Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
Summary
Esch Batiste is fifteen, motherless, surrounded by brothers in the junk strewn woods of Bois Sauvage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and she has just worked out that she is pregnant, by a boy named Manny who belongs to someone else. The novel gives her twelve days, numbered chapter by chapter, and the reader knows what she does not: the storm assembling out in the Gulf during those days is Hurricane Katrina.
The house runs on scraps and loyalty. Daddy drinks and, alone among the adults of the parish, believes the storm warnings, spending the twelve days nailing plywood and hoarding water with a prophet's desperation. Randall, the eldest, is basketball's one thin chance at a scholarship. Junior, seven, was the birth their mother died of. And Skeetah, closest to Esch, loves China, his white pit bull, with a ferocity the book treats as its purest devotion; China's whelping opens the novel, her fighting and her puppies' fates run through it, and Esch, reading Mythology for summer school, narrates it all through Medea, wronged, powerful and monstrous with love, the frame a pregnant girl chooses for herself.
Then the water comes, and the last chapters, the family in the attic, on the roof, in the flood, swimming, choosing what can be carried, are among the great storm scenes in American fiction, and what is lost is exactly what the title says must be salvaged.
Around two hundred and sixty pages, narrated in prose that runs biblical and bodily at once.
Best for readers who want Katrina from inside a family the cameras never found, myth and poverty and love in one voice.
Historical Context & Significance
Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, a decision that surprised the handicappers and now looks like the prize doing its job early: Jesmyn Ward was two novels into a career that would bring her a second National Book Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She wrote it in deliberate answer to how quickly Katrina had faded from the national conversation, and from the inside: Ward's family, of DeLisle, Mississippi, the original of Bois Sauvage, saw their house flood and fled into the storm themselves.
Critics reached for Faulkner, the compressed rural cosmos, the flood, the family epic in miniature, and Ward has claimed the lineage while correcting its centre of gravity toward the Black coastal South.
Sing, Unburied, Sing took a second National Book Award in 2017, making her the first woman with two fiction wins, and her memoir Men We Reaped stands beside the novels; Bois Sauvage has become one of the permanent invented places in American letters, and this book is its cornerstone.