The Ascendant

Jesmyn Ward, double national book award winner and best-selling author, returns to fiction with the haunting, beautiful Let Us Descend

- By Leah Faye Cooper. Photographs by Akasha Rabut

AS EXTRAORDINARY IDEAS often do, the one for Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel came to her in the most ordinary of ways. More than seven years ago, the prolific author was driving from her home in DeLisle, Mississippi—population 1,712—to New Orleans, where she’s a professor of English at Tulane University. “I was listening to the local NPR station, which is WWNO out of New Orleans, [and] they were doing a [series] celebrating New Orleans’s tricentennial, so 300 years of New Orleans history and New Orleans culture,” she says. Of all that Ward absorbed from the 64-episode series—which ran from 2015 to 2018 and expounded on everything from the legacy of gay Carnival to Germans introducing the city to gymnastics—she was most enthralled by a segment on the city’s role in the American domestic slave trade. Ward grew up frequently visiting relatives in New Orleans, and her father lived there for several years when she was a teenager. Her upbringing, education, and career have minted her an ardent student of the Deep South. Yet, “I was shocked that I knew none of the history that they were covering in the radio show,” she says. “And that I think really drove home for me the fact that that history had been erased; so erased from the landscape that I had spent years of my life in that place and couldn’t see that history at all. I just remember being appalled in that moment and wondering, What if I wrote about it? Would that help to bring that reality back into the public consciousness, back into [the] public awareness?” And thus, Let Us Descend was born.

A searing and vivid work of historical fiction,