Jesmyn Ward on life in the American South and rebuilding in the face of natural disaster
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired on Sept. 28, 2014.
Jesmyn Ward grew up in a small rural community in Mississippi. The oldest of four children, Ward was the first of her family to go to college. After publishing her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, the author was awarded a Stegner Fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford University.
Ward explores the stories of people living in the American South in her writing. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, follows Esch, a pregnant 14-year-old, and her family in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Following the success of Salvage the Bones, Ward released her memoir Men We Reaped. In it, she examines her experiences with racism, the absence of her father and the death of her younger brother.
Ward is the first woman and first Black person to win the National Book award twice, for her novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is also the youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, which is a lifetime achievement award honouring fiction writing.
Ward is an American author and professor of English at Tulane University. Her latest book, Let Us Descend, is a historical fiction about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.
Ward spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2014 from her grandmother's home in DeLisle, Miss.
The devastation of hurricane Katrina
"Everyone that was basically older than us, they knew what to expect.
"They knew because like you said, they'd lived through Camille and so they knew how powerful and awful a Category 5 hurricane is. But we didn't know. And by we, I mean me and my sisters and the rest of the young people my age, we just didn't. I think the worst storm that we'd lived through had been like a Category 3 or something.
"So we didn't know what to expect. And I think that at the time I just assumed that it would be like a Category 3, but maybe a little worse, would uproot a couple of trees and that would be it.
"So I was totally unprepared for Hurricane Katrina, but my mom and my grandmother's generation… they knew that it would be bad. I think they didn't expect the flooding to be as bad as it was. That's just because Katrina was special, because it was so big — and it moved so slowly and it pushed water where it hadn't been before."
A decision to stay
"I knew that if I left that I would be worried about my family and be obsessing over them here. And I would probably feel guilty because I wasn't here with them. And so that's why I decided that I'd just stay, that it'd be easier if I just stayed with them for the storm and then if I just went up to Michigan afterwards.
"So that's what I did. I stayed here. And then of course, because we had no power, we had no gas afterwards, it took me a much longer time to get up to Michigan than if I'd left before.
"The problem is that my family can't evacuate because I have such a huge extended family and it's really hard to evacuate so many people. We basically didn't have the money and the resources to evacuate. So we didn't.
We did what we always do, what we've done for generations.- Jesmyn Ward
"We did what we always do, what we've done for generations, and we just boarded up the windows and filled up the bathtubs with water and made sure we had enough canned goods and batteries and oil for lamps and we decided that we were going to ride it out."
Silenced by the storm
"It silenced me because I was depressed at the time. I was living at home because I moved back home after I spent a year in Michigan. I was working at the University of New Orleans (UNO), which is in New Orleans East in Louisiana.
"And so every day I would drive back and forth through New Orleans East, which, it seemed like in Louisiana they were just much slower to at least clear the debris, I guess, and deal with the aftermath of the storm. I was going back and forth and it was like the storm happened maybe a week ago or that's what it seemed like the entire time that I was working at UNO. I worked at UNO for two years and it was just so slow.
"New Orleans was so slow — especially the east — to come back and to pull everything together so that event [living through Hurricane Katrina] and how traumatic that event was, it was just so very present for me during that time that I was, I was silenced.
"I felt really hopeless and it wasn't until I saw old pictures taken during the early 70s, and these pictures were set around DeLisle. I compared those pictures to my own experience growing up in DeLisle and how we sort of rebuilt and came back and things had grown again and blossomed again and the landscape had come back. It was only after I saw those pictures that I thought, we're going to come back from this, we're going to build from this.
Home won't be the same, but it will be home again. It will be a home.- Jesmyn Ward
"Home won't be the same, but it will be home again. It will be a home. And it was only when I had that realization that I was able to return to writing.
"I had to have that realization in order to find some sense of hope again."
Jesmyn Ward's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
