On Witness and Respair

On Witness and Respair is a collection of essays, speeches, profiles, and literary introductions. Across these pieces, Jesmyn Ward traces her development as a writer, recounts the losses and joys that have shaped her, and argues that storytelling is an act of love, witness, and survival for Black Americans.

In the Introduction, Ward describes her childhood encounter with the Mississippi State Authors Map in her elementary school library, where the illustrated faces of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright inspired her awe. Growing up poor and Black in Mississippi, she came to appreciate that her life held both hardship and beauty: communal river swimming, family gatherings, and Sunday baseball games. Reading Richard Wright's memoir Black Boy struck her most deeply and moved her to become a writer, yet Wright's rancor toward Mississippi unsettled her. Ward's own sustaining memories shaped her philosophy of creative nonfiction: to write with honesty, generosity, and a complicated love for Mississippi, acknowledging both its beauty and its violence.

"Why Fiction Matters" centers Ward's grandmother, Dorothy, as the foundational storyteller of her life. Dorothy was born in 1940 with a stillborn twin, survived against expectations, and worked throughout her life as a housekeeper, health aide, hairdresser, seamstress, and pharmaceutical plant worker. She taught Ward storytelling's central lesson: Tell it straight, tell it all. Ward reveals that Dorothy now has Alzheimer's disease and no longer recognizes her children most days. During a trip to the Florida panhandle, Dorothy told Ward about being born with a caul, a membrane covering part of a newborn's head or face, which midwives said gave her prophetic sight. Ward closes the essay with a story her mother shared 23 years after the death of Ward's brother Joshua: Ward's mother had recurring dreams of a fatal car crash before Joshua was killed, and Dorothy had interpreted the dream as a warning about someone close. Storytelling, Ward argues, is a communal, intergenerational act of carrying truth forward.

"No Mercy in Motion" narrates the summer of 2000, Ward's last with Joshua. After finishing her master's at Stanford, Ward returned to Mississippi but could not find work. Joshua, 19, cycled through jobs at a wax factory, a truck stop, and a casino, occasionally selling crack between jobs as a stopgap in an economy where young Black men's labor was expendable. When a college contact arranged a job interview in New York, Joshua saw Ward's suitcase and his face fell. On October 3, 2000, Ward learned that Joshua had been in an accident the previous night and did not survive. A drunk white driver had hit him from behind at high speed on a coastal road. The driver was charged not with vehicular manslaughter but with leaving the scene of an accident, sentenced to five years. He served three years and two months and never paid the ordered restitution.

Several essays explore Ward's relationship to place. "My True South" explains her 2010 return to Mississippi, balancing the state's racist history and present-day aggressions against its beauty, community, and the people working toward change. "We Do Not Swim in Our Cemeteries" narrates her family's experience during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Unable to afford evacuation, her family gathered at her grandmother's brick house, only to flee through rising floodwater when a tree fell on the roof. White neighbors refused them shelter during the Category 5 storm. Ward interweaves her father's account of surviving Hurricane Camille as a 13-year-old in 1969. In the aftermath of Katrina, private truckers arrived with water before the federal government, and the landscape and community were fundamentally changed. "The Belief in Our Inferiority Persists" argues that material poverty and racist beliefs are structurally embedded in Mississippi, tracing this from her grandmother's childhood hunger through present-day systemic deprivation.

Ward's literary essays trace how reading shaped her identity. "Open Minds, Open Books" recounts her hunger for representation: by age 10, she had found only two books featuring Black girl characters. She connects contemporary book banning to the aliens called Wipers in a childhood television show who destroyed libraries. "Growing Up and Grasping Gone with the Wind" describes reading Gone with the Wind at 13 and being stunned by its depiction of Black people as animal hordes and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. Her Toni Morrison memorial speech describes Morrison's work as the "holy word" she had searched for, the first writing that fully rendered visible people like her. "A Conflicted, Imperfect Love" traces Ward's evolving relationship with Faulkner, finding in As I Lay Dying a foundational text that taught her rhythm, fluidity, and the depth possible in characters. "How to Survive in Broken Worlds" reads Octavia Butler's fiction as a template for surviving through hope. Ward also writes about discovering Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf as a teenager and recognizing a kindred voice in Shange's poetic language.

"Cracking the Code" explores Ward's mixed-race heritage through genetic testing. Her father discovered he is 51 percent Native American, and Ward herself is 40 percent European, 32 percent sub-Saharan African, and 25 percent Native American. After days of disorientation, she resolves that people of color from her region can embrace all aspects of their ancestry while choosing to identify as Black when fighting for racial equality. "Head Rush" profiles her father's relationship to Prince, arguing that Prince's renegade masculinity emboldened a man who channeled his thwarted creative impulse into motorcycle rides with his children.

The collection's profiles of Black artists extend Ward's arguments about witness and representation. Her essay on Regina King traces the actress's career from the sitcom 227 through If Beale Street Could Talk and her directorial debut, emphasizing King's insistence on building genuine partnerships. Her profile of Ava DuVernay argues that DuVernay's most distinctive contribution is allowing Black characters vulnerability on screen. Her profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates covers his debut novel The Water Dancer and his congressional testimony on reparations, which frames the issue as a dilemma of inheritance.

"I Love You: Please Don't Forget It" describes the genesis of Ward's anthology The Fire This Time, rooted in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and her return to James Baldwin's writing. "Raising a Black Son in the US" recounts her dread upon learning she would bear a Black boy, connecting her fear to the long history of Black children being denied childhood, from enslaved infants killed by overseers to children imprisoned at Parchman, a notorious Mississippi prison farm, for vagrancy after emancipation.

"On Witness and Respair" narrates the death of Ward's partner in January 2020 from acute respiratory distress syndrome at 33, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and global protests after George Floyd's murder. She describes being broken open by the revelation that Black Americans were not alone in their struggle. "Cocoon of Sound" traces Black music as a source of safety throughout her life, from her earliest memory of Michael Jackson's "Rock with You" in an airport at age three to riding in her nephew's truck on Mother's Day, affirming that Black communities will continue to make art that insists on their being.

In the final essay, "You Tell Your Story: You Survive," Ward delivers a comprehensive artistic manifesto. She names the feeling her family's stories of oppression produced in her "blood dread," the inherited dread of remembered oppression passed from generation to generation. She describes being silenced for three years after Hurricane Katrina and insists that without hope her work would be horror. She reclaims the word "savage" as her community has redefined it: resilient, resourceful, courageous. She closes with an affirmation: "You tell your story. You survive."