again on crystal meth. These are terribly flawed, suffering characters, and Ward resists the temptation to soften our view of them: The story remains three-dimensional and complex,