“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.”
Let Us Descend (Scribner 2023) is my first Jesmyn Ward novel, but it certainly won’t be my last. Ward’s writing is as lush and powerful as everyone says, and there is a cadence to the storytelling that echoes oral traditions centuries old.
The novel is about Annis, a young slave in the Carolinas. At night, her mother tells her the stories of who they are and where they come from, and she teaches her to fight. When the slaveowner, who is Annis’s sire, turns his gaze toward her, her mother makes a choice. The choice saves Annis in the moment, but her mother is sold. Drowning in grief, Annis finds solace in the arms of another young slave. Her relationship with Safi reminds her of the stories her mother told of women soldiers turning to each other for love and comfort, and it brings her strength for what is to come. Both Annis and Safi are ultimately sold, and they begin the long journey to the slave markets of New Orleans. The landscape and, in particular, the swamps, is its own character. (Can we talk about how fantastic the cover is with the cutout and the swamp within the bee?) As someone who grew by the Great Dismal Swamp and whose head is full of the stories from that swamp, I wish that swamp and those communities had featured more, but the Great Dismal was the dream that her mother couldn’t realize and it’s the swamps of New Orleans she descends into. During the journey, Annis calls to the spirits of her ancestors, and they answer. The magical realism just kisses the pages with a bit of traditional African folklore and African American folklore.
Ultimately, Let Us Descend is a Dante’s Inferno retelling, and Ward isn’t shy about it. Annis’s half-siblings, the pampered and pale children of her sire, are studying Dante’s descent into hell while Annis is living it. It’s in the same vein as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and I find those “writing back” moments where the canon is stared at head on with a snarl, weapon in hand, so satisfying.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 