NOTE: I wrote this review on November 22, 2014, and never published it. Given how powerful the book is, I wanted to at least put this out there.
In a span of four years, five young Black men in Jesmyn Ward's life, including her brother, died. She tells the story of each death, each person, his quirks, beauties, and foibles in heartbreaking detail. The constant, suffocating grief that Ward deals with throughout her life is visceral. Her words hold nothing back.
There are many things that I took for granted as a child without understanding the consequences, both mental and physical, that would have been part and parcel of my youth had I not been provided with so many of those necessities. Reading Ward's account of life in Mississippi as a Black family and community was striking, poignant, brave, and eye-opening.
There are so many worlds that I am so close to yet so removed from that I can't comprehend the gravity, perils, and consequences that are more inherently borne into lives based solely on circumstances, and many times, the color of their skin. This book helps to provide some insight into one of those worlds.
I wanted to share a few of the most powerful passages from Ward's memoir. Many are bleak but provide insight into Ward's psyche and the psyche of those around her coping with so much.
Nonetheless, I think the last passage shows how Ward, after experiencing so much loss, found something to hold onto.
(These passages provide brief glimpses of the power of the entire book, so please read the entire book to understand where Ward is coming from when saying these things.)
1. "The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C.J. knew this. I have no words."
2. "What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs."
3. "After my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman, she raised the seven children they'd had together on her own. She took what my grandfather left with her, and she built it into something more, and she survived.
"This is a common refrain in my community, and more specifically in my family. I have always thought of my family as something of a matriarchy, since the women of my mother's side have held my nuclear family and my immediate family and my extended family together through so much. But our story is not special. Nor had it always been this way. It used to be that the Catholic Church was a strong presence in my community and divorce unheard of; men did not leave their women and shared children. But in my grandmother's generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who'd grown up with the expectation that they'd have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called "sir" in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who love them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did."
4. "When I was 12 years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a loathing of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this fostered a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to it's breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: this is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what is, and to make something of it. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother's gifts.
"Without my mother's legacy, I would never have been able to look at this history of loss, this future where I will surely lose more, and write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says: Hello. We are here. Listen.”
