Salvage the Bones

This is a beautifully written novel by Jessamyn Ward centering on an impoverished, struggling family living in a hardscrabble bayou town along the coast of Mississippi during the twelve days leading up to and including the direct landfall of Hurricane Katrina.   Their story is told through the eyes of Esch, a 15 year-old girl living with her three brothers and alcoholic father.  


Mama died giving birth to Esch's younger brother, Junior.  While Esch and her two older brothers, Randall and Skeetah, can recall their mother, her words and actions still alive for them, Junior is truly an orphan, depending on Esch and his big brothers to love and care for him. 


The plot of land the family lives on has come to be called the Pit.  It was purchased by their grandfather, who also built the first home on the property.  Esch's grandparents are long-dead and the house they left behind "is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years."  Before dying, Papa Joseph had helped Daddy build a new house which Esch's family occupies and once he and Mother Elizabeth were gone, Mama and the older children had slowly over the years taken "couch by chair by picture by dish, until there was nothing left."  


This is a family in severe decline, living in poverty, salvaging what they can from the land, neighbors,  abandoned houses and each other, occasionally stealing (but struggling with what Mama would think of that behavior).  Daddy works odd jobs when he can pull it together; he cares deeply for his children and is grief-stricken by the loss of his wife. But alcohol has its grips on him and he has been failing to provide for his family since Mama's death.  


Although the framework of the novel is provided by the approaching hurricane, it's almost a sidebar to the everyday starving, fighting, and struggling to survive.  There are also instances of great love and sacrifice.  Within a few pages of the novel's opening, we learn Esch is pregnant and that, as a matter of fact, she has been sexually active since she was twelve with a number of her brothers' friends.  This is part of her life, part of her survival.  She will deal with it and survive, as will the baby.  Esch is reading, as part of her summer reading assignment, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and throughout Salvage the Bones she reflects on the elementary similarities between the ancient gods and goddesses and the world she lives in.  Spurned by the father of her child whom she loves with the ferociousness of a fifteen year old, she thinks "In every one of the Greeks' tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman or a woman chasing a man.  There is never a meeting in the middle.  There is only a body in a ditch and one person walking toward or away from it."  


One of the few comforting aspects of the story is that Esch and her brothers love one another deeply.  They comfort and look out for each other.  Esch is especially close to her brother Skeetah, who has developed an intense relationship with a white pit bull he has named China.  China gives birth to a litter of puppies at the opening of the novel and Skeetah's efforts to keep China and the puppies alive and healthy are monumental.  It's a complicated relationship fraught with love and violence; China is a "fighting dog".  Skeetah has trained her to be a killer.  The violence and of the dog-fighting scene is almost too hard to read; too real, too bloody, too intense.  


On Day 11 in the novel,  Katrina hits.   This isn't a spoiler; it's clear from the first page that this is going to occur.  What the reader can't guess is how or whether the family will survive intact.


I found Salvage the Bones to be totally engrossing.  I've read other novels related to Katrina (most memorably Zeitoun by Dave Eggers), but this was the first one not centered in New Orleans.  The author's account of lives lived in the impoverished underbelly of our country is moving and certainly has the ring of authenticity.  It speaks in a matter-of-fact, memorable way, of life for the have-nots, and it reminds me of how convenient it is to forget about them in our day-to-day lives.  


We are a country of sharply divided economies and cultures; I appreciate the opportunity a finely-written novel gives me to deepen my understanding of our country and the challenges it faces. I have to, and want to, use this knowledge to inform my politics, my behaviors, and my view of the future.  


Read Salvage the Bones; you won't easily forget it.