Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
When Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award in 2011, Salon critic Laura Miller called the award a literary equivalent of spinach: “a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.” Miller contended that the NBA judges focused on unknown small presses and obscure aesthetic concerns, at the expense of better fiction. Victor LaValle refuted Miller’s claims saying, “These five books worked some special kind of magic on us [National Book Award judges]. In the end, what’s any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey. You really think it’s any different for us than it is for you? The books might differ, but not the alchemy.” After reading Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, I can only assume that Miller places archetypes of motherhood, poverty, and survival into the obscure column. Perhaps when she read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Homer’s The Odyssey, and the Biblical accounts of Job and Noah, Miller consumed them unwillingly, as limp spinach.
Set in predominantly black Bois Sauvage, a Mississippi bayou town directly in the path of Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones is the story of pregnant-and-fifteen Esch Batiste and her family, alive or otherwise. Esch and her siblings, Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, have largely raised themselves after the death of their mother and their father’s subsequent slide into angry alcoholism. They live on the outskirts of town, on a parcel of land called The Pit. Derelict vehicles and junk litter the area, but The Pit bursts with beauty, a natural place to share secrets, swim in black waters, and come into sexual awareness. Esch weaves her love for Manny, a neighboring boy and father of her child, with the story of Jason and Medea as she reads Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
Fiercely emotional and loyal to her family, Esch embodies the classical hero. She is protector and defender, of herself, of her brothers and father, of her unborn child, and the memory of her mother. Esch’s blunt, practical sexuality masks a deeper need to be seen, to be recognized for the woman she is becoming. Esch struggles with her secret pregnancy. The family has little money for food, much less medicine or prenatal care. Specters of maternal death and infanticide haunt Salvage the Bones, from Esch’s mother, to the abandoned home of her maternal grandparents, the story of Medea, and China’s litter. Amid limited options, Esch feels the closeness of life and death and the physicality of both.
As narrator, Esch tells her story without sentimentality or compromise. She speaks to the reader in what Ward termed “narrative ruthlessness,” language veering from lyric to local without pause. Ward wants her diction to jar the reader. The characters find no comfort in their lives, except what they make for each other amid competing elements. The niceties of prose exist in a world irrelevant to Bois Sauvage. Ward similarly challenges her readers to leave old comforts behind and discover new possibilities.
Each Batiste family member occupies a specific role in this classic tale. Randall is the eldest, a basketball court Hector and de facto leader of the family. Daddy is a wounded [End Page 493] Menelaus, unable to imagine his life without Rose. The youngest, Junior, is almost magical, elfin. He crawls under houses and onto shoulders, clings to legs, and revels in his discovery of his father’s wedding ring, still attached to his bloody, amputated finger. Junior longs for the one thing he can never have: the touch of his mother. Rose Temple Batiste died giving birth to Junior, and the siblings struggle to keep her memory alive through stories, memories, and the odd trinket or photo. But as their memories fade, these mementos slip from their grasp.
Esch and her brother Skeetah form the strongest relationship in Salvage the Bones. Although we eventually learn his given name is Jason, Skeetah more closely resembles Odysseus. Skeetah is a cunning strategist, better...
