Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Being Vulnerable

Mississippi is a strange place. To say it is conservative is a euphemism for... well you make a judgment: It took about 130 years for the State legislature to approve the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution which made slavery illegal (1995 I believe)*. I doubt Mississippi is on many bucket lists. Salvage the Bones explains why it really isn’t a tourist destination.- in addition to the horrid climate.

The family Batiste exists on a knife edge, “starving, fighting, struggling” in the piney woods of Southern Mississippi. Any mis-step can lead to disaster. They are vaguely aware of this vulnerability but do little to protect themselves. Their preparations for a threatening hurricane are more symbolic than effective. Their everyday lives are lived warily but with a haphazard casualness they seem to understand as courage; perhaps it is. It is impossible to tell if they are stoical or merely submissively resigned to overwhelming forces.

“It’s all contaminated,” one of the brothers says. “Everything.” And it is. The plot of land they live on, the sand pit they swim in, the various domestic animals they keep, the entire existential scheme in which they find themselves. The naïveté of 14 year old Esch, the narrator, is startling. Her life is emotionally and physically brutal, made only worse by her fantasies of Greek heroes and their lovers. Even these classical myths are contaminated by the facts of her life.

“So now we pick at the house like mostly eaten leftovers.” The grandparents’ house is progressively cannibalized to make inadequate improvements to their own deteriorating dwellings. The family conspires to destroy their own history plank by plank. Their “present is washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.” They have lived in the coastal lowlands for generations but they have fewer roots than the palmettos they live among.

“We live in the black heart of Bois Sauvage.” Is that a place of refuge or a prison? It’s protection against the alien “white Bois” and the folk who “live out away in the pale arteries.” The family come across white folk at school and the supermarket but they don’t speak except in emergencies. A sort of apartheid of the heart prevails. There is mutual non-recognition.

“These are my options, and they narrow to none.” This applies not just for the pregnant Esch but also for the entire family. There are no options, no real choices they have to make other than to submit or not to what’s presented to them. Hope is not something they engage in. They move on from one imminent aspiration to the next: “Always crazy for something.” They take unnecessary risks because... well they just do. At least something unexpected might result, something different. Mostly it’s something worse.

The spine of the story is a vicious pit-bull terrier whose litter of puppies is as threatened by her as every other living thing within range of her muzzle. She is like the impending storm: still and silent until suddenly deadly. The dog is male machismo made flesh and bone, the psychological anima expressed in reality. It’s function is to fight and maim and cause pain so the male doesn’t have to do it himself. But as most men find out sooner or later, the anima is very high maintenance and entirely unreliable.

Esch’s parallel animus is not to be trifled with either - she’s not going to let some Jason treat her like an hapless Medea. The black Athena inside her will fight for survival. Like the storm “she made things happen that had never happened before.” Whatever Bois Sauvage had been before the storm - the demarcations between black and white, the male competitions, the designation of rich and poor - no longer exist. “Suddenly there is a great split between now and then.” A way to start over... perhaps. It is Mississippi after all.

* See messages 2 & 5 below for clarification of this point.

View all my reviews