Reviews

Jesmyn Ward gives us a powerful tale of a reality foreign to most. Yes, we have all dealt with family struggle of some kind. Yes, we have all dealt with loss. Yes, we have all met the challenge of finding our way. Jesmyn Ward writes writes so beautifully of her often ugly journey, that it shines a new and difficult light on this path. It presents a harsh reality to things we thought buried post civil rights movement. She speaks of the South in agonizing, yet beautiful ways, telling her story of growing up. This is the foundation from which Salvage the Bones came, and as essential a read as Maya Angelou.

We who still live do what we must. Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages