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A Novel
by Jesmyn Ward
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Mama nods.
"Watching me like a hound," I say.
She blinks.
"His shoes. His feet."
She settles, still.
"Grab my head," I say.
When she is sad, my mother presses her lips into a thin crease and turns her head away, her cheek a drawn curtain; I saw it first when I was young enough to climb in her lap whole and be held by her, after I had fallen while running and cut a long gash in my calf. When she is angry, my mother folds her arms across her stomach, as if she could hold in her fury; I saw it when my sire crushed his daughters to him in their finest black dresses as they lowered his wife into her grave, knew it was because he spent the week before throwing every dish my mother set on the table at the floor, the wall, the ceiling, in his grief. My mama and me spent them days on our hands and knees, scrubbing, scrubbing. My mother holds her stomach now, her spear in the V of her elbow.
"Why," I ask. "Why we do this if we can't do nothing with it?" I let my staff drop.
My mother closes her eyes, sets her spear aside, and crouches on her haunches. I sink down next to her, let my arm rub against hers.
"Mama Aza taught me this," Mama says, looking up to the roux-dark sky, her arms still tight around her stomach. "Was about the only thing she could teach me. This and gathering."
I rub her arm with a finger, all our hard strikes gone from this clearing.
"This place, these people, this world," she sighs, "was new to her. She ain't know how to move through it. Didn't know the order of it. Just a few short months after the ship, she found out. The old master come into the cabin after she birthed me, and he laid claim to me, me wet with birthing blood and bawling. This owning from birthing to the grave, and on down, through children—this world overwhelmed her."
I grip the soft sliver of meat under my mama's armpit, one of the few tender, fatty pieces on her.
"This place horrified her," Mama whispers. "When I got older, I thought I knew. Thought I understood how wrong this place was, but I didn't." Mama squeezes her middle. "I didn't understand how wrong until you came squalling out of me."
In that one place, my mama's flesh is soft as pig stomach, the pale plush of intestines.
"Teaching Mama Aza's way of fighting, her stories—it's a way to recall another world. Another way of living. It wasn't a perfect world, but it wasn't so wrong as this one."
Mama squeezes my fingers.
"Best we don't forget," she says.
The trees wave and whip their fronds above us. The ruined tree creaks.
"You remember what Mama Aza did first as a king's wife?"
I nod.
"She ran," I say.
Mama snorts.
"He come at you again, you run," she says. "Knowing when to stand and when to go, when not to fight, well, that's a part of fighting, too. Knowing when to wait and bide and watch and duck. You got to know that, too."
We sit in the clearing until just before dawn, both of us too anxious to do more than lean into each other, hugging, blinking and slipping into sleep in little nods. When we rise and bury our blunt weapons, I pour the last palmful of sand over the wood, and the wind silences. Everything is quiet, until there is a buzz at my ear, a brush of sound. It is an inky bee, drifting in the dregs of the night, in this fighting clearing. Mama and I walk back to the cabins with our arms locked and linked. Her leaning on me, me bearing her up.
WE GLANCE PAST THE silent cabins and walk directly to my sire's house.
"We start early," Mama says as she lights the kindling in the stove, blows in its belly. "Mayhap we finish early," she says, and I know why. She thinks to hurry our work so I do not have to kneel at my sire's feet again.
"Yes, Mama," I say, and set to hauling water.
But the hours unspool anyhow. My sallow siblings want extra water to wash. The tutor wants me to clean and polish the shelves in the nursery turned schoolroom, complaining of dust. My sire wants fresh bed linens, tells me that fever made the ones I'd turned down the evening before reek of sweat. When evening falls, I still am not done. When the family's bedtime approaches, I find myself sloppily tucking and folding my sire's linens on his bed, kind Cleo and sulfur-eyed Safi already gone downstairs. When they left me to finish, I wanted to call after Safi, beseech the thoughtful girl who has always run to hoist too-heavy buckets with me, has always been quick to grab the opposite edge of a bedsheet so we could fold its length together. She would've known I needed help. But my voice has withered. My breath rasps. Run, I say to myself. Mama said run.
Excerpted from Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2023 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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