Let Us Descend

LoveReading Says

Following the physical and spiritual journey of an enslaved American woman, Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend is a raw, poetic tour de force. A story that speaks the language of spirits and the soul. Of salt, smoke and soil. Of the earth and water. From its crackling opening line — “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand” — through its heart-rending, radiant path, this is a work of stirring, spellbinding power.

“Mama has always been a woman who hides a tender heart: a woman who tells me stories in a leaf-rustling whisper, a woman who burns like a sulphur lantern as she leads me through the world’s darkness.” So shares Annis early on in the novel, when she and her mother are enslaved on a Carolina plantation, a place where the sire “appraises me in the same way he studies his horses.” While Annis deals with the “mess” in the chamber pot of the man who’s violated her mother several times, his twin daughters — her half-sisters — learn about Aristotle.

At the same time, Annis’ mother teaches her resilience, and shares nourishing, empowering stories of her African warrior grandmother. These stories serve her well, and feel potently real, when her mother is sold, before Annis herself is sold and taken south. Through her journey through rice fields and the Great Dismal Swamp, Annis sees a spirit and partly occupies a mythic world beyond our own. 

On reaching New Orleans — “City of the living, city of the dead, city of all between” — she sees free people, women who “walk through the world as if every step they take were their own”, but is sold to a Louisiana sugar plantation. As the spirit urges her to “do as your people did. You must sink in order to rise”, Annis navigates her own way to selfhood and freedom. 

Joanne Owen

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