Bayou Pages | “Let Us Descend” by Jesmyn Ward

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.”

I didn’t so much fall in love with Jesmyn Ward’s novels as I did with the power of Ward’s writing. She tackles hard, gritty subject matter, exposing the underbelly of American reality, and in this novel American history, with acute examination. While lauded for her novels like Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011), Ward now turns to the past, the original sin of American chattel slavery. And notably, Ward examines the mother/daughter relationship, a source of criticism from her other works of fiction.   

Annis, an enslaved girl, exists in the shadow of her enslaved mother. A product of the master’s assaults on Annis’s mother, the girl learns the art of combat from her mother deep in the forest, where the mother is undoubtedly preparing her child for what’s to come. But at night, Annis sleeps in the relative comfort of her mother’s embrace – a reprieve from the horrors that will inevitably ensue in a neo-slave narrative. When Annis’s mother is sold, followed soon by Annis herself, and the shadow is lifted, Annis is forced to exist outside the shadows, to navigate the harsh realities alongside the spirit world via the ghost of her maternal grandmother Mama Aza. 

Where Ward soars is in her use of language, a lyrical cadence that both softens and sharpens the hard material. She writes, “Most people can’t see all the layers in a person, just like they can’t taste all that goes into a pot. They chew and pick out one, two flavors. Cooks know every one.” Ward understands and manifests the power of simplicity, weaving complex reflections with words read easily. Ward’s work is synonymous with themes, particularly grief. “How that love, with nowhere to go, aches.” In this novel, Ward compounds that grief with a layer of unknowing. 

In an NPR interview, Ward insisted that the novel contained hope, an interesting assertion as the plot channels Dante’s Inferno, of which the most quotable line reads, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Perhaps Ward’s version of hope in the life of an enslaved person is one we wouldn’t, or even couldn’t, recognize. But like all of Ward’s work, she envelops her readers in the questions, forcing us to reckon with the known and the unknown, the unimaginable and the unrealized, the stains that remain. 

  Ward’s novels are not for the faint of heart. They are not a form of escapism we covet. They are an examination of history and its systems, of the left behind and the left out. She resurrects stories America’s chosen to forget. And for that reason and countless others, Ward is one of the brightest and most intuitive contemporary authors of our time. 

“My mama knew the world was sopping with spirit, that you didn’t need to go to heaven or hell to witness it; she knew it was all here. And now I know too.”