Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close to her, including her brother, who was killed, aged 19, by a drunk driver. In January 2020, Ward’s husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery
Hell is very much the context for her fourth novel, Let Us Descend. In it, Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery, fleshing out their lives through the story of Annis, her teenage protagonist, whose plantation-owning ‘sire’ raped her enslaved mother.
The title is from a line in Dante’s Inferno, snatches of which Annis overhears outside a closed schoolroom door.
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