Jesmyn Ward: Can a Divided Nation Find Hope?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, storytelling is a powerful tool for connection and for preserving the memories of our loved ones. That is particularly true for two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, who has found solace in storytelling after her grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s. She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss her latest collection of essays and how her writing has helped restore her hope after despair.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Jesmyn Ward, welcome to the show.

 

JESMYN WARD: It’s good to be here.

 

ISAACSON: The first chapter of your book ends with the six magic words, I think, of any writer, which is, “let me tell you a story.” And that’s the theme of the book, is the power of storytelling. Tell me why you find storytelling so important.

 

WARD: Well, I think, you know, I think back to I don’t know, to when I was growing up I come from a really big family in rural Mississippi. A huge extended family. And when we gathered, we, you know, celebrated and ate and drank. But also the older people in my family told stories. And so I grew up around storytellers. I grew up hearing stories of my grandparents, my great-grandparents. So I don’t know. I feel like storytelling has always been really important to how I understand myself and to how I understand my community and my family and the people around me.

 

ISAACSON: Well, let me focus on the great storyteller in your book, which is your grandmother. And she told stories that had a moral purpose to them as well. Just tell me about her. Tell me about sitting on her lap.

 

WARD: Yeah. So when I speak about my grandmother, I’m speaking about my maternal grandmother, my mom’s mom. And I grew up with her. I mean, she was a second you know – well, not really a second, I guess, a third parental figure for me. I grew up in her household because me and my nuclear family had to live with her for a number of years. When she told stories, she was always, it was always important to her that she was telling the whole story, right? Telling the good with the bad. You know, she was – and her stories, they always, there was a serious weight at the center of them, but at the same time that there was a serious weight at the center of them, they were also, her stories were also funny. You know, they were also full of love and joy and connection. And you know, she did not have an easy life. You know, she did not complete high school. She never graduated. She earned her GED She worked really hard throughout her life, you know, as a housekeeper and later as a factory worker. But she embraced life.

 

ISAACSON: Let me quote her from the way you quote her in this book of essays, which is you say, “my Dorothy was the first storyteller of my life. One of the most important lessons she taught me about life and story was this: Tell it straight, tell it all.” And that what this book of essays has, and your fiction, your novels have it, which is you don’t sort of sugarcoat things. And yet there’s a core of hope and optimism that comes through. 

 

WARD: Yeah. I mean, there are two reasons for that. The first reason is because writing, you know, in that way is, I’m being honest right? About what I see in my family, in my extended family, and in my community, right? And then the second reason you know, that I, that it’s important to me, to be honest in my work in that way, is because I feel like, you know, the people who came before me, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents you know, all the, all the people who you know, who lived in this place and who made me what I am today, they live, they always, they live their lives that way, right? They embrace the truth of their lives. And, and at the same time, they never lost a sense of hope. They held that close to them. And that’s, I think that’s what made it possible for them to thrive and not just survive their lives.

 

ISAACSON: Yeah. And you talk about survive. And once again, the last sentence of your book repeats the theme. You say you tell stories, you tell your, “you tell their stories, you tell your story, you survive.” And so how important is it to the survival that we become a species of storytellers?

 

WARD: I mean, I think it’s essential because storytelling enables us, I think, to connect the dots in our lives to career sense of meaning in our lives. You know, we all, we also use storytelling to connect to others, and that’s really important too.

 

ISAACSON: One of the sad things I notice in the book is that she develops Alzheimer’s. What do you learn from that when she can no longer remember the stories?

 

WARD: It’s heartbreaking, really. You know, she was a storyteller. You know, my grandmother was, she had so much knowledge, I think of my family and of my community, and of our history. And so when she began to lose her stories, she lost an important part of herself, I think. And, you know, because she is the, she is, because she was the first storyteller of my life, because she helped me to learn to see the world through stories and through connections. It was heartbreaking, I think, you know, for me to witness her losing those stories and losing. And losing –

 

ISAACSON: But you feel you’re carrying on her work?

 

WARD: I hope so. I hope so. You know, she was an exceptional, you know, storyteller, like in person, an oral storyteller. You know, I practice in a different medium. But I don’t know. I hope that I’m carrying on her legacy and that I’m making her proud.

 

ISAACSON: One of the complexities of race you talk about in the book is when your grandmother, Dorothy goes to visit her white auntie. Tell me about that.

 

WARD: Yeah, that’s one of the earliest stories that my grandmother told me. You know, as I said, like she was very intent on telling you the whole truth. But that was one of the earliest stories that she told me. So, you know, this is a – my family is mixed, I guess. And so she would visit her white I guess her grand aunt. So it was her grandmother’s sister who was white and her grandmother, right, was white. And they actually lived up in the Kiln in Mississippi, and you know, which is, you know, right next to De Lisle, just sort of north. And they would visit during the daytime, right? And you know, her grandmother, her white grandmother would go and then her dad, and then all the kids would sort of pile in the car. But when Sunset approached her aunt would say, okay, it’s time for y’all to go. You know, like…

 

ISAACSON: And that’s ’cause the Kiln was a white community, and De Lisle was a black community, even though they were abutting each other.

 

WARD: Yeah. And so there was, there, I mean, that she was concerned for their safety, right? If they were there after, if they were there during the night. And so they would pile back into the car. But, you know, my grandmother was a brown-skinned woman, you know, and all of her siblings, they were, you know, varying shades of, of, of brown. Like, you could tell that they were mixed. And so they would have to hide in the trunk of the car. And she would always tell me, she’d always say, you know, we, we called it the boot. You know, so we would all have to climb into the trunk of the car, and they would close the boot. And that’s how we would ride back, even though the sun hadn’t even set yet. But that’s how they would ride back from the Kiln to De Lisle. And my, you know, her grandmother would sit in front and then her father, who was so light skinned that he could pass for white if need be, they would sit in the front.

