Read[H]er: "Let us Descend" by Jesmyn Ward

A descent into the inferno of American history

There are three American authors who I love so very much that word of their latest novels sends me racing to the nearest bookstore: Anthony Doerr, Madeline Miller, and Jesmyn Ward. While I always eagerly await Ward’s novels, I was especially grateful when I heard that Ward’s latest, Let us Descend, had been published. Ward suffered the unimaginable loss of her husband during the early days of the pandemic, and I worried that this awful loss, coupled with the horrible dark places her research on American slavery must have taken her to, would prove to be too much to write through. So in my mind, the very existence of this novel is a small miracle, and because it is written by Jesmyn Ward, a gift.

Let us Descend takes the reader into the inferno of the history of slavery in America. Rich with allusions to and modeled in some ways after Dante’s Inferno, Descend insists on a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the specific hideous practices of slavery, without which, Ward suggests, this country can never emerge up and out of its past and into the fullness of its radical potential. Descend is the story of Annis and her antecedents: Annis’ grandmother, a West African Dahomey warrior, was seized, sold, and shipped to America, and her family’s history of past glory and degrading enslavement finds itself expressed in Annis’ very body. Because of the perversity of chattel slavery, Annis’ grandmother’s enslavement descends to Annis’ mother and then to Annis herself, and Ward dramatizes in unforgiving detail the story of slavery primarily through Annis and her mother. Through their story, Ward starkly depicts both known and little-known horrors of slavery such as the “Slave Trail of Tears,” a brutal practice in which the enslaved were bound together and forced to walk one thousand miles from Georgia to New Orleans. In this novel, Ward demonstrates why historical fiction is not only powerful but necessary: she imagines and depicts each agonizing step taken by once-tender feet, each raw rub of shackle or rope against living skin; like Octavia Butler’s brilliant novel Kindred, Descend dramatizes history and in so doing forces the reader to face the past not on the page but in the beloved bodies and spirits of her characters. In other words, Ward recreates the specific innumerable horrors of this forced march not for the sake of historical accuracy but instead to put into words what it must have felt like for a human body to take every single step of those one thousand miles. The story is history, but the story is human. And Let Us Descend knows that the feeling and knowing and confronting of history is what we as a country must do if we are ever to ascend, as Dante does, into that shining world:

So now we entered on that hidden path,

…to move once more towards

a shining world. We did not care to rest.

We climbed, he going first and I behind,

until through some small aperture I saw

the lovely things the skies above us bear.

Now we came out, and once more saw the stars.