Ian Mond Reviews Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward (Scribner 978-1-98210-449-8, $28.00, 320pp, hc) October 2023.

2017 was a terrific year for ghost stories that spoke to America’s two-hundred-and-forty-year history of racism against people of colour. There’s the astonishing soliloquy from Litzie Wright, one of the numerous ghosts from George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, detailing her experiences as an enslaved per­son. There’s the spirit of a Black musician from Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, who manipulates an unwitting white boy to take revenge on the wealthy family whose ancestors killed and ap­propriated the Bluesman’s work. And there’s Richie, a twelve-year-old Black boy sent to prison who dies during an escape attempt. His presence literally and figuratively haunts the characters of Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. Of the three ghost stories, Ward’s left the most profound impres­sion on me: her discomfiting dissection of race relations and her evocative, lush prose. Ward’s much-anticipated new book, Let Us Descend, is somewhat of a departure from her previous books in that it’s not set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, but rather is a historical narrative that takes place before the American Civil War. In a critical respect, the novel echoes Sing, Unburied, Sing in how Ward wields the fantastic to viscerally depict the hor­rors of American slavery.

Let Us Descend begins in the Carolina rice fields some decades before the Civil War. We are introduced to Annis, an enslaved young woman working in her father’s house, the ‘‘sire’’ who violated her mother and now holds them both captive. When Annis is not overhearing the tu­tor teach her half-sisters Aristotle and Dante’s Inferno, her mother is educating her on the medical properties of herbs and distinguishing those mushrooms good for eating from those that poison. They also train each night in the ways of Annis’s grandmother, Mama Aza, a woman warrior and one of the many wives of the Fon King, who was sold into slavery because she fell in love with another man. As retribution for stepping in before their sire can rape Annis, her mother is traded to the Georgia Man to be force-marched to New Orleans. A devastated Annis finds a modicum of solace in the arms of her friend Safi, only for both to be sold to the Georgia Man after they are caught kissing. When, during the horrific journey between the Carolinas and New Orleans, Annis is split from Safi, her only salvation is in the erratic nature of a storm spirit who has adopted the name of the chained and pregnant woman the elemental encountered on a sailing ship bound for America: Annis’s grandmother Mama Aza.

In a short letter penned to the reader, Kathryn Belden from Scribner informs us that Ward wrote Let Us Descend ‘‘during a period of in­tense personal grief,’’ the death of her husband only months before the pandemic. Like Melissa Broder does in Death Valley (reviewed below), Ward funnels those feelings of heartbreak and despair into her novel. Where Broder uses hu­mour to take the edge off some of the pain, Ward makes no such concession. Her book depicts grief at its most unvarnished and primal; Annis’s physical, mental, and spiritual agony saturates nearly every page. Take the astonishing scene in the forest clearing several weeks after Annis loses her mother to the Georgia Man. Struggling to sleep, freezing despite the summer heat (‘‘I ain’t never been so cold. That this what it means to live without my mother spooning my back… ’’), Annis feels the bees ‘‘that I have come to think of as my own descend in the night to land on my wrists, my feet, and then alight back to their hive; this makes me wonder what bitter nectar they collect from me. This makes me wonder where they taking my sorrow.’’ I am in awe of Ward’s prose, her vital description of Annis’s connec­tion to the natural world, and an articulation of grief and sadness unlike anything I’ve ever read.

Grief is not the only emotion at play; there is also fear, courage, and love. The title, inspired by Dante’s Inferno – whom Annis refers to as the ancient Italian, overhearing the poem as she lingers by the school door – speaks to the terror and torment Annis confronts, her descent into a hellscape, especially the forced march to the slave markets in New Orleans, more than 600 miles, through forests and swamps and extreme weather. Annis’s ability to endure all this suf­fering, which doesn’t end when she’s sold to a sugar cane plantation, is, to some degree, assisted by Aza, the calculating spirit who helps Annis only when it serves them. Mostly, though, it’s Annis’s inner reserves of strength, the legacy of her mother and grandmother, that allows her to survive. Her unceasing love for her mother and Safi not only equips Annis with the insight to see through the motivations of Aza, even to manipulate the spirit for her benefit, but provides her with an opportunity to experience a type of freedom, brief and fleeting, but hers, nonetheless. While Ward never flinches from the horrors of slavery or the deep scars it has left on America’s political and social landscape, it’s Annis’s un­willingness to succumb to grief and loss makes Let Us Descend such a powerful novel.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.