Let Us Descend
by Jesmyn Ward
An enslaved girl marched south. The ancestors walk with her.
For you if
you are ready for a novel that descends into the full reality of American slavery without ever losing sight of the humanity at its center
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Annis is enslaved, sold south by the white man who fathered her, marched from the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into a Louisiana sugar plantation. Ward structures the journey as a descent through hell — Dante's Inferno turned toward Black American experience — with Annis accompanied by the spirits of her warrior grandmother and the elemental forces of earth and water that her mother taught her to hear. Ward does not look away from what slavery did to bodies. She also does not let the body be the whole story — Annis's interior life, her ancestral connection, her spiritual world are as real and as present as the chains. The most formally ambitious American slavery novel since Beloved, and the one that most completely refuses to let the institution stand in for the person living inside it.
Where This Book Lives
- Topics
- atlantic slave trade
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