“Let Us Descend” Author Jesmyn Ward Explains the Spirits in the Book
It’s hard to believe, but Jesmyn Ward didn’t grow up with many books in her home. She lived, for many years, with her maternal grandmother, in a house with four bedrooms, 12 or more extended family members, and one big hardcover Bible. As she flipped through the colorful pages as a young child, the second line in Genesis caught her attention—a wind from God swept over the face of the waters—and kept it for decades to come. This line, which came right before God declared, “Let there be light,” perplexed Ward.
“I remember being a kid and wondering, Wait, what’s the water?” she explains, “because God was supposed to come before everything.” The beauty of the image captured the young writer’s imagination, and the mystery at its center captured her mind. “I just had questions.”
As she got older, the spiritual curiosity those questions sowed grew deeper roots. She eventually realized that Catholicism “just didn’t fit for me.” But when her brother was killed in a hit-and-run in 2000, she realized that atheism didn’t fit, either. She could not imagine that he was entirely gone, in body as well as spirit. She decided to pursue her dream of becoming an author, she says, “to honor the time that I have that my brother never had,” feeling that writing “could make my life worth living, even though he’s not in it.”
But writing served an additional purpose in her grief. “I think, in the back of my head, I was thinking about spirituality, and I was thinking about how I could, at least in my fictional worlds, construct some sort of spiritual reality that makes sense,” she says.
In Let Us Descend, her fourth novel and Oprah’s 103rd Book Club pick, Ward did just that. The book imagines a new spiritual order, one capable of holding the complexities of the author’s own experiences, her characters’ history, and the Southern landscape they all exist within. “I think this is something I had been working my way toward my whole life,” Ward says.
Let Us Descend tells the story of a young enslaved girl, Annis, as she is sold deeper into the antebellum South. The world she exists within is riddled with physical violence, but it is also “sopping with spirit”; rivers speak, storms have human faces, and the trauma of the slave market is embodied, appearing as with flaming hair and “etching the names of the enslaved on the scroll of her skin.”
For the first six months she was writing the book, Ward did not include this supernatural plane, rooting the narrative entirely in the material world—a world in which Annis, physically bound by slavery, had very little agency.
“I understood pretty early on that I couldn’t write about the experience of being caught in the system of American chattel slavery without the existence of a world beyond this one,” Ward says. To do so would be not only “soul-crushing” but also ahistorical; spirituality has always been a “very important” part of the experience of people of African descent in this country, she explains, “and I wanted Annis’s story to reflect that.”
Ward began by familiarizing herself with the religious traditions of that region, but she soon realized that it “just didn’t feel right” to insert the West African spirits into this American narrative. She had read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods —and been inspired by it— but felt that the “idea of a people bringing their gods with them had been done” in that fantasy novel, and she wanted to do something that hadn’t. “Why wouldn’t the spirits in this world be specific,” she wondered, “born of this time, and this place, and this meeting of all these different types of people?”
The first spirit who appeared in Ward’s imagination is also the first who appears in the novel: Aza, who takes the form and name of Annis’s human grandmother (distinguished as “Mama Aza”) throughout the novel. The spirit came to Mama Aza as a storm in the Middle Passage and was so drawn to her “strength of spirit,” Ward explains, that it assumed her name and her appearance. Once Ward understood this spirit’s origin story, it was as if “she opened the door so that other spirits can exist in that world, too. And then, I just discovered them as I wrote them.”
Several of those spirits take inspiration from the spiritual traditions practiced in New Orleans and throughout the South. For example, Aza, with her skirt of clouds and cape of fog, is based, in part, on Oyá, “the Santería goddess of wind, of storms, and tempests,” as described in Sallie Ann Glassman’s Vodou Visions—a spirit who can “clean the world with [her] storms, destroy it anew with the winds of [her] skirt.” Like Annis herself, the voodoo is rooted in Africa but influenced by European traditions, transformed by enslavement, and distinctively Southern. “I took that awareness into the writing of Let Us Descend,” Ward explains, as well as “the idea that spirit is everywhere and that it is accessible.” Unlike in the Catholic tradition Ward was raised in—where “the divine is sort of removed from you, and the church is the vessel through which you can communicate”—in voodoo and the West African traditions they derived from, you can call out to a spirit directly and “interact with it in very intimate ways.”
The spirits of Let Us Descend are not all-powerful—or even all good. Aza, in particular, lies about her origin story and often seems to be manipulating Annis to her own ends. But imperfect gods might make more sense in an imperfect world, and to characters for whom notions of superiority and absolute power are not religious abstractions but daily, material threats.
A religious order free of hierarchy better fits the needs of Ward’s enslaved characters, as well as the author herself. While Ward was working on the novel, in the early days of the Covid pandemic, her partner died of acute respiratory distress syndrome. “I’ve lost so many people,” Ward says, “part of me very much wants to believe that and does believe that the world is seething with spirit, you know, that the world is sopping with spirit.” Those spirits, she imagines, are not above and separated from her but exist alongside her: “unpredictable, and incomplete and complex” as the people she knows, mourns, and immortalizes on the page.
In some of her earlier novels, most notably Sing, Unburied, Sing, in which hoodoo and voodoo traditions play a central role, Ward says she gave herself permission to “begin writing toward these ideas I’ve been curious about for a long time.” But in Let Us Descend, she says, “I just went all out.”
Charley Burlock is the Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere. You can read her writing at charleyburlock.com.
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