ILLUMINATING BEAUTY AND FEMINISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES (California, New York, England, France; 21^st century sweeping into 14^th century to early 15^th): “Medieval sleuthing” cannot be rushed. Savor this brilliant, richly-detailed historical novel that vividly takes us back to the late medieval era, alternating with 2018 modernity.

Venturing into the medieval period, new for this blog, might not be the case if Cities of Women weren’t so entrancingly written, enlightening, and relevant to our historic era.

Ten years of scholarly research by Kathleen Jones, professor emerita at San Diego State University women’s studies program, triumphantly transitions to historical novelist.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t concentrate as Jones invites us to put on our detective-thinking caps in this medieval whodunit. Not a murder, but an art mystery as to who exquisitely embellished a coveted medieval “Illuminated Manuscript”? (See definition here.)

Created for religious purposes, royalty, and others before paper was invented, the art of illustrating glimmering manuscripts applied delicate gold leaf and brilliant-colored paints along the borders of impossibly hard-to-decipher medieval handwriting scripts, on parchment or vellum (see description, differences, images here), reflects a fervent “determination to bring beauty to life” during the dark Middle Ages.

Dedicated to “invisible” women artists, Jones’ modern-day protagonist, Verity Frazier, is seeking tenure at a California college, depicting what 21^st women in academic settings go up against – the pressures of academia to publish and gender assumptions.

On page one, we learn that Verity’s feminist scholarly interests mesh with her personal preference for female lovers, thus the knowledge, instinct, and sensitivity she brings to bear is a strong belief that the mystery artist was a woman not a man as medieval historians claim and later ones presume too. It’s not that a man couldn’t arrive at the same hunch, but likely not as acutely as Verity, arguing that “the only architects of beauty” weren’t only men” – “as if vision had only one sex.”

Verity is willing to risk tenure to find evidence to alter art history and her tenure chances since she’s been longing for something more radical.

The hunt for a medieval female artist buried in history proves elusive and transporting. Splendid atmospheric prose combined with unknown familiar history and art is charismatic.

Historians know who wrote the manuscript, but not the name of the artist who adorned it with intricate artistry and devotion: Christine de Pizan was prolific, “regarded as one of Europe’s earliest female professional writers” (https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/06/christine-de-pizan-and-the-book-of-the-queen.html). The British Library’s online comments and images, refers to this medieval manuscript as “one of our best-loved (and most-requested).”

Verity takes us to the London-based library, considered one of the greats and largest, on her quest to pursue truth, accountability, recognition. Housed in their Treasure Gallery, Christine’s stunning manuscript survives. Commissioned by the Queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria who reigned in the early 15^th century, it’s called The Book of the Queen or Harley 4431. Jones describes how and why this extraordinary work came to be.

Alternating mostly between the 1300s and 2018, the medieval chapters consume much of the story. Opening when Verity is late submitting her dissertation, only the final chapter left. Interestingly, it’s already been critiqued for not sounding scholarly, rather in the writing style of a novelist. Cleverly mirroring what Jones has done.

Prior to leaving America for Britain, Verity attends a medieval lecture and exhibition in Manhattan at the Morgan Library, J. P, a voracious collector.

There she stumbles on a mesmerizing medieval painting an astute female librarian notices her admiring.

“Tantalized by its central image: a large initial C decorated in the brightest blue she’d ever seen. The initial was fitted inside a square illuminated in glittering gold, while out of its edges tumbled tendrils of vines and other flora in red and green, with gold-flecked flourishes . . . the longer she stared, the more it seemed as if the gold-embossed letters, tendrils, and halos were some kind of multidimensional time machine: incandescent, ethereal, and luminous, transporting meaning beyond the ordinary boundary of understanding. It was like seeing dust burst into flames.

“She took out her notebook and wrote one word: Beauty.” 

Creating Beauty, the primary theme, shows why women seek “beautiful things” in the darkest of times.

Other important themes include Learnedness, Integrity, Justice, and Reason. Leading female characters choose to tell stories of “charity and goodness and the welcoming embrace of a community of women” instead of dwelling on the darkness. The Morgan librarian is pivotal, suggesting Verity read Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. From there, the sleuthing ignites. 

