Ward is classically beautiful — delicate and golden-skinned with her hair hanging in long curls. She is friendly and open yet reserved. Her face is unlined, making her appear much younger than her 46 years. But there are occasions when she sets her jaw and fixes to speak, and you find that she has the speech habits of an elder Black woman, following profound observations with silence, waiting for her point to sink in without exegesis or elaboration. When she laughs, though, shoulders hunched, I can imagine her as a little girl running around the woods she is driving me through. “It felt wilder when I was little,” she said, looking at the trees. “It wasn’t as built up. After Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people bought property around here. White developers decided to develop it. Sometimes I feel like the home I write about in my work — the home of my childhood — doesn’t quite exist anymore.”
Eventually, we came to a road that Ward said went up to a community called the Kiln — pronounced “kill” by the locals, and fictionalized as “the Kill” in Ward’s third novel, 2017’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” It is perhaps best known as the hometown of Brett Favre, the N.F.L. Hall of Fame quarterback. The town is important to Ward for another reason, though: Her great-grandfather Harry was the son of a white mother, Edna. When Harry had kids of his own, he and Edna would take them up to the Kiln to visit their white relatives, including Edna’s sister. At a certain point in the day, she would usher the family out before the sun set. While Harry and Edna rode back down to the Black side of town, the children were loaded into the trunk. Ward borrowed her family’s complex racial history in writing “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” That family history tells us something about how Ward thinks about history and its relationship to her fiction. She uses the raw material of the past to chronicle how it continues to work on us, but also to how we continue to work on it. She trains her attention on things both familiar and difficult. As her friend, the scholar Regina N. Bradley, told me, she shows us the Black & Milds, the liquor and the T-shirts with images of the deceased emblazoned on them, but also the way fragmentation, natural disaster and structural injustice can scramble Black life. Ward’s novels are populated by the dead, their ghosts and the survivors they leave behind. The reality of premature death looms, yet, as she makes abundantly clear, Black people live. She’s interested in that living and the hauntings that both torment and sustain us.
Ward’s new novel, “Let Us Descend,” which will be published later this month, offers a sensorially and emotionally thick account of an enslaved existence in the antebellum South. The book’s protagonist, Annis, is a filia dolorosa, an archetypal sorrowful daughter mourning her separation from her mother because of the slave trade. But the ruptures of slavery are not, in Ward’s telling, to be transcended; nor are they merely an unrelenting horror show. She offers another way: a life made of fragments and held together by acts of tenderness. Along her path, Annis’s connections are snatched, and though she has spiritual guidance from foremothers and other spirits, it would be too romantic to describe her as triumphant or resilient. This is not that kind of story; rather we stand in the storm with Annis.
When I spoke with contemporary Black writers and intellectuals about Ward, two of the words that came up most frequently were “us” and “ours.” The writer Mitchell S. Jackson described her to me as “an ultimate model of what it means to hold your people up, not because they are perfect or special, but because they are worthy.” The scholar and fellow Gulf Coast native Eddie S. Glaude Jr., told me via text that Ward’s novels “feel like they belong to our time, to the places that are most familiar to me,” and described her work as “a literature shaped by the Reagan era and its deadly consequences. Her voice on the page doesn’t imitate an early time with its protests and Black consciousness. She writes in its aftermath.” In a political moment when the country’s ugly racial history is being openly misrepresented, Ward is depicting a time and place that often goes overlooked in contemporary American literary fiction. In doing so, she is remapping where we believe we must look if we are to understand that history and the world it has created.
The contours of Ward’s life were formed by two hurricanes. In 1969, Hurricane Camille struck, marking a terrible watershed in Black life on the Gulf Coast. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated a year earlier, triggering spasms of mourning and rage-filled urban uprisings. Camille compounded that loss, scattering Gulf Coast residents across the country. Ward’s father’s family survived the storm by sheltering in the attic, then left Pass Christian via a government resettlement program, moving to Oakland, Calif. Her mother spent time in Los Angeles while attending community college, and was coaxed to Oakland with love letters. Ward was born in the Bay Area in 1977.