Sunday Morning! “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward

I’m still adjusting to life in New York City and have recently taken a restaurant job to meet people in the area and earn some much needed cat food money; I’m working in a café adjacent to Tompkins Square Park and next to a bar that appears in Russian Doll, for whatever that’s worth. What this means though is I’m back to restaurant life, in which the “weekend” actually starts on Monday. This post might be a bit rushed or choppy. I’m a little fried.

I wanted to write a bit about Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones for a few reasons. The first is Ms. Ward just became the youngest person ever to win the Library of Congress Award for American Fiction. She’s previously won a MacArthur “genius” grant and this novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011. She won the National Book Award again in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and was the first Black female author to win twice. Yet, the novel was also challenged recently in North Carolina as inappropriate for AP English students, which I’ll discuss momentarily.

The book takes the point of view of Esch, a fifteen-year old girl in southern Mississippi who lives in a world of males; her mother died after giving birth to her brother Junior, and her widowed father is raising her and two other brothers: Randall and Skeeter. Unfortunately for her, the family is very poor and Esch is pregnant by Manny, a friend of the family who’s dating another girl and not remotely daddy material. She is trying to hide the pregnancy, but is going to need to rely on her family. Meanwhile, her brother Skeeter is hopelessly devoted to his fighting dog China, who has just had puppies of her own; and her Daddy is frantically trying to prepare them for the category 5 hurricane that is threatening to make landfall: Katrina- maybe you’ve heard of it?

The novel does an excellent job of putting us in the mind of this young girl who is deeply infatuated with a beautiful boy who apparently couldn’t care less about her feelings. Esch is an avid reader of Edith Hamilton and she knows the story of Medea, who was also deeply in love with a self-absorbed manipulator; it’s a tale as old as humanity, and it’s hard not to wish that Esch will get a similar revenge on Manny. But, she’s also a 15 year old working-class Black girl, and the novel is much too closely-hewn to reality to give her a cinematic vengeance third act. It’s enough for the story that she’s a fully fleshed-out girl who’s found herself in a terribly difficult bind in the days before Katrina.

The looming storm adds an extra element of tension to the story; we all remember the terrible devastation that swept down upon the Southeastern United States in 2005. Jesmyn Ward lived through the storm and shows how it caught people off guard who’d had experience with lesser storms when the waters and winds suddenly surged. What helps the characters survive is clinging to their kin, and this section of the book is thrilling.

However, I wished at times the storm would arrive earlier in the story. Daddy is running around trying to prepare and is accidentally maimed in the process- there are clear parallels to the Biblical story of Noah- but the storm doesn’t come until well over two-thirds of the way through the novel. So, the second interesting thing for me about Salvage the Bones for me was that I didn’t quite connect with the story. I appreciated the echoes of the Medea story and Noah, and cared about Esch’s plight, yet I found its realism a bit of a slog. A subplot about Skeeter pitting his dog China against another dog in a fight over a bet was bloody and dramatic, but not the sort of thing that interests me.

However, I think I would have loved the novel as a younger reader. Let’s face it: my concerns are not the same as a middle-aged man as those of a fifteen-year-old girl. Young people would relate better than I could.

Which brings us to the third interesting thing about the novel: its recent challenge in Guilford County, North Carolina over its inclusion in an AP English class. Two students took offense at the book, which was optional, and their parents urged the removal of Salvage the Bones from the class and High School library, calling it “trash,” “pornography,” and “garbage.” To be blunt, these particular critiques are specious bullshit. The literary merits of the novel are obvious, it’s understandably popular with a majority of students, and the sexual content in the first chapter is sufficiently chaste that I’d forgotten all about it when I heard it was challenged. Yes, as depicted, the pregnant character has had sex (hence, she’s pregnant!) and, yes, she’s a poor Black girl, which may or may not be the real issue here. But there’s nothing salacious about it- teenagers sometimes get pregnant, alas. As I’ve said, the book sets us down in the heart of reality; nothing felt contrived or sentimental, or lurid.

Luckily, there were enough members on the Guilford County School Board who read past the first chapter that the bibliophobes lost this time. However, since book banning is becoming the most popular indoor sport in contemporary America, the best course of action would be to do what many of the other posts on this site encourage: do your own reading and judge for yourself.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, or preparing for this weekend?