Jesmyn Ward

The subject here is endurance and triumph over deprivation, cruelty and abuse. Nothing is softened or euphemized, yet often while reading I felt the way I sometimes feel reading poetry...the words wash over me as the meaning sinks away beneath the tide. Metaphor and symbolism are as thick as mosquitoes in the Louisiana swamps. Some of it works, a lot of it doesn't. I had a very hard time with the narrative voice--first person, present tense, modern excellent English, from a 19th century unlettered, 3rd generation enslaved African woman half dead from starvation, physical punishment and exhaustion. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief, first that any human being could endure for over a year the overwork, lack of food (and I mean near absence of food), constant harassment and fear of beating or being consigned to "the hole", and retain any sense of self, no matter how well trained in martial arts nor how determined she might be; and second, that even the basest of slave-runners or slaveholders would fail to provide their human "livestock" with the minimum requirements of life to protect their investment. A horse treated as Annis and her companions were treated would soon fall down dead and useless. Cattle driven to market under the conditions we are shown would arrive with little value left on their bones, if they hadn't drowned or collapsed before reaching their destination. I know that conditions for enslaved people were brutish, filthy, and dangerous; I know that a great many died of their mistreatment and a great many were intentionally mutilated or killed for minor transgressions, let alone for outright rebellion or attempts to escape. I know that to some white people they were considered expendable in ways that farm animals were not...not just less than human, but less than alive. I still balked at a mistress who made no provision whatsoever (as far as I could gather from the text) for feeding her house slaves, even punishing them for trying to cook a dead wild animal no white person would eat, because it was hers and so was the fire. Yes, the woman was demented, but there was no counterpoint to her ...nothing to suggest that her approach was atypical in any way. Let Us Descend is literary; it has some "good bones" as a story. Ward's descriptive talent is huge. (Rarely have I encountered such marvelous use of the English language to present such unpalatable content.) But overall, I cannot rate this book very highly, as it simply failed to work for me.… (mer)