This timeless, affecting story portrays women standing up for their beliefs and values no matter the odds against them, or the sacrifices they have to make.

Verity reasons that for a female to climb the ultimate echelons of respect for her talent during the medieval ages when knights, kings, clergymen reigned supreme, Christine wouldn’t choose a man to partner with. So who was the female medieval artist Christine trusted with her life’s work?

History is shown to repeat itself, including personally when another woman, a professor from France notices Verity at another library, this one in London. Her scholarly interest in medieval women isn’t new, like Verity’s (who specializes in 19^th century female French revolutionaries), so she offers to assist with her research, also leading to a tender love affair fraught with jealousy on the part of Anastasia. A name that becomes very significant in the investigation.

Past and present history also converge with wars and a pandemic. During this medieval timeline, The Hundred Years War between France and England and The Black Death (bubonic plague) happened, each killing millions. The Great Plague, history’s worst, millions more.

Poverty versus wealth; the hypocrisy of sacred values and sexual abuse in the church; transformative childhood influences; and human emotions that run the gamut from grief, loss, lust, violence to love. All stand the test of time.

Moreover, Cities of Women shows people with divergent agendas coming together. Can that comparison between the ages happen today?

You’ll be introduced to technical words in the laborious process of making parchment or vellum, creating “suede-like” sensations derived from drying and stretching the young skins of cows, sheep, and goats. Single pages of medieval manuscripts are called “orphaned leaves;” a double page “bifolia”; a collection of pages “quires”; bound pages transformed into a book “codex.” Artistic embellishments were intended to push past the ugliness” to “make beauty burst into it like a bright light.” 

Paris is seen as a thriving center of medieval paper-making for book publishing. Today, when you walk along the Left Bank of the Seine you’ll still see booksellers lined up but their status is unclear because of the upcoming Olympics.

The energizing spirit of persevering women artists in the face of atrocities and adversities is palpable. Makes you wonder how many other great women of the arts have yet become visible.

Lorraine

Reflecting on what matters most in your life (New Jersey suburban neighborhood close to Manhattan; present-day): There’s a good reason Olivia Strauss is Running Out of Time has been released on the first day of the new year when you may have made a resolution to follow a dream you keep putting off. New beginnings are reflection points, provoking thoughts on whether you’re satisfied with how your life is turning out and what you could do to make it better.

Since Angela Brown’s witty, wacky, science-fiction-y contemporary novel hits a realistic nerve, it’s a fitting way to kick off 2024 when Americans are making resolutions to “improve mental health” and “be happier,” according to surveys (see here and here).

What if you knew how much time you had left on this planet, would it change how you view your life? Your routines? Priorities?

These questions asked because Time is Olivia’s overwhelming issue, triggered when she turns thirty-nine. A mid-life crisis researchers, psychologists, doctors say typically spans your forties to sixties. Still, how typical is it at Olivia’s age to have a full-blown mental breakdown about her “expiration date,” disturbing normal life cycles, organized into four parts: Death, Life, Afterlife, and Birth? A tip-off you’re in store for some twists-and-turns you’re likely not see coming. What you will see is how relatable Olivia is – practically, emotionally, philosophically, existentially.

Repeatedly Olivia reminds us her nickname Liv sounds just like “Live!” Mortality, the fundamental theme. Would you even want to know how long you’ll live? What if you did find out?

That’s the fantastical premise of Liv’s comedic, disguised, serious tale that pulls us in through her earnest narrator’s voice. Ironically, she’s become possessed with finding her authentic voice – her literary voice, her unfulfilled dream to be a published poet. She knows what that felt like once, from her NYU college days when she entered a poetry contest, won, and was elated to see her name in print in a literary journal. Since then she hasn’t written a word. Marriage, motherhood, and moving out of energizing Manhattan to suburbia, likely in New Jersey where the author lives, are culprits. How big a role does Liv’s personality and mental attitude play?

Over the years she’s seen her husband Andrew, and her best friend Marian, both with history and fond memories from college, become writers. Andrew seemingly content to be a reporter for a local newspaper; Marian a food writer combining the pleasures of meals with the memories they hold. Liv, though, has been too busy, too frazzled, juggling parenting, home, and a job teaching high school English (though not her dream job), feeling she’s let too much time go by to write what she wants to. How can she carve out quality time for herself if she doesn’t have enough for her adorable, precocious, five-year-old son Tommy? Andrew, a devoted dad, is seen as spending the most time attending to Tommy’s needs and wants.

