As is often the case with great stories, the latest novel by Jesmyn Ward (DeLisle, Mississippi, 1977) came about unexpectedly. About nine years ago, the writer was driving from her small town of about 1,700 inhabitants to New Orleans, where she teaches Creative Writing at Tulane University, and was listening to a local radio program dedicated to the tricentennial of the city's founding.
"It was a series exploring little-known stories from the history of New Orleans. This particular program was about slavery and detailed the fact that, although there were dozens of slave markets and pens in 19th-century New Orleans, today there were only two commemorative plaques of this fact, and one of them was misplaced," recalls the author for La Lectura. "That broke my heart. In fact, I started crying while driving. It seemed terrible to me that millions of people had endured such pain and then that experience had been erased from collective memory."
Proud Southern writer and passionate student of the Deep South, Ward grew up visiting her relatives in New Orleans frequently, and her father lived there for several years when she was a teenager. "Upon deeper reflection, I was surprised to know nothing about the story they were telling, to discover that all that terrible past was so forgotten and buried that I had spent years of my life in that place and there was no trace," she elaborates. Later, horror gave way to an idea: "I immediately wondered if I could write a story about a young enslaved woman who has to go through those same markets. What if I wrote about that? Would a novel help bring that reality back to public consciousness, to collective memory?"
Thus was born Sing, Unburied, Sing, a vivid and poignant historical fiction set in the early 19th century, telling the heartbreaking and harrowing story of Annis, a young slave who is separated from her mother, sold by her master -who is also her father- to a Southern man and forced to descend from the rice fields of Carolina to the slave markets of New Orleans where, once again sold, she is condemned to a brutal existence on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.
Southern literature
Narrated in a powerful first person, with immersive lyricism and hints of magical realism, this real and metaphorical journey to a not-so-distant past becomes a descent into hell for Annis, whose life becomes a flight. "The novel comes from Annis's voice, the character came to me. In my early drafts, she came to me at the moment when they were selling her mother. She is panicked, afraid, and filled with rage and love for her mother. In other words, the broad strokes of her humanity were clear to me from the beginning, but I had to write in the novel to discover the smaller aspects of her character: her love for words, her pride in acquiring knowledge, her hunger for love...," explains Ward, emphasizing how challenging it was for her to delve into such a harsh life.
"I feel a responsibility when writing about poor and Black people in the South. I must be honest about their lives even if there are uncomfortable realities"
"It was very difficult. Essentially, this is a story about a young woman who suffers great abuse, sorrow, loss, boredom, and pain. It was difficult to accept all this because, viewed from the present, this brutal reality makes no sense. But Annis's wit, tenderness, fierceness, and resilience allowed me to write about the darkest experiences." Among them the traumatic separation from her mother, the rape of her lover with her present, the attempts of her father/master to sleep with her, the grueling march south where hundreds of people died and the confinement without water or food in a hole dug in the ground as undeserved punishment by her new mistress.
This darkness is one of the hallmarks of Ward's work, the first woman and first African American to win the National Book Award twice. The first came in 2011 for Salvage the Bones, where she narrated, through the eyes of a pregnant black teenager, the real story of how her family survived Hurricane Katrina. The second in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing, a dark family saga set in contemporary Mississippi dealing with race, poverty, and the aftermath of past violence. Before that, in 2008, the writer debuted with Where the Line Bleeds, the story of two poor black twin brothers raised by their blind grandmother who manage to survive in impossible circumstances.
Ward's first three novels, set in Bois Sauvage, a fictional town in the Mississippi Gulf Coast mirroring her home, explore common themes of Southern narrative: poverty, oppression, racism, and pain; family, strength, community, and hope. Ward, the first person in her family to attend college, graduated from Stanford in 1999. Shortly after, her brother Joshua was hit and killed by a drunk driver at their home in Mississippi. The driver, who was white, was only charged with leaving the scene of the accident, not for her brother's death, and ultimately served only two years of a five-year sentence. Ward transformed her grief into her memoir, Men We Reaped, which deals with the loss of five young men in her life.
The weight of the past
"Except for this very personal book, my fiction is not autobiographical, but I describe what surrounds me. The people living in rural Mississippi and forming my community, poor and Black Southern people. They are my inspiration. I want to tell the truth about this place, about these people who have been invisible for so long. It is an honor for me to write about them," Ward asserts, very aware that everything about who she is as a writer "has been shaped by growing up and living in the South. I see the inequality and the harsh reality of the lives that the people I love lead, and I want to represent that, to give it a presence. I feel a certain responsibility: if I choose to write about these people, I have to be honest about what they are experiencing. Uncomfortable realities come into play, of course, because many of them struggle with pain, loss, and death. When I write, I try to give dignity to my characters, for readers to understand what their lives are like."
"Unburied past shapes the present. Just like in the past century, many still believe that black lives matter less."
According to Ward, lives marked by history. The unburied past shapes the present is the mantra that runs, like the chorus of a song, throughout her work, focused on dismantling, by narrating the scars and injustice, any residual myth about the existence of a post-racial America. "One of the most valuable things historical fiction can do is encourage readers to feel empathy for the characters, who are just people doing the best they can with what they have. More empathy is always a good thing. Unearthing this past and writing this novel allowed me to better understand my present. American slavery was a terrible system, and its echoes are still with us today," the author states.
The big issue, she asserts, is that in the United States, there is not only interpersonal racism but also systemic racism. "It is rarely acknowledged, and that is why it is so difficult to eliminate. We know that African Americans reach the highest levels, including the presidency, and that there is a substantial middle class, but this is countered by systemic racism that continues to dehumanize, marginalize, and impoverish Black lives," Ward laments. And she does not hold back when giving examples. "It manifests in everything: in the shorter life expectancy of Black individuals, in infant mortality rates, in higher rates of chronic health conditions, in food deserts, and in inadequate infrastructure and lack of investment in Black neighborhoods, in discrimination in access to housing, employment, and school admissions... It is everywhere."
