Jesmyn Ward is at home in DeLisle, Mississippi, where she grew up, and where she has set much of her fiction. Her two eldest children are at school and her youngest, the care of whom she shares with her new partner, is at home, while she talks to me on Zoom about her fourth novel, Let Us Descend. To Ward, who is 46, these circumstances – personal and professional – remain profoundly strange. Three and a half years ago, Brandon Miller, her partner and the father of her two eldest children, died suddenly of acute respiratory distress syndrome. By then, Ward, who has twice won the US National Book award, in 2011 for Salvage the Bones and six years later for Sing, Unburied, Sing, was three chapters into writing her new novel, and she ground to a halt. For six months, she didn’t write a thing. “I said [to myself], OK, are you done? Have you written all the books that you’re going to write? Because it seems like that is the case.”
Writing against this backdrop of grief was always going to be hard, but Let Us Descend turned out to be almost comically ill-suited to drawing her back into work. “I was so mired in sorrow, and in shock. I wasn’t feeling any motivation. I didn’t want to immerse myself in that world,” she says. Grief had already played a large part in Ward’s life – her 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, describes the loss of her brother and four other men, all close relatives or friends. Her novels examine the common grief of living in a region decimated by natural disasters and the scourge of centuries of racist violence and underinvestment. If she has a lightness about her – a quickness to laugh and an eagerness in the way she leans forward in her chair – it strikes me as a determined, almost pragmatic choice. What else, implies Ward, can you do, when you have young children, your partner dies suddenly and you are knee-deep in a novel about the horrors of American chattel slavery?
