ON WITNESS AND RESPAIR: Essays, by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward’s first book of nonfiction, “Men We Reaped” (2013), was primarily about the lives of five young men she knew well who died from unnatural causes: drugs, suicide, car accidents.
The book is an emphatic and bruising blend of journalism and memoir. When I reviewed it, I wrote that, though its tone can be somber, “it is also shot through with life, with a sense of rural community and what it felt like to be young and adolescent and footloose on hot Mississippi nights, all the beer cans and weed and loud music and sex and rolled-down car windows.”
It’s among the essential nonfiction books of this no-longer-new century. It’s hard for me to believe it landed 13 years ago (it’s hard for me to believe anything anymore) because a lot of its moments are still active in my mind.
Ward’s new book of nonfiction is a collection of essays, profiles, introductions and speeches titled “On Witness and Respair.” It’s more hit-or-miss, as such assortments usually are.
The misses tend to be the pieces on writing, and on the novelists and artists she admires, simply because she leans on soft language. On reading Toni Morrison: “Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace.” On the actress and director Regina King: “She makes films because she wants to foster beauty in the world.” Ward asks us to “be more mindful of the miracle of joy.”
It doesn’t matter that Ward isn’t exceptional at this kind of left-handed journalistic piecework; many serious novelists are not. But that material is included here, and because it is worth heeding Ward’s dictum that only “full witness is love,” it must be mentioned.
Ward is a two-time winner of the National Book Award, for her novels “Salvage the Bones” (2011) and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017). She’s received a MacArthur “genius grant.” The best material in “On Witness and Respair” reminds you why she’s gathered these plums.
Her writing about blue-collar Black life in the South, and about her family, comes alive because it is shrewd and vexed; Ward’s feathers are ruffled and she is more present on the page. She keeps everyone in the frame, and deals out facts and impressions so deftly that she makes you recall Saul Bellow’s comment that a fact is a wire though which one sends a current.
The indispensable piece is “We Do Not Swim in Our Cemeteries: A Legacy of Not Evacuating,” which appeared in the Oxford American in 2008. It’s about her family’s experience riding out Hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi. A lot of her extended family was packed into her mother’s double-wide trailer before they were forced to flee it.
“We never evacuated, so we didn’t evacuate this time,” Ward writes. “For one thing, we couldn’t afford to leave. My mother made seven dollars per hour as a teaching assistant, my middle sister made 10 dollars per hour as a dental assistant, and my youngest, pregnant sister made two dollars and 50 cents per hour as a waitress. My father made eight dollars per hour as a gas station attendant. I was unemployed for the summer.”
After the water began to rise, the family made their way to her grandmother’s brick house. Ward charts the water ascending to the carpet, and then to the waist, the cars drifting and spinning outside. After they were forced out of this house as well, a white family denied them shelter.
Ward captures the heat and grime afterward, the bugs and the lack of shade and the rashes and the necessity of siphoning gas. Downed power lines “lay like slinky Mardi Gras beads all along the streets.” The entire region smelled like grilled meat because families raced to cook what they had before it went bad.
The essay downshifts into outrage. Where are FEMA and the Red Cross? Why are the police treating survivors like a band of thieves? Ward reminds you why Katrina’s aftermath was a dismal chapter in the moral history of America.
An essay titled “No Mercy in Motion” — which appeared in Guernica in 2013 — captures Ward’s existential loneliness as an undergraduate and master’s student at Stanford, where she graduated from in 2000. She made a stab at working in publishing in New York but felt like a Southern oddity. She longed for Mississippi. The essay also relates the events of her brother’s death at the hands of a drunken driver, a white man who received a minimal sentence.
There’s an essay, written for The New Yorker, about taking a genetic test and being shaken to find that her ancestry is 40 percent European. There’s one about her father — a former Black Panther who liked motorcycles and kung fu and Public Enemy — getting into Prince’s music and being confronted with what she calls “alternative Black masculinity.” Another is about her fears of bringing a Black boy, her second child, into a dangerous world for Black boys.
One gets a sense of all the white people who have twinkled patronizingly at Ward — and worse. An indelible moment occurs at the Washington offices of the Mississippi senator Trent Lott, whom Ward met while in high school. “My schoolmates were white,” she writes. “I was not.”
Trent Lott took a whip as long as car off his office table, where it lay coiled and shiny brown, and said to a male schoolmate, who grinned at Lott enthusiastically: Let’s show ’em how us good old boys do it. And then he swung that whip through the air and cracked it above our heads, again and again. I remember the experience in my bones.
The title essay details Ward’s husband’s death, at 33, during the Covid lockdown, from organ failure that was initially thought to be the flu. It’s an emotional steamroller. Some have said, glibly, that nothing bad can happen to a writer, that it’s all material. But for Ward, the bad things have kept coming. You see from her buoyant writing about friends, family, food and other topics that she would still be one of our best Southern writers without so much agony. Her resilience is plain; so is the sense that she’d be happy to have trouble no more.
ON WITNESS AND RESPAIR: Essays | By Jesmyn Ward | Scribner | 226 pp. | $29
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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