Liv blames suburbia. Not the first writer to tackle the ennui of conventionality, rules, expectations, feelings of shallowness, emptiness. Mind-numbing for some, causing them to act crazy (see https://enchantedprose.com/the-hundred-waters/); for others the American Dream. It’s a friendly neighborhood, overly so for Liv. Gossipy, superficial, insufferable. Then again, what does she really know behind the facades?

Liv’s mid-life crisis is fired up when Marian surprises her with a far-out, utterly unique birthday gift. A cockamamie crystal ball, psychic fortune-teller that uses DNA testing to fly into the magical, mystical stratosphere, claiming clairvoyance. Would you even undergo genetics testing that tells you how much time you have left to do what you want and be who you want to be? Would you even take this test seriously? What if you did?

Intellectually, Liv knows the new age-y wellness clinic Marian takes her too is a fake; emotionally a different matter when it gets in her head obsessively.

Depending on a number of factors – life circumstances, challenges, desires, mindset – you may not empathize with Liv’s mental health crisis. Blessed with a loving spouse, a terrific boy, a good roof over her head, a genuine friend, and only a hop-on-the-train-ride into a city that’s a state-of-mind for creativity – so what’s the problem you might ask?

For one thing, Marian tells her she’s not fun anymore. Yeah, she has responsibilities now, and she’s a modern woman who wants more for herself. Maybe if she stopped making to-do lists, elevating her anxieties, always rushing around, always late, falling short, on edge she could find time for a room of her own? Maybe not an original idea, but the zany plot is.

I’ve chosen to give Liv some slack since the only thing she does spontaneously these days is curse in front of Tommy, negativity that’s not enchanted, since she knows it’s not good for Tommy and wants to stop. Each time she errs, he reminds her, melting our hearts, to drop some punishment money into her “curse jar.” Will she stop? Can she?

While it all starts with Liv’s birthday, actually it starts with everyone’s nemesis: Time. “Time. That’s the problem, Olivia says on the introductory page. “There’s never enough.” You never know what life brings. The use of humor and absurdity deflects from dealing with the most consequential issues in a purposeful life.

Brown captures what many of us may have been doing since the pandemic: taking stock of our lives.

“Middle age may be dislocating for some,” says an Australian professor, “but there’s little evidence it is a period of crisis and despondency.” That statement made in 2019, pre-pandemic. There’s plenty of evidence the pandemic has caused Americans to reevaluate their lives. For instance, many have quit their unsatisfying, poorly-paid, unappreciated jobs, or had or found remote jobs they don’t want to give up for the perks, such as freeing up time at home and avoiding long-commutes. Time magazine’s headline on how the pandemic “caused a widespread existential crisis,” echoes Liv’s angst. Different reason, similar questioning. 

The prose sparkles with humor and ridiculousness, and the ultimate question of how much time we have in life makes for addictive reading.

“The problem is no one knows . . . Maybe tomorrow. Or next year. Or in a hundred years. Or never. Well, not never. But it sometimes feels that way, doesn’t it? Never. Never me. Never you. Never us . . . We still have time. Time to put off. To try again . . . To apologize. To meet for coffee. To take someone’s breath away. To say I love you. To kiss good night. To whisper good morning.”

Birthdays are like New Year’s resolutions, offering “a brief sense of hope,” when “we tell ourselves this will be our year.” Let’s hope so. For us, and a world needing all the brightness and hope in 2024.

Here’s to making more time for reading in the New Year, Lorraine

A graceful writer embraces the grace of the natural world and all its living creatures, counteracting what’s lost and vanishing (Nashville, Tennessee; 2022, and past years): As soon as you read a few pages of Margaret Renkl’s new essay collection A Comfort of Crows, you’ll feel calmer. Call it literary therapy, a quieting mind-set, a potent self-help antidote needed for a world when so many are grieving, suffering, struggling.

