In Men We Reaped, her memoir about growing up poor in the American south, and the five men close to her who died too soon, Jesmyn Ward writes of a niggling dissatisfaction with her first novel. She knew that the twin boys in Where the Line Bleeds, who graduate high school only to face the invidious choice of minimum-wage dead-end labour or drug dealing to pay the bills, “were failing as characters”, because she couldn’t figure out how to “look squarely at what was happening to young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.”
In every novel since, she has looked that reality more squarely in the face. In Salvage the Bones, where Hurricane Katrina bears down on a pregnant teen and her fiercely protective, daily hustling, extremely poor family; in Sing, Unburied, Sing, whose first pages are a litany of difficulties (prison, drug abuse, mental illness, poverty, violence, absent men and the women and children who pick up the pieces). Her achievement so far, rewarded by two National Book Awards, has been to do this while also insisting on her characters’ individuality, autonomy, dignity and complication; their tenderness and love in the face of overwhelming odds. Her new novel, Let Us Descend, goes back to the beginnings of the reality Ward has lived and written about, to the arrival of the slave ships, and the plantations where those slaves were put to work; a reality so dark it is like being taken by the hand and led into hell.
And that is how the novel is explicitly structured. Annis is the mixed-race daughter conceived through rape; she and her mother are slaves in the rapist’s house. Her grandmother, born in west Africa and given to the king of Dahomey for his army of warrior wives, was herself sold into slavery by that king when she fell in love with someone else. Annis, in between dodging the attentions of “the man who gave me the middle-mud of my skin”, eavesdrops on her white half-sisters’ education, thus “taking a thing for myself”; she learns of Aristotle and his bees, and listens to their tutor read The Divine Comedy. Then her mother, in punishment for trying to protect her budding daughter, is sold on; then Annis, for having the temerity to love another slave, a woman, is sold on, too.
“Now, let us descend,” Virgil said to Dante, “into the blind world below.” Chained to one another as they sleep, wake and walk, chained even when fording rivers, the slaves descend, down through the Carolinas and Louisiana, through alligator-infested swamps (echoing Dante’s swamp), down into the city of woe, here an eerie, foggy New Orleans, populated by slavers, by bright, freed women who wander the streets blind to their sisters, by ghosts; and from there into the infernal reaches of a sugar plantation.
The unquiet ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing – killed children yearning for love, to be acknowledged so they can rest – here flower into whole restless lineages. Spirits attend Annis, including a guide who likes to take the form of Annis’s grandmother but is not her. “My people are storms,” says this guide, a needy and fitful Virgil. “We spin and rend. We dance chaos.” It is a potent melding of traditions – “the Italian” and his pain-racked shades, combined with spirits who might be recognisable in west Africa, or indeed by those who believe in the zars of east and north Africa. These spirits are ravening to be placated, to be seen; wheedling, vengeful, loving, fallible, often chronically untrustworthy but necessary allies in negotiating psychological and physical pain nonetheless. “Through me you go to the grief-racked city,” spits Annis at her guide at one point, quoting Dante. “Through me to everlasting pain you go.”
It is especially potent when set against the backdrop of the deep south, a landscape of watery, hot, lethal murk that Ward has always been able to make viscerally present; and when told in a language that, as in the past, is adept at yoking emotion to the body, and which here is harnessed to a heightened register of sometimes mesmerising incantatory power. If Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones – which is the most moving and best achieved of all her novels – were chamber pieces, full of delicate interlocking voices and emotional eddies, this is Wagnerian opera, a soaring howl of pain and grief that aims to balance intimacy with mythic scale.
There are losses. What the structure gains in allegorical force it loses in jeopardy and dilemma (her first novel may have some juvenile limitations, but it does jeopardy so well I often had to put it down, worried for her characters). Narrative engines – Annis’s mother training her in hand-to-hand combat, for instance – are set running but have nowhere to go. And some of the characters, especially later in the book, are pure plot devices. Ward doesn’t always avoid the trap of telling instead of showing, and the heightened language eventually brings diminishing returns. The spirit-Annis duets get repetitive, and Ward sometimes allows sonorousness and the imperatives of rhythm to trump sense. Increasingly I acknowledged the powers unleashed but was concerned by how little I felt for those on whom they acted. Though perhaps that is the point about hell – that it is not dynamic, but a static everlastingness that chars everything it touches.
• Let Us Descend is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
