As we recognize the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi this month, I am recalling the book I read that forever solidified the image of that deadly storm for me. Seven years after it hit on August 29, 2005, our Magee Books-n-Lunch Club read Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward.
I make notes on the books I read, and this was my evaluation of Ward’s novel in 2012: “Our August book club selection was one of the two or three most moving and authentic novels I’ve ever read, though several times I didn’t think I could make it through the story.”
Despite the emotional distress it may cause you, I’m recommending that you put this “most moving and authentic” novel under your reading lamp this month as you’re being reminded of the storm that wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Salvage the Bones, Ward’s second novel, won the National Book Award for fiction when it was published in 2011, and deservedly so.
Having grown up on the Gulf Coast, Ward said that she was “very dissatisfied with the way Katrina had receded from the American consciousness.” She lived through the storm herself in the little town of DeLisle and experienced the devastation that never fully ended for many on the Coast who were so poor that they couldn’t come back from such losses.
The Batiste family lives in the fictitious backwater town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, based on the author’s hometown. The town’s name means “savage wood,” and it’s a savage life of despair for the most part— living hand to mouth, stealing when they have to, having their slender hopes crushed one by one.
Claude Batiste (Daddy) has become an alcoholic after the death of his wife when their last child, Junior, was born. Claude keeps a little money coming into the house until he loses three fingers in an accident. Oldest son Raymond dreams of a shot at a basketball camp where he can be spotted by a scout, until his own family erupts in a fight in the gym and he is banned. Middle son Skeetah’s love is for his dog China, a pit bull that he has trained to fight in illegal dog matches. When she has a litter of puppies, he hopes to sell them for a good price. Youngest son Junior suffers from never knowing his mother.
The narrator and viewpoint character is the only daughter, Esche, who becomes pregnant by a local boy with no plans to marry or take care of her. Sadly, in her culture, Esche believes that she can’t refuse his demand for sex.
In the background of the family’s disintegration, reports begin to surface of a hurricane drifting toward the Gulf Coast. The news creates a relatable tension in us south Mississippi readers especially, since the storm hit us too. But the Baptistes are only mildly concerned at first, as we were in Simpson County before the news got serious. They can’t do much anyway. They have no money for travel, and they have no where to go.
When the storm hits, rising water forces the Baptistes into their attic, then onto the roof. But even that is not enough to save them, and they make a final desperate attempt to swim to higher ground. In the flood, China and the puppies disappear when the family’s home is swept away.
Ward’s aim seems to be to show that all the forces of the universe—social, economic and natural— are solidly against the poorest and most desperate among us.
The family’s only defense against the onslaught is hope, which rises even as they survey their losses of home, belongings, and town. Claude sees finally that his family is his strength. Esche has hopes for her unborn child, that she can give it a better life. Skeetah hopes against hope that he will find China and the puppies. At least the family is still together.
The title of the novel reveals Ward’s concept for the story. “To salvage” means to rescue from wreckage, and if only “the bones” can be salvaged, they represent only the scraps of a life. It’s not much, but it’s something to reclaim, and therein lies the hope for the Baptistes and others like them.
The “salvaging” motif runs through the plot. The Baptistes live by salvaging what they can find in their impoverished environment. Houses, their town and their lives are disintegrating, and they must take back what they can in order to survive at all.
Eshe says, “Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered .... left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage.”
Ward’s moving and emotionally brutal novel captures what it means to survive. The Baptistes’ survival after Katrina will depend on taking what they have left, which is basically only each other, and buiding back from that. And despite the devastation, the reader believes that will happen. They will learn to crawl back to life.
