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?
Let Us Descend is an extraordinary novel, one Ward wasn’t sure she wanted to write. The idea for it came in 2015, when she was in the car driving from DeLisle to her teaching job at Tulane University in New Orleans. A short item came on local public radio about the history of slavery in the city. Ward knew New Orleans well; after the collapse of her parents’ marriage, her father had moved there and she spent large parts of her adolescence with him and his family. The historian on the radio was talking about the role played by New Orleans in America’s domestic slave trade, and how, while there had been dozens of slave pens in the city, “there were only two markers of where they had been, and one of those was in the wrong location”. Ward was stunned. “I knew none of that – that New Orleans was the centre of the domestic slave trade in the early 1800s, or that thousands of enslaved people were sold south to New Orleans and on to plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana.”
She began reading around the subject and the things she didn’t know began to multiply. “I realised I knew nothing about chattel slavery in America: how plantations worked, or the slave pens, or the fact that one of the reasons that so many enslaved people were brought to New Orleans was because of the agriculture in the upper south failing – tobacco and rice weren’t turning the kind of profits that sugar and cotton were, and so they began selling masses and masses of people. I didn’t know any of that. It’s ridiculous. One of the biggest things I didn’t know was that there was a healthy history of resistance on the part of enslaved people.” This was not, Ward recognised, a mere question of oversight. “That I had grown up in this place and knew none of that seemed so purposeful, and so terrible. That these people, very real people who had suffered in terrible ways, that their lives and that reality had been erased from the landscape? That really bothered me.”
The novel that emerged after almost two years of background reading tells the story of Annis, a teenage girl who is transported from a plantation in the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans. As in all of Ward’s novels, the writing is both lyrical and sharply controlled. Annis loses her mother to the slave market, her lover to escape, and everyone she has ever known or loved to uncertain ends. “My longing for my mother spreads over me in a great fishing net and tightens,” writes Ward, and the novel, which takes its title from a line from Dante’s Inferno – “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world’” – is in large part a book about the pain of not knowing. Ward evokes a world in which Annis and the enslaved people around her must create a reality apart from the material realm. “Didn’t Mama say I was my own weapon? That I was always enough to figure a way out.”
In her previous novels, in particular Salvage the Bones, which tells the story of a family in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which centres on the brutal history of Parchman prison in Mississippi, Ward’s characters operate within highly circumscribed conditions, but they nonetheless have some physical freedom. One of the central problems in writing Let Us Descend, Ward says, was figuring out “how to write from the perspective of someone who has been robbed of nearly all physical agency. It was very hard for me to access Annis,” she says. “How do you write about someone who can’t go anywhere or do anything?”
She also worried about how a novel on this topic might be received. “I was thinking a lot about audience and knowing that, across large swathes of Black America, there’s oftentimes resistance to slave narratives – to experiencing an enslaved person’s life in art.” Colson Whitehead had just written The Underground Railroad and Ward found herself thinking “Is there even room for this? I was afraid there was a certain amount of fatigue.” It was a conversation with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates that gave her the boost she needed. “One of the things he said was, if you think about it, there were millions of people who were enslaved. So there are millions of lives to write about and their experiences were all different. The common element was the fact they were enslaved, but they all had different wants and desires and dreams and longings and griefs. That’s a very simple declaration, but I needed to hear it.”
She wrote and rewrote the first chapters over and over; as she puts it, “unsuccessful beginning after unsuccessful beginning”. And then in January 2020, Miller started feeling unwell and went to a clinic for blood tests. “There was nothing that happened at that visit that indicated he would die two days later.” When Miller was admitted to hospital for further tests, Ward returned home, unconcerned, to their children. “And so, when I got the phone call from one of his aunts who said ‘You have to come back to the hospital, he might not make it’, I said, ‘What? This makes no sense.’”
It still makes no sense. Twenty years earlier, Ward’s 19-year-old brother had been killed by a drunk driver. She had lost countless friends to murder or drug addiction, and wrote brilliantly about them in Men We Reaped. But Miller’s death threw her into a different kind of grief, deepened by the fear of what it meant for her children. “How do I raise them in a world in which they’ve lost their father? I feel like I haven’t figured out the answer to that, and I’ll be figuring out the answer for the rest of my life.”
