Jesmyn Ward creates another winner with her latest novel, “Let Us Descend: A Novel.” Ward uses magical realism to tell a story of slavery and survival.
As “Let Us Descend: A Novel,” the fourth novel by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward begins, Annis, the main character and narrator, asks her mother why she is teaching her to fight with a spear if she can’t really use it.
“Teaching Mama Aza’s way of fighting, her stories,” Sasha replies, “it’s a way to recall another world. Another way of living. It wasn’t a perfect world, but it wasn’t so wrong as this one.”
Knowing when to run, “when to stand and when to go, when not to fight,” Sasha adds, “well, that’s a part of fighting, too, when to wait and hide and watch and duck. You got to know that, too.”
Separated from her mother, Annis is sold by the owner of a rice plantation in the Carolinas who fathered her, walks hundreds of miles in a coffle to a slave market, and descends into a hellish existence on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. She is sustained by memories of her mother and African warrior grandmother.
A beautifully written, tour-de-force history without the footnotes, “Let Us Descend” uses invented characters and plots to capture the brutal realities of slavery and the ways in which enslaved people preserved hope, a sense of self, family, and community.
Ward describes the passage from Africa to America, in which Mama Aza, tethered to dead people, was “bathed in blood, vomit and shit;” slave auctions, in which potential buyers rap riding crops against the legs of slaves, pry open their mouths to inspect their teeth, gauge their capacity for mating and producing babies.
Ward spares no detail in describing Annis’ slave coffle, led by a “Georgia man,” a sadistic rapist; the dark, underground hole on the Louisiana planation, in which she is imprisoned, barely able to breathe, tasting mud, surrounded by snakes; the swamp, where fugitive slaves eke out an existence, knowing that they’ll be tortured or killed if they’re captured.
A mother’s love
Ward also emphasizes the love Annis gives to and gets from her mother, Safi, Esther, and Mary.
Annis, of course, understands “what it means to lay down with despair, to sink with it.” She wakes up each morning knowing she might always be “in this endless place,” her body and the open petals of her hands “perpetually burning,” plagued with a “hunger that hollows me from the inside as the land hollows me without.”
That said, when Mary finishes singing, her voice lingering in the air, and the slaves scrape a plate to savor pie crumbs in a corner of the kitchen, and feel full for a moment “over leavings,” Annis breathes in to “pull that leftover sweetness from the air down deep… so that for one blink in the bowels of this rotten house, tenderness is a touch in my bones.”
Central to the narrative of “Let Us Descend” are Annis’ exchanges with the spirits who hover on, above, and below the earth, especially the wind spirit, who has taken on the name Aza. She wears her grandmother’s face, Annis believes, “because she wants me to turn to her for mothering.”
The spirits, who are not all-knowing or all-powerful, Annis suspects, “want worship, want succor, want admiration, want obedience, want children. They want love. We starve, but they are hungry, too.”
Annis decides to run away. If the spirits fail her, she will throw herself at the dogs, fight them and lose, and go “to the singing place beyond the Water, to Mama Aza, to Safi, perhaps, to her mother: I will be free. The truth bursts in me.”
In the end, Annis acknowledges that the wind spirit has borne witness to “our drowning, burning, bleeding, our descent into the bellies of the rivers, into the mouth of They Who Take And Give.” She is, of course, also eternally grateful to the Queen Bees, the Woman Warriors, Mama Aza, and her mother.
But most of all, Annis declares, “I’m here because of me.”
Dr. Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
