Salvage the Bones by Jesamyn Ward

Over the holidays, I was writing a profile of Vassar professor and writer Kiese Laymon, who has become better known for his wonderful essays published on his blog and at Gawker. I love his voice and honesty, and I'm looking forward to checking out his books when they're published this summer (Long Division is available for pre-order on Amazon and as of now, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America the autobiographical essay collection is scheduled to be published in August.)

Anyway, during our discussion, he mentioned Jesamyn Ward, a fellow black Southern writer, and it reminded me that her second novel, Salvage the Bones was on my list of books that I wanted to read last year but didn't get around to.

I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.

There are descriptions like this throughout the book, which is the story of Esch and her family in the days before and after Hurricane Katrina. Her brothers Skeetah, Randall and Junior are always into something. Her dad is a broken widower with a fighting spirit. Ward didn't win the National Book Award for nothing - there is poetry and depth and sweetness even in her descriptions of mischief and betrayal. I hate to call it poetic, actually, because that seems so vague.

I like how Ward uses metaphors and analogies, the restraint in her details and, in places, the lavish nature of her descriptions.

She is in love with a manchild from the Pit, a part of town where they all live on the Gulf, Bois Sauvage. There are two narratives, here, almost three. Esch is becoming a woman, Skeetah is a dog fighter in love with his pit bull, China, and Hurricane Katrina is the shadow in the distance.

It is a little less than 200 pages - I read it as an ebook - and it reads like a companion to the triumphant Beasts of the Southern Wild. What you find in Salvage the Bones is the grit and heart of a black girl, her gumption and yearning of a black teenage girl and the rejection that stings and burns.

The book also contains humanizing and heartbreaking sex scenes. I wince while reading most fictional sex scenes and rarely mention them in reviews, in part because most literary sex skirts the often awkward corners of intimacy, but Ward does not.

Finally, there is the terror and shame of Katrina, a modern memory that made visible to America a racial and class wound that black Americans know all too well, is so recent that it is difficult to humanize, to believe that there is a story to be told about it that would evoke any further understanding, sympathy or insight.

Salvage the Bones is about waiting and worry, it is about fighting to live, whether storms are metaphorical or literal. It's a joy for readers because it makes beauty out of wreckage.

People Who Write: 2013 Writing/Book Conferences Worth Attending

Here's a solid list of conferences and book events for the aspiring or established writer.

People Who Write is a newly launched effort by Powder Necklace author Nana Ekua Brew Hammond. It has tons of good information and inspiration for those interested in publishing.

I won't be at the earlier ones because of my own book launch in January and my subsequent preparation to speak at South by Southwest in March. But I hope to make it to BookExpo America, especially since they have a Power Reader program that's intriguing and less expensive than the other options.

Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry

Melissa Harris-Perry refers frequently to the crooked room in which African American women find ourselves in her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. She writes of Zora Neale Hurston's protagonist, Janie Crawford, falling in love with Tea Cake and Michelle Obama, owning her body, her connection to the legacy of black motherhood, her respectability as a woman who has chosen domesticity while also owning her power as an educated black woman. She mentions Ntozake Shange's play and Tyler Perry's misinterpretation of a film, too.

When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion...it may seem inexplicable that a respected black woman educator would stamp her foot, jab her finger in a black man's face, and scream while trying to make a point on national television, thereby reconfirming the notion that black women are irrationally angry. To understand why black women's public actions and political strategies sometimes seem tilted in ways that accommodate the degrading stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that influence their behavior. It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room.

When she wrote that "black women are rarely recognized as archetypal citizens," or that to be a black woman is akin to trying to stand straight (and tall) in a crooked room, all I wanted to do was cheer. She named for me, as a writer and a reader, impressions and ideas that are rarely named in our culture. I knew that she would, which is why I loved the book and the idea of it before I even read it.

There are few authors who write extensively about the misrecognition of black women in society or the emotional, financial and political implications of that. There are also few books that explore the crooked room and gaze of black women in the church - they have remained the backbone of traditional Christian organizations, for example, while largely being cast aside for leadership positions.

For us to fully be citizens, it is required for us to at least try to stand up. And often, because of the myths associated with our superhuman strength or our supposed mannishness, we are criticized when we try. As Harris-Perry writes, "Sister politics is also about challenging negative images, managing degradation, and resisting or accommodating humiliating public representations." The most refreshing part of the book for me was Harris-Perry's analysis of Michelle Obama's significance to black women and American culture. She deftly sums up what it is, exactly, about Michelle that has prompted odd discourse about our First Lady.

It is an act of resistance for a black woman to demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United States, black women's bodies have been valued only to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others.

It would be so nice if this weren't true. But because it is, the best we can hope for are more books that provide solace for those of us who effort to stand straight in the crooked room.