Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's 2023 fourth novel, the structural follow-up to Sing Unburied Sing (2017) and the more historically ambitious move from the contemporary Mississippi-coastal territory Ward had occupied across her earlier catalog. The structural premise is Annis, an enslaved teenage girl on a Carolina rice plantation in the years before the American Civil War, who after a series of plantation crises (Annis is the secret daughter of the plantation owner; her mother has been transferred away from the rice plantation; Annis attracts the attention of the plantation owner in a way that produces an existential threat) is sold south to a slave-trader and forced to walk in coffle from the Carolinas across the entire Deep South to the New Orleans slave market and the sugar-cane plantations of Louisiana. Annis's West-African-warrior grandmother Aza, who was kidnapped from her own pre-colonial West African village, walks with her in spirit across the entire arc of the novel.

Ward's structural method is the close-first-person Annis narration across the entire walk-and-Louisiana arc, with Aza's spirit-presence providing the structural mythic-counterpoint that the realist Carolina-and-Louisiana-plantation material serves as the structural setting for. The walk-and-coffle chapters across the middle of the novel are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific kind of forced-internal-migration history that the broader contemporary American literary tradition (Beloved 1987, The Underground Railroad 2016) has been working toward for forty years. The Aza chapters across the entire novel carry the structural mythic weight of the West-African-warrior tradition that gives Annis the operational interior to survive the walk; the New Orleans chapters in the back third deliver the structural emotional payoff the entire novel has been building toward. The novel reads in the patient Mississippi-realist register Ward has refined and that distinguishes Let Us Descend from the broader contemporary American historical-slavery-fiction tradition.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Ward pivot from contemporary Mississippi into historical Deep South material, and as the canonical contemporary American literary novel about the antebellum domestic slave trade. Compare to Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead), Wandering Stars (Tommy Orange), and the broader contemporary American literary-historical tradition. The Adenrele Ojo audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.