I recently reviewed Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and had the opportunity to ask Jesmyn how she came up with the concept for this outstanding book. Here is her reply:
The book, like most of my fictional work, offers only a faint reflection of my everyday life. None of the characters I write about have real counterparts in life, and while the landscape does mirror the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I do think that the coast I write about in my books is an idealized version of the Mississippi Coast. It’s a coast that maybe existed in the mid-80’s, and some aspects of it may exist now, but even that world is largely imaginary. There are two events in the book, however, that are somewhat autobiographical. The first is the dog fighting, which occurs throughout the book. When I was younger, my father and brother both owned pitbulls, and they both fought them for honor, never for money. A lot of what the characters say to the dogs, how they goad them to fight, train them to attack, were things that I remember my father doing; for example, he often told his dogs to “watch”, to “get.” When he said these things, they sounded like growls.
The other event that is autobiographical is the characters’ experience of Hurricane Katrina. I was home during that hurricane, and I survived it with my family. We also had to flee our home during the storm because it was flooding, but besides the realization that my grandmother’s house was in a valley, my experience during the storm and the characters’ in my novel are very different. My family and I were in a slightly more densely populated area, whereas my characters have to rely on themselves, their own wits and resources, their strengths, to survive the storm. After my family had fled my grandmother’s house and were turned away for shelter by one family during the storm, we were able to find shelter after sitting in our cars until the water receded and we encountered a generous family.
I wrote Salvage the Bones because I wanted to write about the kind of people who survived Hurricane Katrina with little to nothing to help them. I wanted to write about the kind of people that Hurricane Katrina and the historians who wrote about the storm, the political pundits, tried to ignore or erase. What were the stories of the people who couldn’t evacuate, couldn’t leave, whose only choice was to stay and fight for survival? I’d always wanted to write about a girl who grows up in a family full of men, and a strange boy in love with his pit bull, so it was a lucky accident to find that they were brother and sister and that they would be the people who braved this storm together.
Thanks so much for your answer Jesmyn. I can hardly wait for your next book.
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