After the storms...

I recently finished reading "Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward. This book was a fascinating and saddening read. Now that I am finished, I'm not sure if I would say I liked reading it, but I will say that I think it is a good book. Some stories are like that for me; I do not like reading them, but I am glad to have read them.

Ward's book follows the main character, Esche, through the twelve days lead up, into and after hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005. Despite its quite recent setting and events, I was amazed at how many times as I was reading about Esche's days I felt like she lived in the 1950s. Growing up without a mother or any sense of what sexuality is or can be, Esche's life is consumed by the men she is surrounded by: her alcoholic father, her three brothers and a slew of her brother's friends. She reads Greek mythology and idealizes Medea as she struggles with sex, power and looming motherhood as a child. She watches her brother, Skeeter, as he cares for his fighting dog and her litter of young pups and ponders the issues surrounding nurturing and especially what happens when we do not get it.

This story was unsettling to me because it left me feeling worried for all the people that humanity continues to leave behind. We cast them as backwards, ignorant, rednecks. It is fine to seek an end to ignorance, as much as it is possible, but we have to start seeing it as a symptom of an imperfect system. This divide where we see our "educated" selves as above, or at the least pitying, those uniformed beneath us has to end. Humanity has an amazing capacity for knowledge, but those who have lacked opportunity to grow in curiosity are still human.

I think Ward does a beautiful job of showing the logic that a young girl is forced to make out of a senseless world. Esche stretches her curiosity, but without the facts and the nurturing she needs within reach, she comes to conclusions and makes decisions that set her on a course to single, young motherhood. Curiosity is not enough--the storm makes landfall and reveals Esche's pregnancy. The reality is that her mother is dead, Medea is a myth and Esche lives at the whim of storms that cannot be calmed by her longing for knowledge.