Let Us Descend

Annis is enslaved, sold south by the white man who fathered her, marched from the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into a Louisiana sugar plantation. Ward structures the journey as a descent through hell — Dante's Inferno turned toward Black American experience — with Annis accompanied by the spirits of her warrior grandmother and the elemental forces of earth and water that her mother taught her to hear. Ward does not look away from what slavery did to bodies. She also does not let the body be the whole story — Annis's interior life, her ancestral connection, her spiritual world are as real and as present as the chains. The most formally ambitious American slavery novel since Beloved, and the one that most completely refuses to let the institution stand in for the person living inside it.