Tender Poverty

Jesmyn Ward's hurricane novel, Salvage the Bones

Photo by John Middelkoop on Unsplash

If you’re new here, welcome to Book Burn, the section of Kindling where I tell you about a book that has drawn the ire of school districts and library patrons, and describe how it has impacted me. Usually I give some stats, but honestly, it’s grown tiresome. I’m finding that it is always for the same thing—sex.

So instead, I’ll start this post by letting you know that Jesmyn’s book is hard hitting and honest. It describes a sexual relationship between Esch, the fifteen-year-old protagonist and narrator, and Manny, her brother’s nineteen-year-old friend.

The critics have argued that this book promotes sexual relationships between underage girls and older boys. If by promotes you mean shows the heartbreak of an unexpected teen pregnancy and the outright rejection Esch suffers when Manny finds out, then I guess you’d be right.

But this is where book banners get story wrong. The mere mention of something is not promotion, just an acknowledgement of one very real part of human existence. Moreover, they seem so enraged by the writing of it, they miss the part where a book like this might actually reach a young girl in the same boat, and there will be young girls in this boat.

Pulling the covers over your eyes does not change a thing’s existence. It serves to build a life of shame and secrecy, gives society a stone to throw, but that’s about it in my opinion. This book is about love. A mother’s love despite hard circumstances. A family’s love despite dysfunction. The richness of loyalty and community in spite of poverty. I hope you enjoy.

---

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

—Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Last week, I finished Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, and I had to share it with all of you. It was published in 2011, and received The National Book Award for Fiction. After reading, it’s no wonder.

The story follows a working class, black family living in rural Mississippi just before and after Hurricane Katrina hits. The story is told from Esch’s point of view, fifteen-years-old and the only girl in her family. Her own mother died after giving birth to her youngest brother Junior when she was only eight-years-old.

She carves out an existence for herself surrounded by men—her three brothers, her distant father, and the boys she sleeps with. Not because she loves them, but because she finds it easier to let them touch her than tell them no. That is until Manny, her older brother’s good friend and the only one she loves.

Her sanctuary is found in books, epics and mythologies of heroes and the women they love. Her days are spent swimming, running in packs through backwoods Mississippi wilderness, avoiding her father when he drinks and becomes violent. Her older brothers make their way by dreaming of other things. Randall, the eldest, wants to be a basketball player. Skeetah is obsessed and devoted to his dog China, a white pit bull who has just given birth to puppies when Esch finds out that she herself is pregnant with Manny’s baby. She loves him, but he sees her as nothing more than a warm body.

“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.” “There’s another storm?” Randall asks.

Given this backdrop, it would be easy to lump this story in with poverty porn, but it is anything but. It is a love letter to rural Mississippi and the poor American communities like it. Ward, after all, grew up in Mississippi along the Gulf Coast and was trapped with her family in Hurricane Katrina when it hit. The experience was so traumatizing, she didn’t write for three years after. Everyday on her way to work, she saw the ruins of that storm.

I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn't dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.
―Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Esch’s troubled family members are survivors in the truest sense. They make their way through life together, rationing food, sacrificing for one another, caring for each other, in spite of dire circumstances.

Skeetah and his relationship to China gives the clearest picture of the tender, gritty love that envelops children in poverty. He uses China to fight, to make money, to settle scores and represent his name in an arena against the other boys in his circle. But he loves her, takes care of her, gives her everything and more, thinks of her as his own child. The pain and the love, the abuse and the tenderness are interwoven, inseparable.

Ward’s book gives voice to poverty rather than exploiting it. She opens a window into the complexities and depth of family and community relationships. It’s a world where things are not black and white, where all you have is what you’ve been given, and you work with it to make it your own, to carve out a soft place to fall. There is beauty in all of life, and that beauty is all you have to hold onto when disaster hits and tragedy takes everything from you. When you’re given ashes and then the world burns down, you have no choice but to rise.

And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.
—Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones