I’d like to thank my editor, Kathy Belden, who always asks necessary questions that lead me to essential answers. I’d be a poorer writer without her, and I’m so grateful she walks with me. I am grateful to her assistant, Sally Howe, who compensates for my absentmindedness and keeps me in order. I would be lost without my agent, Jennifer Lyons, who fights for me continuously, insisting that my work reach a wide audience, and who believed in me from the very rough beginning. Kate Lloyd and Rosaleen Mahorter, my Scribner publicists, are sharp, understanding, and kind, and I appreciate everything they do to help my books thrive. My thanks also go to Nan Graham, who has chosen to champion my work and invest in my career as a writer. I would also like to thank the staff of the Lyceum Agency, who are essential to my books and my word getting out in the world. This is also true of my former publicist and close friend Michelle Blankenship, who introduced much of my work to the reading public and continues to believe in me and care for me.
My department chair at Tulane University, Professor Michael Kuczynski, is generous and thoughtful. Without him and my colleagues at Tulane, I would not have had the time and funding necessary to write this book. The students I’ve taught at Tulane are exceptional, and I fear they teach me more than I do them. My fellow writers ground, inspire, and challenge me always: Elizabeth Staudt, Natalie Bakopoulos, Sarah Frisch, Justin St. Germain, Stephanie Soileau, Ammi Keller, Harriet Clark, Rob Ehle, J. M. Tyree, and Raymond McDaniels. I adore them, and I could not have written and revised this novel without them.
Finally, I’d like to thank my family: my mother, who loves me and feeds me and hugs me; my father, who teaches me how to be a free spirit; my grandmother Dorothy, who shows me how to tell a good story; my brother, Joshua, who ignites a love that burns as a fire inside of me; my sisters, Nerissa and Charine, who fight with me and for me; my godmother, Gretchen, who makes plants and people blossom; my little brother/cousin Aldon, who remembers all the memories I’ve forgotten, and who helps me recall them; my cousins Rhett and Jill, who grew up with me then, and grow up with me still; my friend Mark, who helps me pick out furniture and bears me up when I can no longer stand; my friend Mariha, who holds my hand and is determined I not die before I should; my nieces and nephews, who teach me to be silly and give me hope—De’Sean, Kalani, and Joshua D.; my partner, Brandon, who makes me laugh when I need it; my children, who teach me how to be patient, how to love, how to hold, and how to feel joy—Noemie and Brando. In closing, I’d like to thank everyone in my community in DeLisle, Mississippi, who inspire my stories and give me a sense of belonging. I am ever grateful for every one of you.
I love you all.
READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER OF JESMYN WARD’S
SALVAGE THE BONES
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where fifteen-year-old Esch prepares for the storm with her three brothers and her hard-drinking father. As the twelve days that comprise the novel’s framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel’s heart pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
“Strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible . . . Ward stares down the truth.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Masterful . . . Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it.”
—The Washington Post
THE FIRST DAY:
BIRTH IN A BARE-BULB PLACE
China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they’re beaten soft. Only Mama’s forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on her own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She’d stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.
What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit. Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help, although Daddy said she told him she didn’t need any help. Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didn’t work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid she’d knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.
What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.
“Get out the doorway. You making her nervous.” Skeetah is Daddy’s copy: dark, short, and lean. His body knotted with ropy muscles. He is the second child, sixteen, but he is the first for China. She only has eyes for him.
“She ain’t studying us,” Randall says. He is the oldest, seventeen. Taller than Daddy, but just as dark. He has narrow shoulders and eyes that look like they want to jump out of his head.
People at school think he’s a nerd, but when he’s on the basketball court, he moves like a rabbit, all quick grace and long haunches. When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.