Work was the last thing she wanted to do: “Losing my partner almost made me stop writing. It was so hard for me to access these characters and I asked myself: is this it? Because you’re not working. You’re not writing this book.” Something internally answered her, “an intuitive voice,” she says, “that has popped up throughout my life. It spoke up, piped up, and was like: ‘No, this is not it. This is the last thing that Brandon would want, for your grief at him leaving to silence you. He loved you. You can’t stop.’” She went back to the novel.
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Life became different in ways that chimed with the national experience: Covid broke out two months after Miller’s death and, Ward says, it astonishes her how silent we have been about the aftermath of the pandemic. “Over a million people died. So many people lost people they love and are wrestling with grief and loss. And we’re not talking about it. It’s surreal. It’s frustrating. And most days I don’t know what to say, or think about it. Because if over a million people died, you have to think about the web of kin and chosen family and friendship around those people.” She looks incredulous. “That’s millions of people.”
For Ward, grief, in its acute phase, means an intense period of reconstruction. When Miller died, she says, “I knew from when my brother passed that I was about to lose two years. Grief – it unmakes a version of you. And you have to create a new version of yourself and your life. And in a way I think that’s what those two years are about. It’s about remaking yourself.” Being in a town that, with the exception of her college years and a brief stint in New York, Ward had lived in her entire life, meant she had deep relationships to draw on for support. There is, however, only so much other people can do when you’re grieving. “It can feel very isolating. Sometimes I think this is one of the most natural things in the world. Birth and death. Everything is born and everything dies. It feels like it should be something that is more visible, in a way, and we should have more community around.” And yet, she says, “there is something about grief that demands you struggle with it alone; realisations and moments and loneliness and yearning that only you can face”.
Three and a half years on, Ward has a new partner, and a young son. Her life consists of a combination of the deeply familiar and changes she never anticipated. Her older children go to the private school she attended – her mother paid her fees on a domestic worker’s wages and with the help of one of the families she cleaned for, an experience that both changed Ward’s life and was deeply traumatic. In Men We Reaped, Ward exposed the school for the casual racism of what was then an entirely white student body. Her decision to send her own children there was based on the fact that “it offers one of the best educations on the Gulf Coast. I’m on the school board, because I want to do my part to make their experience as different from my experience of the school as I can.”
She thinks about leaving DeLisle all the time. It’s a tremendously hard decision, she says, in which none of the options is ideal, but the urge to move north has been particularly acute lately. “Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican party, and Ron DeSantis [the governor of Florida] is two states over, dismantling diversity efforts at universities that receive state funding. It feels very hostile living here. The threat of physical violence and also emotional violence is ever present. And sometimes it’s too much. I know that it exists everywhere, especially in the US, but there are places where it’s a bit less. The volume is not as loud in places outside of Mississippi. So I wrestle with this impulse to uproot all of us. I think: I could just find a job somewhere else.”
The cost would be proximity to her family, and seeing her children experience the best of her own childhood: “Spending summers running around barefoot in rural Mississippi, riding go-karts and playing in mud. Running wild. I’d have to give that up. It makes me sad and I struggle with it.” These are the questions Ward wrestles with daily – where to find happiness, to be most comfortably herself – and they are the questions that inform her work.
What she understood, ultimately, in the writing of Let Us Descend was that while Annis “didn’t have physical agency, she would have other types of agency”. Emotional agency, agency of the imagination, or memory. “Later I realised she’d have a spiritual agency, and interact with this supernatural world. I just had to figure out how to access those other agencies that aren’t bound by chains or rope or the threat of violence.”
Ultimately, Ward found her way back to Annis through confronting her own pain and doubt. “One of the ways that I began to understand her was through the grief she felt; the ever-present feeling of loss. My own grief, and my struggle to figure out how to live with grief, and how to integrate that grief into a new normal – I felt that is what Annis is trying to do, in horrible conditions. She’s carrying the weight of the grief for her mother forward.” When everything in the world changes, these questions remain. “How do I live with this? Not in spite of it. How do I live with this?”
• Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward is published by Bloomsbury. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
