In Men We Reaped, her memoir about growing up poor in the American south, and the five men close to her who died too soon, Jesmyn Ward writes of a niggling dissatisfaction with her first novel. She knew that the twin boys in Where the Line Bleeds, who graduate high school only to face the invidious choice of minimum-wage dead-end labour or drug dealing to pay the bills, “were failing as characters”, because she couldn’t figure out how to “look squarely at what was happening to young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.”
In every novel since, she has looked that reality more squarely in the face. In Salvage the Bones, where Hurricane Katrina bears down on a pregnant teen and her fiercely protective, daily hustling, extremely poor family; in Sing, Unburied, Sing, whose first pages are a litany of difficulties (prison, drug abuse, mental illness, poverty, violence, absent men and the women and children who pick up the pieces). Her achievement so far, rewarded by two National Book Awards, has been to do this while also insisting on her characters’ individuality, autonomy, dignity and complication; their tenderness and love in the face of overwhelming odds. Her new novel, Let Us Descend, goes back to the beginnings of the reality Ward has lived and written about, to the arrival of the slave ships, and the plantations where those slaves were put to work; a reality so dark it is like being taken by the hand and led into hell.