A poet for fifteen years before she became an essayist, Renkl’s poetic prose shows us the enormous comfort she derives from Nature and all its wild creatures; some we don’t see, others we disregard or stay clear of. Through fifty-two mini-chapters, week-by-week, season-to-season over one year in her own backyard, these intimate reflections, meditations, enlightenment, part memoir, part naturalist, reveal how deeply Renkl has internalized her daily life to the rhythms of Nature, truly “straddling two worlds.”

When Renkl writes about “landscapes of enchantment,” she’s not writing about the Land of Enchantment – New Mexico – that inspired the title of this blog and the value placed on enchanted prose. Instead, she’s sharing her observations, engagement, and lamentations of what’s happening on her half-acre of land surrounding her home of thirty years in Nashville, Tennessee, expanding her “miniature ecosystem” to the rejuvenating walking trails nearby. Here is where she and her husband Haywood, a teacher, she a former one and volunteer teaching English to refugees, raised three boys, all grown up and living elsewhere. Here they also “buried five dogs,” and “let an unaccountable number of fallen leaves lie in a life shot through with leavings.”

The leavings are ingrained in the book’s soul. Some leavings are raw: her mother’s recent passing, her emptied out home, entering her sixties, all causing Renkl to reflect on the passage of time and what matters most in a life well-lived.

Crows, highly intelligent birds, are greatly admired for sticking together as families, mourning the loss of one of their own. The prose conveys wistful, nostalgic, sorrowful emotions that resonate as our lives have changed so much over the past years, including the devastation of climate change – if we’re paying attention. Renkl wants us to pay attention, though maybe not as acutely as she does.

That’s why a Mary Oliver poem – “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work” – is one of the epigraphs introducing this gorgeous book. Both the prose and the striking art accompanying each week created by her brother Billy, a fine arts “collage artist,” illustrator, and teacher.

Their sister-brother artistic relationship fascinates. This is the second time they’ve collaborated on a book. (See: https://milkweed.org/book/late-migrations.) The synergy gained by combining a sister’s poetic voice with a brother’s visual one deepens the reading experience.

Some collages are quite clear as to their earthly inspiration; others more mystical, conveying a celestial and spiritual reach-for-the stars impression. On Billy Renkl’s website you can see these images: https://billyrenkl.com/fine-art/the-comfort-of-crows/. Note how he explains the role of his artistic visions with the prose:

“The collages braid together three threads . . . the natural world as a source of curiosity . . . . astonishment and devotion, and as a model for understanding ourselves in relation to each other and the world.”

An artistic brother’s artworks are wondrously in sync with his sister’s prose, emotions, and spirit.

The harmony between sister-and-brother seems forged from the time they ran free in the woods where they grew up in Alabama. Those memories nurtured the author’s becoming, and gratitude for the wild world she repeatedly calls a “praise song.” The term can be viewed as biblical, secular, or existential in inspiring our purpose on Earth, expressing the beauty and fragility of all forms of life. Human and nonhuman.

An abundance of trees, plants, wildflowers, and wild species, seen and unseen, enchant the pages. Among them are tadpoles, butterflies, lightening bugs (when was the last time you saw those “flashes of brightness” light up the night? Renkl asks), crows, opossums, even the sighting of a bobcat!

The Author’s Note tells us that while the book’s subtitle limits the timeframe to one “backyard year,” Renkl has been penning thoughts over years. Makes sense, or how else could she punctuate so finely each week’s journal-like musings introduced by snippets of prose by so many contemporary authors and poets? A formidable task to have read all these books, finding the precise set of words to fit what she’s saying. Words from Claire Keegan on crows, Catherine Raven’s fox, Maggie Smith on animals, Camille T. Dungy’s soil, Ross Gay’s delights, Ann Patchett’s life in “constant revision,” Richard Powers on mourning what’s gone, for instance.

Renkl is extraordinarily attentive to all sorts of winged creatures. Some like hummingbirds and bluebirds she watches carefully from bird feeders hung in front of nearly every window of her house. The dangers of interfering with the natural world are discussed, but the food and shelter provided is reasoned by “natural systems aren’t natural anymore.”

