Jesmyn Ward’s LET US DESCEND takes readers on a grueling journey through the eyes of a young enslaved woman

Let Us Descend

By Jesmyn Ward

Scribner: October 24, 2023

$28.00, 320 pages

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” — Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend offers readers a view into slavery that is so intimate and grueling, it is almost claustrophobic. Like Dante’s Inferno, from which it borrows its title, Let Us Descend takes us into Hell.

Jesmyn Ward puts us in the mind and body of Annis, a young enslaved woman who is separated from her mother when their enslaver/rapist sells her mother to punish both her and Annis. Before long, Annis is also sold to Georgia Man, who marches her and a group of other slaves from a rice plantation in South Carolina to a New Orleans slave market (the same march her mother would have taken).

The journey is a physical and spiritual trial for Annis, who is visited by the spirit of her grandmother Aza, a Dahomey warrior. Ward depicts the sustaining role that the spirits of enslaved people’s ancestors played in helping them survive and find some kind of solace. Tender moments of love and friendship also add touches of light to the long, dark night of Annis’s life. In time, Annis learns to cope with her losses the only way she can, with her mind and soul, the only things over which she has some control.

Let Us Descend is distinguished by Ward’s remarkable use of language. I highlighted sentences and passages until my highlighter ran dry. If ever a book begged to be read aloud (or listened to), it is Let Us Descend. One example should suffice to demonstrate the powerful imagery of Ward’s prose-poetry.

As they enter New Orleans, Annis is warily observant of the place that she knows will determine the next chapter in her life.

“People crowd the streets. White men wearing floppy hats coax horses down rutted roads turned to shell-lined avenues. White women with their heads covered usher children below awnings and through tall, ornate doorways. And everywhere, us stolen. Some in ropes and chains. Some walking in clusters together, sacks on their backs or on their heads. Some stand in lines at the edge of the road, all dressed in the same clothing: long, dark dresses and white aprons, and dark suits and hats for the men, but I know they are bound by the white men, accented with gold and guns, who watch them. I know they are bound by the way they stand all in a row, not talking to one another, fresh cuts marking their hands and necks. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over some invisible horizon into their ruin.” (italics mine)

In one paragraph, Ward captures the essence of being bound by slavery, still as chained as the slaves being marched into town, with the future holding nothing but pain and ruin.

Annis is eventually sold to an older woman who runs the family sugar plantation while her husband is away, working in New Orleans. The spirit of Aza had told Annis that her fate was bound up with the woman who would buy her. I will leave it at that in order not to share any spoilers.

While I have some quibbles with the pacing and occasional heavy-handed use of Ward’s three main metaphors, Let Us Descend is a riveting, powerful, and necessary read.