A situation she predicts will not improve in the new Trump era. "We have regressed on all levels. Living with this every day is exhausting, but I do what I must do. I fight. Our current horrors have not silenced me yet. I don't know if they will. In any case, the current political atmosphere has angered and frustrated me even more, leading me to my desk, my computer, my books. Just like in the past century, many still think that Black lives matter less," she concludes. According to Ward, those in power in the United States "invest in erasing the past, denying its impact on the present. They continue to insist that racism does not exist, that we are all born with the same opportunities."
A heated debate
However, she believes that if people write and read about slavery, it is because there is a rejection of that official narrative. In her second NBA acceptance speech, the writer expressed hope that this recognition was "a sign that the scope of interests encompassed by literature has expanded and the definition of universal can include stories about Black people, working-class individuals, or women." However, she knows that the topic is thorny and highly polarized in her country, where many argue that it is unnecessary for the horrors of slavery to be continuously represented in television, film, and literature, after years of highly debated works such as The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead or The Water Dancer (2019) by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
"Grief is enduring because it is a frustrated expression of the love one feels for the deceased. As long as there is love, there will be pain."
"In a way, I feared that readers would think: 'Another novel about slavery, please no.' People often have instinctive reactions against narratives about enslaved individuals, as it is such a difficult subject that I believe people resist emotionally engaging with it and, therefore, it is easy to see them as simple and uniformed individuals," Ward reflects. "However, I realized that each enslaved person has a story to tell. They were all people with desires, needs, and longings. And that is something I really wanted to capture in the book. I wanted the reader to feel Annis's pain, her hunger, her longing for her mother, her anger, her despair, her hope, and her struggle. To immerse them in this world and reveal that she is just a person trying to do the best she can with what she has been given, trying not only to survive what she is experiencing but also to reach a place where she may thrive."
Beyond these sociopolitical doubts, another element, in this case personal, that marked the writing of Let Us Descend was the unexpected death in 2020 of her husband Brandon Miller, leaving Ward with two children who are turning 13 and 9 in 2025. "Even today [now remarried and with another child born in 2022], I am living with my grief. Grief endures because it is a frustrated expression of the love one feels for the deceased. As long as one loves the deceased, there will be pain. We have to learn to live with the pain, to live despite it," the author affirms, who was on the verge of giving up writing. "At that time, I felt like giving up because I felt truly hopeless and was immersed in my pain. I had that feeling that nothing would ever get better. A feeling I had experienced before, twice. The first time when my brother died, when he was 19 and I was 23, and the second after Katrina. On both occasions, I wondered how to move forward in the face of such devastation, how to make sense of life. The answer that came to me was to write."
In this sense, Ward acknowledges, finishing the novel was a kind of healing therapy. "Annis taught me a lot about resilience, helped me realize that choosing to wake up, breathe, and live despite difficulties and horror is resistance," she summarizes. "Currently, my grief is a shadow, always present but faint, following me throughout the day. I am grateful to Annis because by writing her journey through grief, I could better understand mine. At the end of the book, she makes the decision to live despite her losses, sorrow, and pain. Writing this story helped me do the same."
The antidote of empathy
A power, that of literature, that the author has made the center of her life. "Although it may be naive, I still believe in the possibilities of literature to narrate and combat inequality. When people read literary fiction, they have an experience with the characters. They feel, suffer, and rejoice with them, and this increases, I insist, the reader's empathy and encourages them to perceive others as complex human beings with emotions like their own. Empathy is a direct antidote to racism and inequality," she maintains. "In this sense, I do not believe that the literary quality of a work dilutes its power to inspire political change. I truly believe that my work reaches its peak when it inspires readers to feel with and for my characters. This is what plants the seeds of understanding, feeling, and ultimately, change."
This militant attitude is something fundamental for the writer in the United States "especially these days when there is a deliberate and sinister effort to erase the lived experiences of poor, Native, Latinx, Black, LGBTQ, disabled individuals... anyone who is seen as other by those who historically have wielded power. My work has sought and will always seek to amplify the voices of those who exist on the margins," she emphasizes, before pointing out that, although the literary world tends to pigeonhole both works and authors, she does not feel that she writes for any particular audience.
"When people read, they feel, suffer, and rejoice with the characters, and empathy is a direct antidote to racism and inequality"
"To begin with, I write for myself, because I love it and it nourishes my soul, but also for my family and my community, for people in the South, for Black individuals, for the poor. And, finally, for people who are marginalized in some way and do not usually see their lives reflected in popular culture and the literature they consume. People who do not have to resemble me, or come from the same socioeconomic background or the same place in the world, but who still find something that resonates with them in this world I am writing and in these characters," Ward reflects. "All good literature uses the power of the specific to have a universal impact. If the writer presents the characters so vividly, with such detail, that they become real to the reader, their stories will become the readers' stories. I strive to remember this in every piece I write. Additionally, I like to think that my books have power, weight, and lasting beauty, regardless of my color or the colors of my characters."
Characters that Ward considers universal because "they are struggling with things that all people struggle with. Loss, family and romantic relationships, or the struggle to overcome inequality or natural disasters are things that many people in the world face, so I hope that my work helps people navigate through these things, as I sincerely believe that life is very much worth living. Even when one is faced with violence, degradation, or collapse. We must not despair: we must live," says the writer, who reveals that she is likely to continue digging into this past to change the future. "I have other ideas for stories about this era, other innovative ideas lurking in my imagination. I am currently working on a novel for children and young people, as they will be the ones holding the years to come".