Two bright purple flowers with alluring names – passionflower and beautyberries – and a hummingbird’s iridescent patch of feathers called a gorget that comes in a variety of colors including purple are examples of what’s in store to stir your senses:

Exuberance for Mother Nature is pure joy. The warmth exuded attributed to: “Age has given me an internal warmth.” But we know better. This is who the elegant writer is. You can pick that up in this video taken in Renkl’s backyard:

Renkl aims to infect us with the same love and gratitude for our natural environments and those we love. Hers has a higher purpose beyond observing and appreciating. She’s an eco-warrior, fighting to preserve what she can. She wants us to do that too, in our own backyards.

“More and more I ponder words like bounty and replete and enough. I think of what we are losing from the natural world and of what we will leave behind when we ourselves are lost. The trees. The stories. The people who love us and who know we love them, who will carry our love into the world after we are gone.”

When someone moves away from her neighborhood, Renkl is hit by the sound of heavy equipment tearing down their house, taking with it the fond memories she and her neighbor carry. Her quiet outrage is a yearning for people to stop building bigger, so contractors will stop knocking down trees and fauna, disturbing, destroying a piece of the natural world.

Eco-grief or ecological grief is a relatively new term describing the devastation climate change has wreaked on those who pay attention and care. An element of that winds through Renkl’s contemplations without sounding preachy. Her heartfelt sorrow is far from paralyzing. She’s dogged at finding, exalting, and contributing to preserving the beauty that still exists, or can with a little help, unfolding around her each season.

Margaret Renkl’s eloquence is a gift for all of us, elevating our passage through time. 

This post will likely be the last in 2023. Not by accident. I wrote it a little while ago, but decided to delay until December. Because it hit the pitch-perfect tone of balancing all the grief and sadness of the year with an uplifting way to carry on that comes from the heart.

Warm wishes over the holidays. With thanks for reading with me.
Lorraine

Love is sacrifice, sacred land life-affirming (Gunnison River Valley, Colorado; 1948—1970): Crying can soothe us. All the more reason to let Shelley Read take you on this absolutely beautiful and sad journey.

“There is a kind of sadness that transcends sadness, that runs like hot syrup into every crevice of your being . . . This is the sadness that changed everything.”

Sadness is the pathos, beauty the richness in Read’s standout historical novel Go as a River. Influenced by the teachings of two Buddhist monks, who inspired “her best life” and now she inspires ours.

The title is directly drawn from one of legendary Vietnamese mindfulness master and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh’s poetic quotes, calligraphy, and the calming song based on it. Its meaning from his spiritual The Story of a River: “Who speaks of a river as not flowing? A river does flow, yes. But she does not need to rush.” To embrace the beauty of life, love, the natural world you must also go through life’s adversities.

Tibetan monk Anam Thubten’s books hold titles that reflect themes that flow through the novel: Kindness for All Creatures, Choosing Compassion, Big Sky.

Earthbound and wilderness bound, there’s unforgettable scenes of selfless, unflinching, compassionate acts involving forbidden love and a beloved horse. Set in a place of stunning natural beauty, the big blue skies of Colorado in the Big Blue Wilderness, an “indescribable immensity,” flows through a terribly lonely, grieving, “blossoming” woman showing her she may not be as alone as she thought. 

This rugged landscape is in America’s Southwest. “A little nowhere Colorado town” in the Gunnison River Valley where Read has lived her entire life. She knows the forces of Nature here, just as she knows its beauty even after unspeakable losses. Read waited thirty years to craft this awesome novel, after teaching creative writing, literature, and environmental studies.

Iola was the name of the town. Was because the hands of man drowned the town, mirroring the young narrator Victoria’s tragic losses at the hands of one man. Whether the wilderness has the power to give her the strength she needs to save herself is the central question. Can she save herself?

Historically, Iola was erased in the late 1960s to create the Blue Mesa Dam and Reservoir to bring more water down from the mountains. The sadness Victoria endures aligns with the sadness of seeing her town disappear. Can you “hold onto something of this earth you care deeply about” to survive?

How’s this for the opening sentence of a prologue? “Imagine what lingers on the black bottom of a lake.” Followed by: “My home is at the bottom of a lake.” Decades later, due to severe drought, haunting remnants of the town have begun to emerge. Nature proving more powerful than man, symbolic to Read’s story.

Iola was “huddled against the foothills of the Big Blue wilderness on the south side and the towering Elk Mountains to the west and north” in 1948 when the story begins. This is the area where Read lives too, on what’s known as the Western Slope of the Elk Mountains. West of the Continental Divide. You’ll feel the love, blood, and soul of five generations of her Colorado ancestors embedded in the soulful prose and storyline.

