JESMYN WARD
In conversation with William Jelani Cobb and Khalil Gibran Muhammad
September 30, 2013
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. This is fantastic. Good evening. Very, very responsive crowd. This is marvelous. My name is Paul Holdengräber; I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. You’ve heard me say this a hundred times. My goal here at the Library is simply to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. (laughter) I hope you have had a moment to review our fall season, which ends on December 12 with Toni Morrison and Junot Díaz, preceded amongst others by Alice Waters and Kermit Lynch in mid-November, Nico Muhly and Ira Glass in the middle of October and next week a conversation with virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget and most recently Who Owns Culture? Come here to hear him next Thursday, October 10.
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Tonight I will break my usual way of introducing the various guests I invite. I invite the guests who come here to provide me with a biography in seven words. But I want to tell you a little bit more about them. Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She’s currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. She’s the author of Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, for which she won the 2011 National Book Award and was honored with the American Library Association Alex Award. Salvage the Bones was also a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize as well as a nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
William Jelani Cobb is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of several books including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, The Devil and Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. He’s a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and other publications.
My colleague Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. His book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America won the 2011 John Hope Franklin best book award in American Studies.
Now what you’ve been waiting for, the seven words. I ask my guests to provide me with seven words which will define them, seven words which are a haiku of sorts or, if you want to be very modern, a tweet. William Jelani Cobb: “Queens born, Howard educated, father of one.” “Queens born, Howard educated, father of one.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad: “I do history to teach and inspire.”
Just about a year and a half ago I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jesmyn Ward here on May 1, 2012, in this very room. We spoke about Salvage the Bones. I asked her back then also for her seven words, and they were an incredibly moving seven words, so I will read both the seven words she provided me today and the seven words she provided me a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, she wrote, “Born red, she fought from the beginning.” When I asked her about this, her seven words back then, she said, so “Born red, she fought from the beginning”—this is what Jesmyn Ward said:
“The reason I wrote that is because it’s supposed to be a biography in brief, in seven words, then that’s the way that I think about myself, that’s how I think of my story, that is my story. And here’s why: because I was born prematurely, I was actually born at six months instead of nine months, and when I was born I weighed two pounds and four ounces. And of course because I was that premature I was red all over, then I developed these blood tumors and later healed, but I had blood tumors too. So when I was born, of course—this is back in 1977—the doctors told my parents that I was going to die, first, and then when I didn’t die, then they said, evidently I had a strong heart and strong lungs, I guess.
“And when I didn’t die, they said she’s going to be affected mentally by this. They didn’t think that I had my full mental capabilities. I then grew up and I did well in school and everything that they predicted for me wasn’t the case, but when I think about that, when I think about the fact that they all predicted that I was going to die, I think about the fact that I was born so small in 1977 that I basically fought to live from the very beginning, and that’s how I define myself, because I feel I’m always fighting against people’s expectations of me and of what I’m going to do, but it is good to know that when the doctors told my parents, that my dad became very angry and he said, ‘I knew you weren’t going to die and I knew that you were a fighter.’”
Jesmyn’s seven words tonight are: “The wolf stalks; she shines the light.” Take it away, Khalil and Jelani, and a warm welcome back to Jesmyn in your fight.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Good evening, everyone. This is great, thank you so much, both of you, I feel like although this is the Holdengräber Show, as a member of the Library I feel like I should officially welcome our guests, even though Paul has done such a magnificent job so far, so welcome to the New York Public Library.
JESMYN WARD: Thank you.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So I’ll start with I think a question that picks up on those seven words. Where did the wolf metaphor begin?
JESMYN WARD: The wolf metaphor was born when I read, because basically there’s a historical plaque when you cross the bayou into DeLisle, it’s, you know, sort of sitting there right on the edge of DeLisle and on that plaque it says that before DeLisle was called DeLisle it was called Wolftown and so and the first time I read this I was confused, because I never thought that were are—I mean, there aren’t any wolves in South Mississippi that I know of, right, so I was wondering where that came from, and then when I sort of got to the point where I committed to writing this book and I was thinking about the young men that I knew that died and sort of the—you know, all the darknesses that bear down on us, you know, in my community, the wolf, you know, that image popped into my head and suddenly, you know, the wolf became I guess a symbol of all of those things, and so I decided to sort of use it in the book.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: This is a story that many of you will learn once you’ve read it or already know, it’s very much about place, it’s very much about the rural South, it’s very much about Mississippi, both a universal story capturing time in this country, the time that black people have spent here, as well as a very particular story, and knowing Jelani very well as a friend and as a colleague I wonder if there’s a way in thinking about this wolf that can’t cross the Mason/Dixon line; is this predator unique to this place? Is it more than just the name of the town? Can it be a northern wolf? Are there other species of this predator? And I invite Jelani to join in that conversation.
