Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s “Let Us Descend” is a searing and lyrical historical novel that voyages through the antebellum South in a stunning adaptation of Dante’s “Inferno” — the legendary 14th century poem chronicling an allegorical descent through hell.
Raw, transcendent and ultimately hopeful, Ward’s envisioning of American slavery follows a young woman who is guided by the ghost of her warrior grandmother on a harrowing journey from a Carolina rice farm to a Louisiana sugar plantation while desperately seeking freedom.
The only kindness Annis has ever known is her mother’s love. Born to an enslaved mother and enslaver father, her earliest memory is of a clearing with a felled tree, her grandmother’s spear and her mother’s whispers of their warrior legacy. Annis’ grandmother Mama Aza was a Fon soldier in an elite force tasked with protecting the king. After Mama Aza fell in love, broke her vow of celibacy and became pregnant, the king traded her as punishment.
Mama Aza was tossed about by a stormy sea on the inhumane journey in the bowels of a ship bound for the Americas. Covered in excrement while chained to the dead, she called out from the pit of this despair and a spirit answered.
Ward funnels trauma through a masterful application of magical realism to construct a rich and evocative world. The spirit that answers Mama Aza is the wind itself, the embodiment of the stolen souls who lost their lives on the passage, their voices risen from the ocean floor “like water bubbling to air in the heat of the sun.” The voices of the dead form the vapor of the spirit’s skirts and proclaim their freedom through her storming winds.
This commanding energy takes center stage in Ward’s narrative. The spirit assumes Mama Aza’s likeness and adopts her name, providing Annis with a comfort she’s reluctant to trust but can’t survive without. Aza is Ward’s homage to Dante’s Virgil, the spirit that protects Dante as he descends into hell. Yet Aza can be Annis’ adversary as well as her ally.
The visual imagery Ward uses to illustrate Aza’s power is both mesmerizing and palpable. The spirit “pools to a mist, laying like a cool blanket” over Annis, providing relief when she is imprisoned in the sweltering heat. Another time Annis watches “Aza’s tendril snake around (a plantation owner’s) neck, knot itself into a phantom scarf, and tighten.”
Aza frequently takes the form of the weather itself, which is how she initially reveals herself to Annis on the grueling journey from the Carolina woods to a New Orleans slave market. Forced to walk without food or respite, Annis is about to break when Aza appears in all her glory to offer a spark of hope. Her skirts billow as lightning splits her face and slithers over her cape, the cloak formed from “tendrils of fog draped over her shoulders, yielding curtains of rain down her arms.”
Ward’s descriptions of Aza are hypnotic and dense with detail that illuminate the complex combination of awe and fear she inspires in Annis, who eventually realizes Aza yearns to be worshiped. The spirit feeds on veneration and expects sacrifice and obedience in exchange for her assistance. But those are things Annis may not be willing to trade to anyone for her freedom, even an entity that resembles her revered grandmother and promises liberation.
Luckily Aza isn’t the only spirit willing to trade favor for veneration. When Annis is sold to a sugarcane plantation, she angers the enslaver’s wife and is thrown in the punishment hole. The size of a coffin, the hole is lined with wooden spikes coated with the sorrow of those imprisoned before her.
While captive underground, Annis meets the earth spirit called They Who Take and Give. The earth clears the spikes out of her way and allows Annis a reprieve from her relentless torture. She collects miniscule drops of respite, whether from spiritual intervention or human kindness, and uses them to sustain herself as she descends deeper into hell.
The Biblical concept of the holy trinity is a recurring theme in Dante’s “Inferno” — from the structure of his three-line stanzas to the depiction of Satan with three heads. “Let Us Descend” pays homage to the trinity in an equally compelling way, through the matrilineal connection between the three generations originating with Mama Aza. This rare access to her stolen history allows Annis to retain her sense of self while traversing unconscionable horrors in her disparate reality. And there is a third spirit, the water spirit called She Who Remembers, that rounds out the trifecta of forces vying for Annis’ devotion.
As earth, wind and water battle for her favor, Annis realizes they offer different vehicles to freedom. Which one will deliver her from hell and into the life of freedom she craves?
Jesmyn Ward told The Paris Review in 2011 that she uses classical texts from Western literature to frame universal stories about the human experience “particular to my community and people.” In “Let Us Descend,” she has produced a shimmering and breathless proclamation of loss and deliverance set against the monstrosity of human slavery that accomplishes her objective flawlessly.
FICTION
“Let Us Descend”
by Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
320 pages, $28
AUTHOR EVENT
Jesmyn Ward. In conversation with Regina N. Bradley, presented by Georgia Center for the Book and Charis Books and More. 7 p.m., Oct. 27. Free with registration. First Baptist Church Decatur, 308 Clairemont Ave., Decatur. 404-373-1653, charisbooksandmore.com
About the Author
