Episode 590 || Summer Readings: On Witness and Respair
This week on From the Front Porch, our Summer Readings series continues! In this series, Annie introduces you to one book you should read this summer by reading an excerpt (with permission from publishers).
Today, Annie reads a passage from Jesmyn Ward’s latest book On Witness and Respair. Use code SUMMERREADINGS at checkout to get 10% off On Witness and Respair this week.
To purchase the books mentioned in this episode, stop by The Bookshelf in Thomasville, visit our website (search episode 590) or download and shop on The Bookshelf’s official app:
On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
What the Fireflies Knew by Kai Harris
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram and Facebook, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.
A full transcript of today’s episode can be found below.
Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
This week, Annie is reading The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley.
If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also support us on Patreon, where you can access bonus content, monthly live Porch Visits with Annie, our monthly live Patreon Book Club with Bookshelf staffers, Conquer a Classic episodes with Hunter, and more. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch.
We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.
Our Executive Producers are...Ashley Ferrell, Beth, Cammy Tidwell, Gene Queens, Jammie Treadwell, Joseph Shorter IV, Kimberly, Linda Lee Drozt, Nicole Marsee, Stephanie Dean, and Wendi Jenkins.
Transcript:
[squeaky porch swing] Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. [music plays out]
"Tell it," my grandmother Dorothy said. She understood that full witness was love.”
Jesmyn Ward, On Witness and Respair.
[as music fades out]
[00:00:36] I'm Annie Jones, owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and this week, I'm back with another installment of our Summer Readings series. Have you ever wondered what the Bookshelf actually looks like? Consider following us over on Instagram @Bookshelftville. We post behind-the-scenes pictures and give important updates on store hours, events, and special promotions. We'd love to see you over there. Now, back to the show. Last spring, when I finally came to terms with the fact that I was, in fact, pregnant and a baby was actually coming, I brainstormed ways to keep the podcast episodes coming throughout my maternity leave.
[00:01:16] We rarely run reruns on the show, and even though I'm not opposed to taking a break, I simply haven't taken many. Last summer, though, with Olivia and I both down for the count, I knew something had to give, so we launched our Summer Readings series. I fell in love with the format. So this summer, even though I'm not pregnant and neither I nor Olivia is on maternity leave, we're bringing the Summer Readings series back. These episodes are short and sweet, much like our traditional "Yes Virginia" episodes, but they'll provide you with a taste of some new summer books I think you'll really love. Each book featured can be found on our website, Bookshelfthomasville.com, and each week you can receive ten percent off that week's featured title. Use the code SUMMERREADINGS -- make sure to add the S at checkout. Each week for the rest of July, I'll tell you a little bit about a featured summer book, then read an excerpt and close with some comp titles so you'll know if the book is right for you. The comp titles are 1 0 % off in the Bookshelf shop, too.
[00:02:15] I hope these quieter episodes will give you a respite and a reprieve this summer, that you'll like the feeling of being read to as much as I do. Last week, I shared an excerpt from the debut rom-com Abby Offsides. This week, we're switching gears, and I'm highlighting Jesmyn Ward's On Witness and Respair, which released back in May. Nonfiction is to me the unsung hero of the summer reading months. Want to get lost in a narrative while lounging at the beach? True crime. Visiting family and need a shared topic of conversation? Narrative historical nonfiction about something you can all nerd out on together. Traveling somewhere with public transport and need something to read on the bus or train? Essays. On Witness and Respair is a collection of essays and lectures, some previously published, some brand new for this work, from one of America's greatest living writers. If you haven't read her fiction, I hope you will give it a try. Salvage the Bones, Sing Unburied Sing, or Let Us Descend, two of which were National Book Award winners for fiction.