Seventeen-year-old Torie begins her story, later shifting to her rightful name, Victoria, when she becomes a woman. She refers to herself as “patternless” because: “All on my own I figured out how to carry on without a mother.” At age twelve, her mother dies in an accident along with two relatives she was close to who also lived at their farmhouse. Forced to fend for herself when she’s left to live with three angry men who treat her like a “mere fixture,” expected to carry on her mother’s farm duties, cooking and toiling for a disengaged father, younger brother Seth, and the shell of an uncle post-WWII.

They’re second and third generation farmers, except for Seth no one ever knows where he is. They own an unlikely peach orchard – sweet and juicy seeds unearthed from Georgia – that Torie/Victoria says is the “one beautiful thing” in her life.

Early on, the reader is clued into “a fateful moment, I know in retrospect.” Several pages later warned: “It is often the smallest twist that alters our lives most profoundly.”

Swiftly moving, on line one of Chapter One Torie meets Wilson Moon walking on the opposite side of the street she is. When they lock eyes, they feel a deep attraction to each other. They end up walking together, not easy for a girl drilled on “proper” behavior. A small act of defiance against her no-nonsense/strict/religious mother’s rules that intensify when she hears Wil called a “filthy Injun.” Overwhelmed by the “bigotry,” the “cruelty of ignorance” towards the one person who gave her freedom “for the first time in her life.” He never said who he was, his tribe or reservation, nor why he wandered into the town. Her father initially thought he was Mexican. Being an American Indian, a far worse crime.

So much happens in this layered-upon-layered story in the telling that would be spoilers, but telling you he’s from the Ute tribe is telling Colorado history.

The young couple’s love-at-first-sight relationship leads to Torie wondering: “How does one live seventeen years without ever considering whether she is known”? A question that hangs heavy given the alarming loneliness crisis teenagers are experiencing in America. One in six, according to Newsweek, struggling with suicidal ideation. So what happens to Torie when faced with unbearable aloneness?

The will to live is mystifying. The “eternal cadence” of the wilderness and the “wonder of the world” are entry points. There’s so many passages of exquisite nature writing, such as witnessing “the total silence of a trotting fox, the perfect symmetry of a beaver lodge, how butterflies arrived like a toss of colorful confetti.” Understanding Nature as an “ancient intelligence far too rich and complex to fully grasp,” Read’s gift is imparting what’s she’s learned living in a spirited land.

As for the crying, you may find tears welling up in your eyes for at least the last 100 hundred pages. Until the last fifty, when they overflow. Until the last twenty, when you’re on the verge of sobbing.

A movie deal is in the works. When it makes it to the screen, keep tissues nearby. Although one wonders if anything can beat the prose.

Lorraine

Weaving magic into a staggering story of enslavement (North Carolina and New Orleans, West Africa spiritually; 1800s before the Civil War): Can literature set us free?

“Let us descend into the blind world” could have been penned by poetic, literary genius Jesmyn Ward. But it comes from Dante’s epic 14^th century poem, Inferno, inspiring the title and hellish journey depicted in Ward’s new historical novel, Let Us Descend. Of epic proportions.

An NPR story, Remembering New Orleans’ Overlooked Ties to Slavery, inspired the setting and ethos of 19th century slavery, centered at the virulent hotbed of America’s slave market in New Orleans.

“Grief and sorrow” are embedded into this deeply felt story told by a teenage narrator, Annis. It’s Ward’s grief and sorrow too. For her brother, ancestors, community, while composed in the rawness of tremendous personal loss: her husband suddenly died right before COVID had a public name. While millions were grieving too.

What happens when you’re hit with so many unbearable losses? Ward contemplated stopping writing. We’re grateful she found a way to pour her emotions into an intense story aimed at engendering empathy.

Ward’s intention isn’t to focus on historical details. Rather, on the history of a culture that dehumanized black people, women the focus, in every way possible.

We know that even before we open the pages. The exceptionally moving book cover isn’t the typical image. Let Us Descend rightfully draws from Ward’s affecting words, printed like a poem, excerpted from an interview with former President Barack Obama in Vanity Fair. On the front cover, Ward beckons us:

      “Sit with me.

