Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is a critically acclaimed American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the first Black American novelist and the first woman to win the National Book Award for fiction twice, earning these honors for her novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2018). Her works frequently explore the lives of poor, working-class African American families living in the Gulf Coast region.
Ward's Life
Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in California, but she moved to Mississippi when she was three years old and spent the rest of her childhood there. After graduating from high school, Ward returned to California to attend Stanford University, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in English and her Master’s degree in media studies and communication. In 2000, she went back to Mississippi, and a few months after her return, her brother was killed by a drunk driver. This unfortunate incident inspired Ward to become a writer, and in 2003, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Michigan. In 2005, she returned to Mississippi again, working for three years to publish her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds. Ward published her second novel, Salvage the Bones, in 2011, and her memoir, Men We Reaped, in 2013. In 2014, she became a professor of creative writing at Tulane University, and continued publishing novels and winning awards. Ward still teaches at Tulane; her most recent novel is Let Us Descend (2024).
Ward and Hurricane Katrina
In 2005, Ward survived Hurricane Katrina and lived through the aftermath. Ward’s working-class family was unable to evacuate, and so they had to weather the storm in her grandmother’s trailer. Although many of her works are influenced by Katrina, the hurricane is the focus of Salvage the Bones, where Ward shares her perspective. When asked about why she wanted to write about Hurricane Katrina in an interview with The Paris Review, Ward states, “I lived through it. It was terrifying, and I needed to write about that. I was also angry at the people who blamed survivors for staying and for choosing to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the storm. Finally, I wrote about the storm because I was dissatisfied with the way it had receded from public consciousness.” In writing Salvage the Bones, Ward not only drew attention to Hurricane Katrina and its effect on the Gulf Coast, but she also drew attention to the stories of the people who are often overlooked.
Salvage the Bones Summary:
Set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones follows the Batiste family’s struggles in the days leading up to and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, exploring the impacts on the members of the Batiste family and their community. Emphasizing themes of loyalty, poverty, family, motherhood, and violence in its many forms, Salvage the Bones is a gripping tale of survival and coming of age that follows Esch Batiste’s exploration of herself and her relationships in light of an unanticipated pregnancy.
Critical Reception of Salvage the Bones
According to Parul Sehgal of The New York Times, Ward’s complex writing style and narrative choices paradoxically represent Salvage the Bones’ greatest strength and weakness: the novel can be simultaneously simple and convoluted. Sehgal first highlights Ward’s use of myth to imbue the novel’s fresh concept with archetypal constructions. For example, Ward explores complex romantic, familial, and sexual dynamics from Esch’s perspective by connecting her experience to the myth of Medea. Sehgal notes that Esch breaks the convention of the “typical teenage female protagonist” in both the physical and emotional sense, enhancing the novel’s realism and connection to its characters. Sehgal notes that “too many sentences grow waterlogged and buckle” under Ward’s heavy use of figurative language and allusion to Medea.
“[Esch’s] love for Manny and her love for literature have animated the world; everything is suddenly swollen and significant.” - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Cori Di Biase of ARDOR literary magazine analyzes Jesmyn Ward’s use of foreshadowing when connecting the Batiste family to the broader experience of surviving Hurricane Katrina in the American South. Di Biase labels Ward’s foreshadowing “copious,” but he contends that Ward averts traditional stereotypes within “disaster fiction” by thoroughly developing her characters and immersing readers within Esch’s narration. Further, Hurricane Katrina “brings no resolution, practical or poetic” in Salvage the Bones. Ward foregrounds families and tests their relationships, but Di Biase notes that Ward treats Katrina and the Batiste family as separate entities to prevent the hurricane from becoming a “narrative device” in the resolution of Esch’s struggle.
“The most significant accomplishment of Salvage the Bones is the extent to which it makes the storm, before it hits, seem insignificant.” - Cori Di Biase, ARDOR
2011 National Book Award for Fiction:
Critics recognize Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones as an intricate, evocative work of fiction since its publication in 2011. Most notably, the National Book Foundation awarded Ward the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011. Critics from NPR regarded Ward as a “surprise winner” due to her anonymity, noting that she earned a distinction previously held by influential Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Ralph Ellison.
"I was happy for [my characters] because I feel like they were being recognized and they were being seen..." - Jesmyn Ward, on winning the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, Entertainment Weekly
For Those Wanting More Mississippi:
Salvage the Bones depicts poverty in rural areas of Mississippi, namely the Gulf Coast. In Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy, Laymon takes a look at his life and all of the things that made him into the man and writer he is today. He pulls at the good, the bad, and the ugly, leaving the reader feeling raw with the emotions of his childhood and an interrogative lens on what it means to carry your past with you forever, and how heavy it can become.
“And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry.” - Kiese Laymon
For Those Who Can’t Get Enough of Ward:
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward takes us back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast this time zooming in on the culture of the communities and the way that the Mississippi Prison system affects everyone in the state, even if it is not yourself behind bars. Similar to Salvage the Bones, Ward interrogates what it means to be Black in Mississippi through lyrical prose but she brings in folklore-esc elements to bring together the narrative of a family pulled apart by a system and addiction and how the family chooses to survive.
“It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.” - Jesmyn Ward
For Those Wanting Faulkner:
While it would not be wise to call this the source material, it would not be too far-fetched to call it a main inspiration. Fellow Mississippi writer William Faulkner, in his novel As I Lay Dying breaks down the family drama. As a fun mental exercise, read As I Lay Dying and find where Ward alludes to his sentence-long chapter and Southern Gothic style in her novel.
“The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.”
- William Faulkner
Exhibit page by
KARA BEARD
ELLA MOFFETT
HAYDEN PILKINTON
AVA GRACE NOE