Jesmyn Ward Quotes

When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.

I know Jojo is innocent because I can read it in the unmarked swell of him: his smooth face, ripe with baby fat; his round, full stomach; his hands and feet soft as younger sister's. He looks even younger when he falls asleep. His baby sister has flung across him, and both of them slumber like young feral cats: open mouths, splayed arms and legs, exposed throats. When I was thirteen, I knew much more than him. I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin. I knew that leather could split flesh like butter. I knew that hunger could hurt, could scoop me hollow as a gourd, and that seeing my siblings starving could hollow out a different part of me, too. Could make my heart ricochet through my chest desperately.

Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there's nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama's feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.

Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.

But I am not that eloquent, so I shut my mouth and smile.

We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.

And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain't going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.

What's done in the dark always comes to the light.

Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother's hands. How unfair it all seemed.

The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I'd seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That's not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That's how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.

Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I've seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I'm already home.

Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y'all one and it beats like your heart.

And I get up because it is the only thing I can do.

The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.

And then she would put her hand over the bird's face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.

I hope I fed you enough. While I'm here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.' I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. 'Maybe that ain't a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.

Speaking specifically about the memoir, I know that's a criticism that people can have about my work. When I look at the young men's lives, if they're reduced to the worst thing they've done, then it's easy for them to become a stereotype. I keep running into that with newspaper articles that are very short.

The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground.

Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight?

A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws, and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama's election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger. It

In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.

When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of your family and they become the symbols of your family life, and your unit out in the world. In that moment I wanted to allude to the fact that the way my parents' relationship was falling apart was impacting me and my brother, my parents, but also our symbols.

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven

To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.

I didn't understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?

The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.

Home ain't always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone, ain't nothin' but a field and some woods but even if the house was still there - it ain't about that. I don't know. Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y'all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.

It's like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone. 'It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.' Like my marrow could carry a bruise.

I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. That was foremost in my head when I was writing Salvage: I wanted every gesture, every little movement, to really carry meaning and communicate meaning to the reader. I was very conscious of that when I was writing.

They've talked about this: I can tell by the way Maggie said his name, the way a woman says the name of a man that she has long lived with, long loved. The way she says his name is enough.

Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn't dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.

When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.

The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.

After, Mam,' I say. 'What happens when you pass away?"
I couldn't bear her being a ghost. Couldn't take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Couldn't take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck.
'It's like walking through a door, Jojo.'
'But you won't be no ghost, huh, Mam?' I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. Even though I feel like speaking's bringing her leaving closer. Death, a great mouth set to swallow.
'Can't say for sure. But I don't think so. I think that only happens when the dying's bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it's so awful even God can't bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.' She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down. 'That ain't my way.'
'That don't mean I won't be here, Jojo. I'll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that's gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop's mama and daddy.'
'How?'
'Because we don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.' Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. 'My son.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.

We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

It is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.

I wanted to be my own heroine.

I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively making these decisions when I'm writing. I wanted to communicate in the book that on one hand, being at home - both in our homes and in DeLisle - gives us a sense of belonging and family and safety, but at the same time, being in those places makes us less safe.

I didn't want them to look at me after saying something about Black people, didn't want to have to avert my eyes so they didn't see me studying them, studying the entitlement they wore like another piece of clothing.

I'm still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say: Here I am, brother. I'm here.

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

When I was twelve years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a coating of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this forested a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity , enable her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the residence to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: This how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human begins sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is a how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what it is, and to make something of it.

Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren't at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered differences between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ.

they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other's light.

Junior, stop being orner." It's what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like 'horny'. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: 'ornery'. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: 'tetrified' when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. 'Belove' when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. 'Freegid' when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm.

I burn, and I hope.

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, "Why not?" It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

But my father could be dark too. He was attracted to violence, to the basic beauty of fighting, the way it turned his body and those he fought into meticulously constructed machines.

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

Some scientists for BP said this didn't have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once ... And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals.

The act of reading outside of your experience increases empathy. It broadens our understanding of humanity and our ideas about who we are and about what we can be.

She bought me betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she'd been out all weekend. I hadn't seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn't come back. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corners of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. I imagined even then that one day I could lean over his bowl, and instead of crunching, little words would pop out the bubbles that fizzed up to the surface. Big face. Light. And love. But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until old day she said: Give him sold old bread. I figured he couldn't crunch like needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his

Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.

Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.

If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles.

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence.
She will know that I am a mother.

I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.

Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table at a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn't stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at the table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it.

I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.

The air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us.

I like to think I know what death is.

This baby got plenty of daddies. - Esch

It felt like an indulgence. Going back was painful, but, at the same time, it was nice to live with them again for a few pages. I got to live with my brother again for the entire book. Of course as I'm writing the book, I'm getting closer and closer to the end and I know what that means. I knew exactly where I was heading. It was really difficult, but it was nice to make them come alive for those scenes. It was good.

Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling.We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won't be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.

In Jamaica, I felt once again as if the only identity that mattered was my own, not the constricted one that others had constructed for me. I strolled into my better self. I said, along with Kierkegaard, "I have walked myself into my best thoughts." (Garnette Cadogan in "Black and Blue")

What I didn't understand then was that the same pressure were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from the lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, within and without. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.