Bearing Witness to the Slave Past: A Review of Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend

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• Bearing Witness to the Slave Past: A Review of Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend
• Yesmina Khedhir (bio)

In her latest novel, Let Us Descend (2023), African American writer and two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Jesmyn Ward takes the reader back in space and time to the deep South and the gruesome history of American slavery. The novel focuses on Annis, a teenage enslaved teenage girl, who recounts her harrowing journey from the rice fields of North Carolina to the sugarcane fields of Louisiana after being sold by the man who raped her mother and fathered her. Chained and exhausted, Annis, together with a group of other enslaved individuals, marches for days to reach the slave markets of New Orleans. Once sold, Annis starts another journey of horror, torture, and pain, but also friendship, endurance, and ultimately liberation.

One of the novel’s main subjects is motherhood. The novel’s opening sentence, “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand” (1), centers and much like Ward’s earlier fictional works identifies motherhood as a symbol of power and a site of female strength. Indeed, as much as it presents motherhood as an ontological state of “non/being” due to the “non/status” of the mother and her inability to legally own her children under the partus law of chattel slavery (Sharpe 15), the novel does not completely take away the agency of Black enslaved mothers to perform their maternal identities, even if to a minimal extent. Similar to Ward’s fictional depiction of the mother-daughter relationship in Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), the transmission of ancestral knowledge from mother to daughter is an important survival practice rendered in Let Us Descend. Annis, for instance, is taught by her mother the skills of both herbal healing and spear fighting, which she inherited from her African warrior mother, Mama Aza, as a way to protect and arm her with the means to survive and defend herself. Sold away early in the novel and presumably dead later in the narrative, Annis’s mother, much like Esch’s mother in Salvage the Bones, remains present in absence, her haunting ghost roams everywhere through flashbacks and memories. The novel’s ending further emphasizes the centrality of motherhood. Free after escaping to the Great Dismal Swamp, Annis is now an expectant mother and promises to bring her future baby in the swamp, a desolate, wild, and alienated place that yet provides a haven, a home, and a space for freedom, community, and being to the enslaved: “I want the seed, the secret, the babe, to be born here,” Annis confirms (Ward 297).

Remarkably, the novel’s end bears a strong resemblance to Ward’s first and recently published short story, “Mother Swamp” (2022), which Ward wrote while working on the rough draft of Let Us Descend, as she mentions in her author’s note at the end of the short story. Set during slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp, “Mother Swamp” revisits the history of the maroon communities, the secret societies of enslaved people—or better called [End Page 41] “self-emancipators” (Morris 2)—who fled to the wilderness of the South seeking freedom from bondage. In her mythical creation story, Ward emphasizes female genealogy and agency as she imagines an all-female maroon community, descending from one single pregnant woman, “First Mother” who, after escaping slavery and giving birth to her “First Daughter,” succeeds in building a family and a self-sufficient community in the swamp. Throughout nine generations, the mother takes her daughter as soon as she reaches the age of seventeen to another borderline island of men (Manilamen) to get pregnant and bring other children into the community. Female children are kept with their mothers and male children are sent back after weaning to their fathers.

Just like pregnant Annis who had to cross a large river and a “hungry” lake to reach the Great Dismal Swamp at the end of Let Us Descend, “First Mother” in Mother Swamp “stole herself from the sugarcane fields in the west” and “dived into a writhing river . . . and swam for a day and...