WILLIAM JELANI COBB: I mean, one of the things that I thought was, as a historian, one of the things that I thought was most impressive about the book is that it is a deeply historical book, even as the time frame is twelve years, thirteen years ago, up to what nine years ago and so it melds kind of the past as part of the living present in a way that as a historian I’m envious of, because in some ways we take the easy route because we go all the way backward and then the implications of the past are left for the reader to imply, but I thought that your book was really kind of audacious in the sense that history was always there, it was just beneath, you know, the skin, like, you know, the veins and you can see and I thought that that was really compelling.
But the other thing I thought to the question that Khalil raised was that there were these dynamics that I found myself relating to having spent virtually no time in Mississippi, having grown up in Queens, New York, and then spent time in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, and I found those dynamics as being very familiar to me. And there's one thing that I wanted to point out, we saw about a week ago, a week and a half ago, a case where there was a young man named Jonathan Ferrell, who was in a car accident in North Carolina and he apparently was disoriented, went to a woman’s door, knocked on her door seeking help, a white woman opened the door, became alarmed, because he is a large African American man, a former football player at FAMU, Florida A & M University, and slammed the door, called the police, the police responded, and this culminated in him being shot to death even though he’d been in this accident, he was seeking assistance. Now, that’s terrible.
But what makes it horrifying is that that week I was teaching about lynching in my class at the University of Connecticut and I came across the story of a man by the name of Reuben Stacey, who was in Florida in 1935, was a homeless man was going door to door asking people if they had leftovers or food that they wouldn’t mind sharing with him. He knocked on the door of a white woman’s home, she saw him, became alarmed, yelled for help, a mob of white men gathered around and lynched him, and so that idea of the past having its grip on the present, I mean, as historians we grapple with that all the time. I really appreciate the way that you were able to explore that in the contemporary sense and still have these implications that we could all relate to even outside of that place.
JESMYN WARD: I mean, I don’t think that that wolf is just a southern wolf at all. I think that that wolf, you know, stalks the entire United States of America. You know, I think about cases like Oscar Grant’s, to me I see that wolf everywhere and I think that—I mean that’s part of what I wanted to do when I wrote the book, is like I wanted to make my characters real enough and authentic enough and sympathetic enough that people, you know, across the United States, when they read the book, would empathize with them, right, but then also, you know, see them as human beings and then also see that, you know, the kind of pressures that these young men face and that young black people face and that black people face period, that these pressures just aren’t isolated in the South. You know, the history just doesn’t bear down on the present in the South, that it—that this happens throughout America. Because I think it’s something that we forget. You know, it’s something—I think that the narrative that we encounter often in America is that everything is new and the playing field is level and, you know, we’re living in postracial America, and that is not the case.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: The book is incredibly moving and it moves powerfully from the tragic story of people who Jesmyn grew up with who she loved dearly, friends and family alike, and their names frame the chapters as they move from a more recent present to a more distant past. You say something, there’s a moment in the book where you talk about your earlier work, your work of fiction, and you describe yourself, and you just made reference to it as being unwilling to wrestle with some of the messiness of the real people whose lives become the characters in Salvage the Bones and Where the Line Bleeds. But here you say you became an Old Testament God, that you found the courage to tell those stories. Tell us a little bit about the transition from fiction to memoir, that transition from New Testament to Old Testament, Jesmyn.
JESMYN WARD: Yeah, you know, I—in my first novel I didn’t realize that I was doing that while I was writing it, right, that I was sparing my characters in a way. I knew that I loved my characters, and I think one of the reasons that I loved my, the two main male characters in that book so much is because I was writing toward my brother, they reminded me of my brother. My brother had—at that point had just died three or four years, you know, previous to me beginning that book and so I really identified my brother with those characters and so, of course, I couldn’t let the story—I couldn’t allow the story to take on its own life right and to live and to breathe, because if I would had done that, then bad things would probably have happened to my characters. And so I had the narrative in a chokehold and it just—it couldn’t live.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And life was still happening, that’s what’s so stirring about this.
JESMYN WARD: That’s when my friends were dying, right, and my cousin was dying. And so I, you know, I guess I was encountering so much tragedy in my real life that the last thing I wanted to do was wrestle with it in my fiction, right? But because I was loath to do that, that meant that I was cheating and I wasn’t telling the truth, and so I understood that, that that was the case, when I began Salvage. You know, I understood, I had failed in a way when I wrote my first novel and so when I wrote Salvage the Bones it was very important to me to tell more of the truth, and I did, but none of the stories that I have told, they haven’t been as like searingly honest and as frank as the stories I tell in Men We Reaped.