If Jesmyn Ward’s fiction tends towards the epic, that is maybe because her life has been marked by monumental events. “I fought from the very beginning”, she says. Born prematurely at just 26 weeks, she was badly attacked by her father’s pit bull as a small child, her younger brother was killed at 19, and, along with several generations of her family, she sheltered from Hurricane Katrina in a truck. Yet today she is the first woman to win the US national book award for fiction twice, hailed by a leading reviewer as “one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country”. And on the morning we meet, it has just been announced that she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Ward’s subject is what it means to be poor and black in America’s rural south, where “life is a hurricane”. Modern Mississippi, she says, “means addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism”. In her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), she felt she “protected” her characters from these brutal realities, because she knew and cared about them too much: “So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.”
She kept this in mind with her second novel Salvage the Bones (2011), in which the struggles of a pregnant teenager are set against the approach of Hurricane Katrina. (Ward couldn’t write for two years after the storm, but then was compelled to do so by her fury at the response to the survivors: “I thought: you know nothing about the reality of life for most people who live down here.”) Her devastating 2013 memoir Men We Reaped documents the early, unrelated deaths of five young men in fewer years in her community, including her brother, who was killed in a hit and run by a white drunk driver. Grief, she says, nearly two decades later, “never goes away. I tell friends of mine who experience the death of someone close to them: ‘You will never stop waiting for that person to walk through the door, but you learn how to live with it’.”
No one could accuse her of sparing her characters in Sing, where the only certainties are danger, death and decay: “After the first flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants.” This is no country for young boys: 13-year-old mixed race Jojo cares for his little sister Kayla; his dad Michael is in the notorious Parchman prison (a place of fear, “the bogeyman”, when Ward was growing up); his mother Leonie is a drug addict. They live with their grandparents: Pop, upright and dignified, is consumed by his past, haunted by racial history; Mam, with her herbal remedies and voodoo, is dried up and hollowed out by cancer.
The novel borrows its road trip structure from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a book Ward returns to again and again (she has his Nobel prize speech pinned above her desk), as Leonie, a friend, Jojo and baby Kayla set off to collect Michael from prison, with detours for the adults to score drugs and the kids to be carsick. But where Faulkner’s family are travelling across Yoknapatawpha county with a body to bury, Ward’s queasy cast return home with an unburied spirit, as the narrative takes a more supernatural turn.
Jojo was the inspiration for the novel, and for a long time Ward struggled to empathise with Leonie. She is hard to love: her addiction, attraction to bad-boy Michael, and grief for her dead brother (an autobiographical borrowing she initially resisted: “I didn’t want people to confuse my experience with her experience” ) forever getting the better of her puny maternal instinct. Her relationship with Michael is as violent in its dependency and mutual hurt as that between their children is gentle; the scenes between the siblings bring an almost unbearable tenderness to the novel. Leonie unfailingly makes the wrong choices – big and small: this is a woman who will buy herself a Coke at a gas station when her children are so thirsty they will drink the rain. But like the chemical burns she has on her scalp from relaxing her hair, she is scarred simply by being a black woman. Ward wanted to “give voice to her experience”, just as she did for 15-year-old Esch in Salvage the Bones, because these girls “are silenced, they are misunderstood, and they are underestimated. Black girls period: pregnant young black girls, poor black girls – girls like that are diminished in American culture.”
In vivid contrast to the bleakness of her stories, Ward’s prose is distinguished by its lush – unfashionable – lyricism. (Recalling the immediate aftermath of the hurricane she describes seeing “houses dotting the railroad tracks like pearls on a necklace”.) She calls herself a “failed poet”, secretly writing poems that “I share with no one”, and dreams of one day publishing a collection. Ward blames her poetic style for some of the resistance her work initially encountered: in the US at the moment, she says, “people prefer cleaner, more spare, less flowery language”. And then there’s her subject matter: publishers and editors didn’t believe “that readers would identify with the kind of people I was writing about”. There was also, perhaps, a suspicion that these characters, who rarely finish high school, have no right to express themselves so fancifully.
