It’s always exciting when I find an author whose writing
makes me want to burn through his or her bibliography like a dangerous fever. I
grabbed the three books I could lay my hands on at the library, and dove head
first into Sing, Unburied, Sing, I
followed with Salvage the Bones, and
concluded with The Men We Reaped.
Each story is powerful and compelling, but as a body of work, they are a vivid
testimony of growing up Black and poor in the rural south.
Salvage the Bones
is Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, and a visceral snap shot of a family, which
itself is a microcosm of the greater systemic disenfranchisement of Blacks in
the book’s fictitious town of Bois Sauvage. Told over twelve days in rural Mississippi,
and climaxing as Hurricane Katrina moves inland, Esch’s story will break your
heart.
Fourteen year-old Esch “grew up”
(as
a child who has only ever known deprivation
and struggle can) putting the needs of her brothers first: Randall (a serious
basketball star, already proving to be a far better father to his little
brother Junior, than their dad ever has been), Skeetah (who, while trying to “make
them know,” ends up finding the love of his life…of a kind), and their baby
brother Junior (a sweet boy, the last boy, the birthing of whom killed their
mother). Junior, whose clinginess binds them, but also reminds them of how fierce
and tenuous they all feel without their mother. Within this backdrop, while a
hurricane threatens on the horizon, Esch struggles with a secret that scares her more than calamity.
In Sing, Unburied, Sing,
we meet a thirteen-year-old boy named Jojo, a young boy growing up in a
house/family that is haunted by racism, the poison of it spreading to each
member of the family like a cancer, body, mind, and soul. Jojo is at that age
where he is dreaming about being a man. And those dreams take on the straight
lines of Pap, Junior’s grandpa. Junior, his baby sister Kayla, and their mom
Leonie all live with Pap and Mam. When Leonie decides to take Jojo and Kayla on
a three day odyssey to pick up her man Michael from prison.(Michael is, to a
much lesser degree, their father. But Jojo learned early what baby Kayla is
just now feeling: Michael has eyes and ears only for Leoni.) Without Pap’s
imperious presence on the trip, Jojo feels unmoored, and worries that Leoni can’t
keep them safe. Running both parallel and through Jojo’s experiences, are Richie’s.
But the same eye Jojo turned so sweetly upon Kayla, sweaty and hot on a
too-long car ride back from the prison, becomes baleful when it lands upon
Richie, slumped impossibly on the floorboard beside him. Well, maybe it’s not so impossible if you
understand that Richie is a ghost that roams forward and back in time, tethered
to a plantation that had many a PR facelift during its time. The owners may
change in name, but never in deed, and those fields may now be growing Parchment Penitentiary
cotton instead of that old slavery cotton, but it’s the same damn field. And the
Black men and boys, rounded up for charges ranging from petty to imagined, as
prisoners, may now be legally yoked to the field once again. The master/jailer’s
face may change, but the same enslavement flows through and around time like a
snake eating itself.
I finished my holiday reading with
The Men We Reap. This volume of Jesmyn Ward’s memoirs tracks the
fatal arcs of five boys’ lives. Stars that dropped right out of her family’s
sky. Jesmyn begins her telling with the freshest loss, family friend, Demon
Cook. Cook was the boy from an unbroken family, a dedicated provider and
conscientious neighbor, who was murdered on his front lawn. A crime still
unsolved. He was preceded in death by Charles Joseph Martin, a lithe acrobatic
marvel and chivalrous and beloved cousin. Death came calling next for Ronald
Way Lizana, a dazzling and charming friend; and lastly, Jesmyn discusses the
loss of her little brother, Joshua Adam Dedeaux. Alternating with each
heartbreaking memorial, are autobiographical chapters chronicling the history
of Jesmyn and her family. She paints a bleak picture of what a young boy can
expect when he’s young, Black, and poor in rural America. She describes in
haunting detail what it looked like when the light dimmed in the eyes of a
brother, a friend, or a loved one as they realized, with their eyes wide open,
that the American Dream isn’t an option for every sleeper.
Reviews by Jennifer Wilson
wilsonj@delphilibrary.org
William Kent Krueger, award winning author, writes of two main characters in his novels: Cork O'Connor and Henry Meloux. Desolation Mountain is his latest book featuring Cork O'Connor.