[00:03:18] This collection gets its title from Ward's viral essay in which she recounts the death of her partner during the COVID-19 pandemic. I remember reading it when it was first published in September of 2020. It was gut-wrenching, of the moment we were living and yet utterly timeless. A heartbreaking portrait of grief and resilience. Respair, a forgotten word, means to return to hope after despair. Of course, there are other essays and lectures in the collection too about the importance of fiction, Ward's home and upbringing in Mississippi, and Toni Morrison. The following is an excerpt from a lecture included in the collection about the importance of fiction, a topic I know will resonate with listeners here. This is an expert from Jesmyn Ward's On Witness and Repair, an essay entitled Why Fiction Matters.
[00:04:14] "My Dorothy was the first storyteller of my life. One of the most important lessons she taught me about life and story was this: tell it straight. Tell it all. Talk about the indentation in the baby's head, about how that velvet-skinned infant slid out blue, but tell the tale of its sister, too. Talk about how she fisted the air and kicked, soft and gasping in the dresser drawer. When you tell the story of the childhood visits to the white auntie, talk about the dense gasoline-infused trunk, the fishhook jerk of terror in a child's neck at every other car's headlight, at every fire burning in the distance. But also talk about how those same children played in the dirt when they weren't working or schooling, how those same children spun games out of thin air where they competed one with the other to create the prettiest, best-decorated grave. How they made crucifixes from oak twigs, crafted flowers from pine needles. How showing love to the dead meant winning. How my grandmother knew from childhood that love and loss were twins in life. How beauty and sorrow kept company, but you could wrest joy from the pairing. Sometimes I wish I could write easier stories where generational trauma doesn't haunt teenage boys, stories where hurricanes don't bear down on teenage girls and raise, stories where brothers don't die, stories where 13-year-olds aren't re-enslaved in Parchman prison, stories where enslaved people are born free and die free.
[00:05:50] A part of me would like to write only the good. Teenage boys leaping from bridges into rivers, yelping with joy, girls cuddling pit bull puppies, 13-year-old boys flashing smiles over their birthday cakes, gleaming with happiness in the buttery glow of the candles. Sometimes I would like to write stories about worlds that never knew enslavement, smokehouses, burning over a pit, rape, or hogsheads. Sometimes I would like to write stories about brothers and beloveds living forever and ever. "Ay-yi-yi," my Dorothy said. "Tell it. Tell it again," we asked her. "Tell it again." So I do as she did, and I do it again. I shoulder past accusations of trauma porn, of trying to make people feel bad about themselves and history, of exploiting poverty, of gross exaggeration, and I tell this American story. I tell this Southern Gothic, this Mississippi tale. I write toward what hurts. I write toward the truth, and I tell it again. I scribe the whole. Once I sat on my grandmother's screened-in porch, the night pulled close around us, bugs trilling and hurling themselves at the screen, and the smell of her boiling pot, which she had piled deep with red beans and sausage and bay leaves and onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic.
[00:07:12] "If it was up to me," she said, "I would never eat beans again. Was all we ate when we was coming up, beans and rice every day. Didn't have no sausage in it, just a little salt meat to give it some flavor, but we was poor, and that's all we had. But I can eat them if I have to. I know how to make food stretch, how to make it with a little bit of nothing." She stirred the pot, and I knew the truth of what she said, knew she baked golden-crusted pound cakes thick with real butter, stuffed crabs with breadcrumbs and seasoning and herbs, boiled giant pots of gumbo as testament, as twin to her bean-poor past, so she could say, "I can eat good, too. My life don't have to be all hunger and silty beans. This is life, too." In part, I tell it straight because my grandmother no longer can. The reason I am speaking of my grandmother in the past tense is not because she is dead. It is because my grandmother is losing her memory. The first storyteller of my life is losing her stories. She suffers from Alzheimer's. Her memories have receded in a great tide, retreating from the shore of her present life. First, she lost her most recent memories, then she forgot her great-grandchildren, then her grandchildren, and now most days she does not recognize her children.