All of her novels are set in the small town of Bois Sauvage, “the fictional twin” of DeLisle on the Gulf coast (nicknamed Wolf Town by the early settlers), where she grew up and where she lives today. “I’d been homesick for so long, I really wanted to see what it was like to live as an adult in the south.” She’s pretty much related to everyone in town, she says, and she’s not joking, with 200 relatives on her maternal grandmother’s side alone. Like most of the inhabitants, the family have lived there for generations. Ward herself has something of an addict’s relationship with Mississippi, yearning from childhood to get as far away as possible but pulled back, “by a love so thick it choked me”, as she writes in her memoir. “It’s everything that I love and everything that I hate,” she says now. Sing is the first novel she’s written since returning home.
It’s a cliche to say that “reading saved my life”, but in Ward’s case, it may be true. The stats in Mississippi are as merciless as the storms and the probability was that Ward’s fate would follow the grim path of her characters: “You have a small array of bad choices and you pick your poison and that’s your life.” After her parents “fell on hard times” in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, they moved into her grandmother’s house with 13 members of her family (one of the happiest times of her life), where “everyone told stories”, leading to a love of books and learning, she says, “that always made me want something more”.
Her first escape seems to come straight from a children’s book (although as Ward notes, no one looked or talked like her in those pages in which she took refuge): when she was 12 a wealthy lawyer for whom her mother worked as a housekeeper offered to send her to the private Episcopalian school his own children attended. She was the only black girl until her senior years. But although it was “really rough”, she credits the bullying she experienced with motivating her: “All I thought about was to escape: ‘I want to get out. I want to go away to university.’”
She now sends her five-year-old daughter to the same school. Although her children will not experience the hardship of her own childhood, she is conflicted about raising them in DeLisle, especially since the birth of her son. She struggles to reconcile herself “to this idea of living in this place that consistently devalues me and people like me in big ways and in little ways every day”.
Making her first departure from Bois Sauvage, Ward is now working on a novel set in New Orleans in the early 1800s at the height of the US slave trade. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the metaphorical secret network helping to free slaves is made real, was one of the biggest US books of last year (along with George Saunders’s Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, also set during this era and with a similarly talkative spirit world). On the morning of our interview, Whitehead tweeted: “Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? A: I could have written about upper middle-class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
Why does she think American writers are returning to this period? Those in power in the US are “invested in sanitising and erasing the past”, denying its impact on the present, she replies. “They keep insisting that racism does not exist, that there’s a level playing field. That we are all born with the same opportunities. If people are writing about slavery, I think it is because we want to push back against that narrative. The narrative serves them. It makes it seem like we chose our poverty, or we deserve our poverty; we deserve our ill-equipped, dangerous playgrounds, and we deserve our horrible educations and we deserve to be hungry.”
The shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 led Ward to assemble an anthology of essays on race, The Fire This Time, by black American writers, a respectful nod to James Baldwin’s 1963 collection The Fire Next Time – “we saw there was space for that conversation to take place,” she says. Although the collection has only just been published in the UK, she began working on it long before Trump took office. Her jubilation at the election of Obama – one of the few times in her life that she has felt “intensely proud to be an American” – gave way to despair at Trump and his supporters, whose response to events such as Charlottesville displayed a sympathy “with people who think that I’m not fit to live. Definitely not fit to live in this country. And that’s hard to live with day in and day out.”
She’s fearful for the future. “But if I did not hope I would not be able to do what I do. But I don’t think it is an intelligent hope, I think it is a necessary hope,” she says. “And maybe that’s what the people in our past did, my ancestors who were enslaved. It wasn’t an intelligent hope that they had for freedom or that their children might live different lives than they did, but I think they had to hope to keep going.”
She writes for those she grew up with, her success proving that theirs are universal human stories. Above all, she writes for her younger self, who felt so silenced and “erased” by the world. With another prize within her sights, that young girl would be feeling pretty good right now, surely?
“Yes, because she secretly dreamed of all this,” she says. “She wouldn’t admit it and she wasn’t very confident about it, but she secretly hoped.”
• Sing, Unburied, Sing is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