 

ISAACSON: This great book, which I loved is called “On Witness and Respair,” and I know a whole lot of words, but I didn’t know the word respair. Tell me about it.

 

WARD: I’m sad that I can’t actually remember the name of the poet who taught me this word. It was a poet that I followed. And in 2020, they made a number of posts about how they were thinking about the word respair and holding that word close to them. And when I read it, I thought, well, I don’t even know what respair means. And then they explained what it means, and that it means to find hope after despair. 

 

And it’s, you know, I think I lit up, you know, like now, when I read it, because I thought, oh, it’s a real shame that we’ve lost that word, and that we don’t have that word. Because now that I know it, it feels like an essential concept and an essential idea. And so I made note of it, right? And so then when I was working on the essay about my partner, my spouse who died in early 2020, I thought, this is a perfect word to share, you know, in this essay. 

 

ISAACSON: When you were young in the library in Mississippi, there was a map of Mississippi writers, and it had – black and white – it had Richard Wright, it had Eudora Welty, of course, and then Faulkner, now you’re on the map in De Lisle. But you started reading these people. 

 

Let me start, if I can, with Faulkner, ’cause I’ve got an odd theory about your book, which you may push back on, which is De Lisle – and all your novels are in this town – it’s sort of like your Yoknapatawpha County is to Faulkner. And it’s all about storytelling. You have Quentin in “Absalom, Absalom!” sitting at Aunt Rose’s feet listening to the storytelling of it. How much do you think you’re similar, and how much do you think you’re different from Faulkner? Because you both write about race in these tiny communities.

 

WARD: I mean, I think that I definitely sort of modeled this idea of writing about a community, writing about a town and also fictionalizing, basically, my hometown in my, this area along the Gulf Coast, because I read Faulkner and because I saw what he did in his work. And how he made that place seem alive and complicated and real. Right? And so yeah, so I think I definitely modeled my fiction after his. You know, there’s this sense of atmosphere in his work that I think that I also try to, I don’t know, translate into my own work.

 

ISAACSON: Well, let me take the black writer that you loved too growing up, which is Richard Wright, and yet you say something of him that’s odd. You say he writes with rancor. Did that bother you?

 

WARD: Well, because I think – it did bother me. And at the time, I didn’t think that, I don’t think that I could have articulated it, but you know, as I’ve sort of grown and developed as a writer and I think about his, you know, I thought about his earlier work. I think that, let’s see, the harshness, right? Like the harsh nature of his growing up in Mississippi, like that was always crystal clear in his work, right? And really vivid and well developed. But I was looking, I think, for something more. I wanted to understand, to better understand how he survived Mississippi. Because I felt like, I don’t know, at least for me, family and community are at the heart of that right? Of surviving and thriving, right? In spite of –

 

ISAACSON: But he doesn’t exactly survive because he leaves. And I think you kind blame him for leaving and you come home.

 

WARD: I do.

 

ISAACSON: Let me leap to that. Why did you come home?

 

WARD: You know,I wouldn’t say, I don’t say that I – I don’t think that I blame him for leaving Mississippi because I understand. I fled, you know, when I graduated. As soon as I got the opportunity to get out of Mississippi, I left. And I spent much of my young adulthood, you know, into my thirties, you know, for, I don’t know, 15, 16, 17 years living in other places. But then I returned as an adult. You know, I answer this question often. I usually say that the reason that I returned is because at the same time that I – there’s some things that I just, that I loathe about this place. I also love this place. I love –

 

ISAACSON: Tortured love, I think is your phrase. Right?

 

WARD: Right, right. I love the landscape. I love the beauty of the place. I love the people, right? My family is here. I have a huge extended family. Just on my mom’s mom’s side, my maternal grandmother’s side, there are over 200 of us on that side of my family. And so I have a huge extended family. I have, you know, a community, a really supportive community. And and it, I think it’s, it’s hard to resist the lure of those. And also, you know, this is a place that inspires me, right? This is a place that informs my work. And so I think I wanted to figure out whether or not I could live and work here as an adult. And so far, I’m doing it.

 

ISAACSON: Your novels, all of them – even “Salvage the  Bones” – ends, I think, with hopeful notes. Is that right? And why?

 

WARD: I think so. I think all my work ends, there’s an element of hope, I think, in all of my work. Part of the reason that I think that that is true, and perhaps the most essential reason is because, as I said, like I look at my grandmother’s life, I look at my great grandparents’ life, you know, when I was growing up when I was a kid, several of my great grandparents were still alive, right? And so I, you know, look at their lives and they, without some sense of hope, you know, without some sense of hope that they could sort of live their way to a better tomorrow and they could help sort of create a better tomorrow, you know, I don’t think that they would have I don’t think that they would have survived, you know, Mississippi in the twenties and thirties and forties and fifties. So I don’t know. So I think that you know, I try to honor that in my creative nonfiction, but in my fiction as well.

 

ISAACSON: We’re about to have our 250th birthday as a nation, its a time of a lot of despair and a lot of discord. What lessons from poor black community in Mississippi do you have for the nation?

 

WARD: Well, I think we have to follow my grandmother Dorothy’s lead, right? I think that we have to tell the whole story, tell the whole truth, you know, even if it makes us uncomfortable, we have to reckon and we have to witness with it all. Because that’s how we get, I think, to a fuller understanding of who we are and of what we can become. And I think that’s how we also still hold onto a sense of hope especially right now, I think in a moment that for many of us, especially those of us from my neck of the woods, that can feel rather hopeless.

 

ISAACSON: Jesmyn Ward, thank you so much for joining us.

 

WARD: Thank you.