Thoughts on 2nd reading of Sing, Unburied, Sing

Having finished the re-read of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, I recognize one major mistake in my memory from first reading Pap/River has, over the course of the novel, told his grandson, Jojo, about his horrible experiences in Parchman prison, and in particular about how he tried to protect a young prisoner, Richie, from attack and abuse, but he never quite finishes his narrative, leaving unexplained Richie's fate - until the end of the novel. At that point, as Pap's wife has died and he's in mourning, he tells Joho the end of the tale: In essence, he led Richie (an escapee pursued by a posse) away from the chase and then kills him to protect him from death by torture that he would have faced when caught by the posse. I'd thought the ghost of Richie tells Jojo this tale; in fact, it's important that Pap tells the story himself, expiating the guilt he has felt across his adult life. The ghost of Richie hears this tale and feels freed - at last he understands why his protector turned on him. All that said, I think this would have been a stronger novel if Ward didn't steer it toward the symbolic and supernatural at the end; do we really need the ghost of Richie as a character? At the end, there's a lot of symbolism and imagery that Jojo, who is gifted in the supernatural, witnesses - the ghosts of spirits of many abused prisoners hovering among the branches of a tree, the transformation of people (Riche's ghost?) into a white snake - honestly, I can't figure out what Ward is getting at here. What I prefer to focus on is her excellent use of first-person voice to establish a # of radically different characters, her understanding of the difficult life in rural poverty in the Mississippi delta, her information about the horrors of abuse in a Miss work prison, her ability to create characters who are deeply flawed while maintaining her (and our) sympathy and compassion for them. Why bring in the ghosts? The heart of the initial narrative (movement #1, as noted in a previous post) is left unresolved - and I think she had an opportunity for either a tragic or romantic conclusion. I suspected she was headed toward an R&J/West Side Story conclusion, in which the white and black families, mortal enemies, would come together over the death of their children, but no, she backs away from that possibility - maybe for the good, as it might have been melodramatic, but still, a novel is about people, not about imagery, and I wish she had not reverted to the supernatural to tie up strands at the end.