The poet, white of face, began: "Now, let us descend into the blind world below: I will go first, and you go second."
In Dante's Inferno, specifically Canto IV:1-63 The First Circle: Limbo: The Heathens, the beginning of a journey is announced. In Jesmyn Ward's latest, brilliant novel, Let Us Descend, a young, enslaved girl hears those words from the tutor of her white half-sisters as she carries out her housecleaning duties. The young girl, Annis, is about to undergo a journey of her own, one of deep depth and darkness, of great sorrow and misery. But it is also a journey with the gaining of great wisdom, and one in which hope does not die.
Annis and her mother are enslaved on a plantation by the man who raped her mother. Her mother works in the kitchen but she's far more than a house servant. At night, she takes Annis deep into the trees and schools her in combat strategies with sticks. Grandmother Aza was a huntress, a warrior in Africa before she was sent through the door with no return and shipped to America. Her legacy of strength, inner and physical, is a deep part of both women.
When that white man, who Annis refers to as her sire, starts to notice her, her daughter-of-a-warrior mother keeps Annis out of harm's way. So she is sold. Annis takes comfort in the love of another young, enslaved girl, Sufi. When they are discovered, both of them are sold.
The drudging march south to New Orleans is brutal. That anyone could survive these enforced days and days of walking barefoot, tied to other human beings, through dust, mud, swamps, crossing deep rivers whether one could swim or not, is incredible. Annis calls upon the spirit of her Grandmother Aza for strength and miraculous rescue.
A spirit does appear. Aza is a wind spirit. An absorbing part of the novel is the ongoing journey of discovery between Annis and Aza. It reveals aspects of character, of personal mettle, of the power of faith in one's ancestors and in what may lie beyond the physical world. Every sentence is wondrous and insightful.
As in Dante's Inferno, the people Annis meets show something of what others treasure and the price they pay. This is especially true of the white people in the novel, including those at the sugar cane plantation where Annis goes after the lady of the house buys her. Their greed overwhelms them. Whether they eat sparingly while the enslaved people around them starve. or gorge themselves, their spiritual hunger is never acknowledged by them. And it eats them alive.
But for her people, what Annis sees is far different:
As I hovered over the fields in the dream, all-seeing as Aza, I saw that despair wittled away at those who crawled through the cane and through the hive of the house. But I also saw a vein of green running through the center of every man, woman, and child; a vein that would push its way to blossom.
... my people could take all that bedevils them and use it to cement seams, to sow and reap, to armor themselves in fact so they could resist, hope bristling in the coils of their hair, in the sable dark of their skin.
Annis perseveres. Those who befriend her suffer and some are the recipients of unexpected good fortune. What happens to them in the long run may not be known, but that the resiliency of the human spirit is rewarded can be enough at times to keep Annis and the reader going.
Ward portrays Annis' journey as spiritual, as she is someone who hears and sees spirits, and physical. Both are described with telling details that resonate. Through it all, one thing Annis realizes is true:
I want to walk through a world of my own making.
Should that ever be too much to ask for anyone? It's a question Ward does not have to ask, but which her novel answers. Early on, the tutor of her half-sisters reads aloud this part of the Inferno, which echoes through Annis' journey:
Lovely things the sky above us bears. Now we came out, and once more saw stars.
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