Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward – review
11 December 2011
Jesmyn Ward comes from a community that's more often spoken for than listened to. She was raised in a poor black area of rural Mississippi, and lived through the devastations of hurricane Katrina. These experiences underpin her second novel, the urgent account of a troubled family's attempts at survival in the days leading up to the storm. But her gifts go much further than as a curator of personal memories, as a recent National Book award suggests.
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| Yesmyn Ward Illustration by Deanna Halsall |
The narrator, 15-year-old Esch, is pregnant. She lives with her three brothers and alcoholic, widowed father in the Pit, the name given to their ragged, rotting junkyard of land, populated by dead trucks and feral chickens. Esch is tough and literate, a taciturn bookworm who's been having sex with her brothers' friends since she was 12 because, as she explains of the first, "it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop".
She's so tough, in fact, that it takes a while to realise how deprived these motherless children are. Details seep out like involuntary revelations. Food is strictly rationed, and a meal of squirrel, shot in the forest and barbecued, is gulped down with stolen bread. The sheets are so dirty that "we'd wake up often in the middle of the night, itching, scratching a shin, an ankle". Junior, who never knew his mother, seems at times more animal than human, a touch-hungry changeling who spends most of his days burrowing in the earth beneath the house.
The older boys have more productive hobbies. Randall, the eldest, is hoping for a basketball scholarship, while Skeetah is obsessed with his pitbull China, who gives birth to a litter of valuable puppies. This bloody, graphic scene sets the tone for an all-pervading physicality. Ward is astonishingly attentive to the body, from Esch's nausea and permanently bursting bladder to the light-reflecting, gorgeous skin of her beloved Manny, Skeetah's best friend and the unwilling father of her child-to-be.
Often this physicality lurches into violence. Alcohol turns Daddy from a vacant, shiftless figure into a mean drunk who doesn't like being contradicted. The local boys of Bois Sauvage scrap among themselves, and settle these squabbles by way of dogfights: secretive battles held deep within the woods that are nightmarish in their violence, like scenes from the Greek myths Esch reads compulsively in bed.
The "black heart of Bois Sauvage" isn't all rotten, though. It's also a place of unearthly beauty, a wild wood planted with magnolias and live oaks. Esch and the boys run in packs, swimming in the black waters of the Pit, their feet permanently dusted with orange dirt. It's the kind of home that leaves its mark on your skin, and though they might fight, the siblings' bond is unbreakably tight.
As the storm comes closer, all secondary concerns are erased. The family barricade themselves into the house, armed with ramen noodles and grubby jugs of water. It's hard not to read the final 80 pages in a greedy frenzy, and to pray that they'll come to the attention of a film-maker such as Debra Granick, the director of Winter's Bone, itself based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell that mapped a similarly hard terrain of poverty and loyalty. There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak ("I'ma get Randall"; "My dog ain't lose") and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth. She's fearless about her passion coming out purple, and for the most part the intensity of her story carries it off. Katrina, anyway, is not a subject that can be considered in small language, and nor, for that matter, are the problems of this small family, who face their maiming with such courage and grace.
Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate
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