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Writer's pictureThe Bossy Bookworm

Review of Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Annis is a young Southern woman enslaved, sold, and abused in the years before the Civil War. In Let Us Descend, she leans on the stories of her warrior female ancestors as she draws increasing strength from her own instincts and drive for survival.

Some pull back. Some cry. Some scrabble for crying babies, rot-gutted women, soft-eyed men, shivering children clustered about us in the dim cold before dawn. To this death before death. To this selling.... Hell, my mother said, and more of us marching there every day.

Annis lives with her mother on a Carolina rice plantation in the years before the Civil War, and when her white enslaver--the man who raped her mother and sired Annis--turns his lascivious attention to her, she fears that new horrors are in store.

But her troubles are about to be compounded: she's separated from her mother, sold, and forced to begin walking in a trail of roped women many miles toward the slave markets of New Orleans.

Without her mother's protection--and inspiring tales of their warrior-woman ancestors--Annis is left with only the ghost of her fierce African grandmother, who seems to be following Annis's path south, dropping crumbs of information about her mother's fate, which may or may not be true.

Ward employs magical realism through the presence of this accompanying female spirit, which ties Annis to her ancestry and family history. The spirit is presented as powerful, and it is able to control storms, but its advice, based upon accounts of the histories of the women in Annis's ancestral line--including that of her mother--are increasingly suspect and seem unreliable. Annis leans on the comfort of the presence of this fierce spirit during grim or terrifying times, but as the story progresses and she relies more fully on her own instincts, she has waning interest in shifting her behavior at the spirit's frequent suggestion.

The horrifying, specific, dark cruelties throughout the story, which are inflicted upon Black people by white people, are extremely difficult to read. In order to see the story through, I kept reminding myself that I was bearing witness to a fictional version of real-life atrocities, and that reading about and recognizing such events is important.

I read Let Us Descend for my book club.

I'd love to hear your Bossy thoughts about this book! Feel free to comment and let me know!

Jesmyn Ward is also the author of Sing, Unburied, Sing.

You can find other Bossy reviews of books that tell the stories of enslaved persons here.

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