''Breathe,''she told herself.''You can breathe through anything.''
Weighty expectations…Ward was the first member of her family to attend university.The Guardian
Salvage the Bones was published to respectable reviews but little was known about the author. She grew up in DeLisle,a small town in Mississippi,where her mother was a housekeeper and her father ran a series of kung-fu schools.
The events in the novel were inspired partly by what happened to her family in 2005,when Katrina tore through their town. They are seen through the eyes of Esch,its 14-year-old female protagonist. The family escapes the rising flood through a hole in the roof. In real life,Ward's family managed to reach their truck and drive to the house of a neighbouring white family,where the real drama began.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Bloomsbury,$19.98.
''And there we are,''Ward says,trembling slightly at the memory.''Me,my mom,my mom's husband,my elderly grandmother,my grandfather and my pregnant sister,who at eight months was very big. We're soaking wet because we've had to scramble out of the house and swim part of the way. And they open up the door. And the wind is rocking the car and they're yelling at us and we're yelling back at them because it's the only way we can be heard,and trees are flying through the air. They shout,'Are y'all all right?'And we're like,'Are you serious? We're sitting outside in a category-five hurricane. Do we look O-OK?'''She stutters.''And they said,'Well,y'all can sit outside in this field until the water goes down but we don't have room for you in the house. We can't let you in.'And I thought,'This is some bullshit.'''
Ward is small and slight - she looks much younger than her age - but determined. When her father taught her to fight,it didn't go entirely as he had anticipated. During a karate-belt test,he rigged conditions to make it easier for his daughter to break a block of wood with her foot and she became furious.
''I said,'You're pushing in on that board,you're not letting me break it by myself!'And he said,'Fine,you want to break that board by yourself?'And he set it up on bricks and said,'You better break it with your hands.'''She mimes a karate strike.''And he showed me how to do the strike and I broke it and I felt a lot better.''
Bloody hell. Ward smiles.''I'd actually earned it.''
She is out of shape these days,she says - the last time she put effort into training was when she lived in San Francisco and got into krav maga,the Israeli combat technique. Her biggest struggle was getting out of DeLisle,a place she hated for years for its smallness and racism. The wealthy family her mother worked for paid for Ward to attend a private school,where for a while she was the only black girl in the entire student body. It wasn't a happy experience. When she was about 12 a boy came into her classroom one day,sat on her desk''and started telling nigger jokes'',she recalls.''And no one said anything. And I was looking at my papers. And I thought,'He wants me to freak out,to start crying or to get angry.'And I sat there and kept writing,and probably failing,and attempting to ignore him. When he saw he wasn't getting any response he said,'Come on,Mimi,I know you know some good honky jokes. Why don't you tell them to us?'''The teacher came back in and kicked the boy out,but Ward didn't tell anyone what had happened and it wasn't discussed in her friendship group.
''No one else said anything and I was very aware of the fact that I wasn't part of their community,racially or socially.''Wasn't her mother concerned?''I think she was,but she just wanted me to take advantage of the opportunity and get a good education.''
Ward became the first in her family to go to university - Stanford,then the University of Michigan. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Alabama. In her late teens,she says,she felt the family's hopes resting on her and they discouraged her from becoming a writer in favour of something more.
It was only when her younger brother died,at the hands of a hit-and-run driver,that she decided to go for it. She has two tattoos on her wrists:her brother's signature and a sign-off from a letter he sent her when she was at college -''love brother''- which she had traced and gave to the tattoo artist.''It changed everything for me;I wish I could express it without using profanity. Losing someone that close and in that way,I realised,'F--- it. What can I do to give my life meaning?'And I thought,'Writing.'''
Ward’s family managed to reach their truck and drive to the house of a neighbouring white family,where the real drama began.
Her writing is lyrical;savage. InSalvage the Bones,the characters are an extension of the landscape;a boy's back,''a young turtle's shell,so thin it would snap if stepped on''. His dog,China,which he fights with other pit bulls as her father and brothers fought pit bulls at home,''billowing and clenching''after a bout. And Esch,bruised by neglect,eloquent,pregnant,her father an alcoholic and her dead mother''present in the absence'',a reminder of what has been lost.
Ward's writing,she has said,is inspired partly by her sense of being''goaded''by illustrious writers of the south. She resisted Faulkner at school -''thought he was totally incomprehensible''- enjoyedThe Sound and the Fury at college and fell in love with him only when,in her mid-20s,she readAs I Lay Dying.''And I thought,'Oh god,I should just quit.'There's something he's captured about the south that I can't even articulate. I recognised it in my bones.
''But when I readAbsalom,Absalom! and saw these Creole characters on the page,I thought …'I have problems with the ways these characters are coming alive on the page. They aren't coming alive like the[white] characters;these characters feel flat to me.'That wasn't until I was 29,that I could finally read Faulkner in that way.''
Has she read,or seen the movie ofThe Help? Kathryn Stockett's fictionalised account of black housekeepers in the south was heavily criticised for its rendition of black southern dialect and the kitschy sentimentality of the film. Ward smiles.''I have not.''
Does she want to?
''No.''
Why not?
''I've heard things about the book that trouble me. My mom worked as a housekeeper and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't. This was a job and there were things she hated about it:the way they treated her,how hard her work was and how she didn't get paid very much. It's a very personal thing for me,as the kid of a housekeeper. Things I hear about that book just make me angry and I don't even want to read it.''
Her parents have,by now,come around to her career choice and are immensely proud.
When she goes back to DeLisle and the mobile home her mother lives in,she knows there should be dissonance:she has changed worlds and is sure some people look at her differently now. But that is not how she experiences it. After years of hating the place,these days she sees things in DeLisle to love.
''I love the beauty of the landscape. I'm very happy that the landscape is beginning to recover from Katrina and become lush again. I love my community.
''I love always being able to come back and have a home. And I love my family,who get together and have these amazing crawfish parties,everyone from my seventysomething grandmother and my five-year-old niece,on the dance floor,dancing.
''And life is wonderful.''
Salvage the Bones is published by Bloomsbury,$19.98. Jesmyn Ward will be a guest at the Sydney Writers'Festival,May 14-20.
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