The two-time National Book Award winner returns with “Let Us Descend” about an enslaved girl haunted by ghosts.
“Let Us Descend,” the title of Jesmyn Ward’s overwhelming new novel, alludes to Dante’s “Inferno,” but her story tells the tale of a real hell on earth. In one sense, that’s long been Ward’s setting. In “,” which won a National Book Award in 2011, she described a poor Black family in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina. In “,” which won another National Book Award in 2017, she described the notorious Parchman Farm, where Southern slavery was effectively re-legalized for the 20th century.
This nightmare makes plain that slavery was not merely a matter of brutal economics. There could be no rational financial reason to starve, drown and cripple one’s valuable. This was fundamentally a system of degradation in the service of White supremacy, which is why certain segments of contemporary society continue to insist that our history remain shrouded in genteel mythology. Ward blasts all that away with the furnace of her prose.
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