She tells a boy-and-his-dog story about her brother Skeetah and his pit bull, China, raised for dog fighting. Their homestead is called “The Pit.” Ward’s language teases out the inherent violence of this place - both physical and psychological - in brutal details red, black and white dominate the color scheme of the novel as do references to meat, sweat and blood.Īs a narrator, rendering the story in the present tense, Esch is observant, poetic and often given to reminiscing about her mother who died in childbirth. Her mother is dead and her father is an alcoholic. Esch is the only girl in a family of boys, and her world, as the name of the town suggests, is isolated and savage.
Salvage the Bones is told in the voice of Esch Baitiste, a pregnant, tomboyish teenager whose lover will not even look at her as they have sex in a toilet stall. She is a writer-of-conscience of the kind we see too few of these days. Ward, a Stegner fellow and finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, demonstrates extraordinary promise for both style and subject matter. Both novels are to be admired for the author’s portrayal, in highly lyrical language, of the gritty lives of the rural poor.
Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, revisits fictional Bois Sauvage, an impoverished African-American community on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast that is the setting for her acclaimed debut, Where the Line Bleeds.
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