If William Faulkner and Toni Morrison had a literary love child, it might be Jesmyn Ward. Born in poverty in the rural Mississippi town of DeLisle (current population 1712), Ward is the only African-American and the only woman to have been awarded the National Book Award twice. Her first was for 2011′s Salvage the Bones, based on her experience battling the destructive ferocity of Hurricane Katrina. The second was for 2017′s Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel in three voices centred around a road trip to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison, one of them belonging to the ghost of an innocent young man whose violent death was covered up by the jailers’ chilling omerta.
Ward’s lyricism conjures the brutality of oppression, racism, poverty and violence with the song of poetry. Pain, grief, community and hope not only imbue her fiction, but also drove her impassioned memoir in 2013, Men We Reaped, which recounts how in five years Ward lost five young black men in her life to drugs, accidents, suicide and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty. That powerful narrative contends with the risk of being a black man in the rural South, the title deriving from the writings of the freed slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”
Let Us Descend, Ward’s first historical novel, similarly draws on classical poetry for its form and title, both taken from Dante’s Inferno, which begins, “Let us descend and enter this blind world.” The world that Ward leads us into is the hell of slavery. Set in the years before the Civil War, our guide is the enslaved young woman Annis, who is sold in a fit of rage by the slaver who fathered her. Separated from her mother, who was sold before her and sent to New Orleans to work on a sugar plantation, Annis is chained to a group of women forced to walk through swamps and unforgiving terrain from North Carolina to Louisiana. Initially, she is joined by her lover Safi, but Safi manages to escape after being cruelly raped by one of the slave masters who did not retie her properly to the chain of women.
Annis is joined on her journey by haunting memories, sympathetic spirits and ancestors from the other side. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with earth and water, myth and history – spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. Ward leads readers through the descent but this is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
One of the fallacies Ward has said she wanted to challenge in this novel was the myth of the passive slave. Her extensive research revealed “all the ways that enslaved people resisted; all the ways they pushed back against this system that spanned the entire world”. Annis is thus invested with the agency of her glorious ancestry. Secretly trained in the arts of hand-to-hand combat by her beloved mother, she is raised to be a warrior. This sacred knowledge gives her strength when starvation, pain and loneliness attempt to overtake her.
This is not a novel for the faint-hearted, but it is one that is elevated by the beauty of language and the eternal vigilance of hope.