            Let me tell you a story . . .

          It feels as if I have been in the dark,

      journeying with this character,

                                            for a long time.

“It is difficult to walk south with Annis.

      Her narrative descends from one

hellscape to another,

            but I promise that if you come

      with me, you will rise.

                      It will be worth the work,

               worth the walking.”

Those words depict how the words inside move us.

Quoted on the back cover is Ward’s writerly purpose: to “get readers to feel with and feel for the people I’m writing about.” The former president understood what she was after: “The power of empathy . . . that we need to “see somebody’s backstory” or else “we end up reinforcing our prejudices, our biases, our fears.”

Let Us Descend is powerful, but can it change deep-rooted hatred? Can any book, or volumes of books, have that kind of power?

Ward is one of those exceptional writers who can take us further than we’ve been. Far deeper into darkness, far longer than we care to go. If you’ve read any of her work, such as her 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing, recognized for the second time for the National Book Award, you still remember those ghosts of Mississippi and trust she’ll lead us into the light. Don’t expect that, though, to happen soon. To tell truths based on history she can’t. 

The otherworldly spirits in this novel expand to many more. They stretch us.

These spirits are a way of transcending being “owned” and “bound” to earth’s inhumanity, to be unbound by a spiritual world. But not all the spirits are good. Some are evil. Annis must learn to tell the difference. How do you when they set traps? How do we learn whom to trust?

When life on earth descends so brutally, when Annis descends alone from the Upper South to the Deep South, the spirits arrive. Historically, this movement reflects what happened after 1808 when America banned bringing anymore slaves into our country, like Annis’ grandmother Aza who came over from West Africa. Aza was one of hundreds of thousands of slaves raped on our shores. Aza’s Mama is the product of that violence. Annis, from the rape of her Mama.

Aza’s true spirit stands out from the rest. She’s the one Annis and her Mama trust seeking to protect. She’s the kind of fighting spirit that strengthens them both. Annis’ mother is called a “warrior,” teaching Annis some of the fundamentals of how to fight, or not – “a part of fighting too” – when they find fleeting moments to flee into the woods.

The other spirits that flow through this extraordinarily soulful novel appear when Annis is desperate to free herself from the “unbearable same.” These spirits have many symbolic meanings – biblical, mythological, cultural, psychological, literary. Some are named like the Wind Spirit, Water, Those Who Foretell, Those Who Take and Give, She Who Remembers. Some we understand, others we guess at.

Opening when Annis and her Mama are slaves on a rice plantation in North Carolina. They don’t call the plantation owner master. He’s only the “sire” – sired like animals. Ward shows us she’s a master of finding words that tug at our hearts. Reaching down to find the right word that calls out penetrating, harsh truths.

On earth, Annis’ story becomes more hellish, taking her on a long, burning, rope-chained walk. The walk she imagines Annis taking. The walk her Mama likely took. It winds south through the sweltering heat, drowning rivers, dark infested swamps from the North Carolina plantation to a Louisiana sugarcane one. In front and back of Annis, tied to a rope that “eats” at her skin, are women she doesn’t know, nor want to. It’s on this harrowing, death-defying walk that Annis learns “what it means to be alone.” “To know only grief in this new world.”

We can wish all we want for only the benevolent spirits to descend onto Annis’ starved life. Starving for tenderness and touch, from brutality and literally a paucity of food. But that wouldn’t be telling hard truths either.

Annis surpasses any humane concept of vulnerability. Yet there’s something about her that also surpasses our concept of resilience.

Hers is a life that, “ain’t living.” “Everywhere, hot knives of pain. When: “There is no one to carry us back.” That’s told: “Tell them who you are. You more than laying on your back.”

Annis, though, tells herself: “I tried to remember that I still had plenty inside he couldn’t take.” And also told be a wise plantation cook: “Most people can’t see all the layers in a person, just like they can’t taste all that goes into a pot.” “You got to know the taste of what heals you.”

Ward’s prose sears and soars. By the time we understand to “fight for it all” also means know what you’re fighting for, we feel the weight of lost love and kindness. Memories can though, eventually, be a propelling force.

But to rise you must first descend. Count on these “farseeing women” to help us ascend.

Lorraine