[00:08:32] She does not talk much now. Instead, this woman who always told the best tales, always jolted laughter from her audience or rapt attention while spinning story after story, telling us about how she caught her kids cussing in their clubhouse, so she unhooked their rigged electricity, or how she sent her daughter to the local white elementary school in the sixties to desegregate it, is quiet. Her mouth is sealed and still. Her face is most often slack as she stares off into what she can remember of the world around her, into what she can remember of her past. She seems disoriented. I wonder if she snags on moments in her mind, rocky promontories of memory, her seeing the downy faces and black eyes of each of her seven children after they were born, her taking her GED exam as a young adult and feeling so relieved and elated when she passed to qualify for her job at the pharmaceutical bottling plant, how it felt to sit on the porch with her mother and peel pecans or shell peas or snap beans and listen to her mother tell her own stories. My Dorothy has taught me what it means to lose memory of self, how it cleaves you from your life and those you love, casting you adrift on space and time. How it hollows out not only yourself, but the lives of those you love, of those who love you. How it sets them scrambling to hold on to the stories you told them, how it makes them grieve the stories that were lost.
[00:10:02] Once my grandmother told me that of her siblings who lived in Mississippi, only she knew the story of how her parents met, and for whatever reason, she did not tell me that story that day. At the time, it was a tease. Now it is a barb. My grandmother was from a long line of story keepers and tale tellers, part of a lineage of American griots who remembered the truth of who we were and what we'd been through and passed it along. I don't know if she ever knew how important her storytelling was to me, to her family, or to her community. How else would I have learned about sundown towns if she hadn't told me about her hiding in the trunk of her father's car as they fled the kiln before the setting sun? How else would I have learned about how one goes about surviving generational poverty if she hadn't told me about the grinding work of wresting food from the earth and sewing dresses from empty feed sacks? How else would I have learned about racially motivated violence except through her telling me how her grandfather had been shot and killed by revenue agents and left in the piney woods, and not one of that group of white men had ever been held accountable for his murder? I never learned these facts in school. I didn't read about growing up Black and poor in Mississippi until I sought out Richard Wright's Black Boy and Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi in high school.
[00:11:26] I knew practically nothing of American slavery until I read Alex Haley's Roots in my senior year. I didn't read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God until I was an undergraduate in college. And I didn't encounter any of James Baldwin's essays until I was in graduate school. I knew nothing of enslaved resistance until I read Sylviane Diouf's Slavery's Exiles well into my adulthood. I have spent my life actively seeking out these stories. I took the tales my grandmother told me, and I aligned them with what I read, and it was the only way I began to understand the whole truth of American history. This is how I began to understand the truth of the life I had lived, the truth of my grandmother's stillborn sister, and my murdered great-great-grandfather, and my mother's experience in a segregated school, and my brother's death. How history lived with us, echoing through our lives in terrible ways. This is how I began to understand Mississippi. This is how I began to understand America. How could I not honor this truth in writing? How could I not translate this knowing into characters and stories and place? To witness someone in all their complexity and to detail that complexity is an act of love. It means a commitment to sitting and grounding oneself in the smallest heartbreaking, wondrous moments and carrying the memory of them forward.
[00:12:55] It means jumping out of the window of your car as it is being swept away by a hurricane storm surge, your pregnant sister at your side, your grandmother standing on high and dry land, her silver hair a beacon in the gray haze of rain, the wind crackling and rending trees, and witnessing the way she spread her arms wide, beckoning us to her, saying, "Come, I will keep you safe," her feet ankle-deep in the water, even though she must have been terrified because she couldn't swim. It means grabbing your dying partner's pinky finger and caressing the fine downy black hairs as the heat of life leaves him. It means riding in the passenger seat of your brother's car and listening to music with him and listening to him speak in the quiet spaces between songs, speak about our parents and our siblings and his fears and what he wanted to do with his life, imagining you are both safe, that you have thousands of tomorrows when you only have hundreds, and each drive is one closer to the one where a drunk driver will kill him. Loving them is bearing witness and writing about it. "Tell it," my grandmother Dorothy said. She understood that full witness was love."
[00:14:12] If you liked Men We Reaped, What the Fireflies Knew, and Red at the Bone, I think you might enjoy Jesmyn Ward's new collection, On Witness and Repair. The book released on May 19th as a small hardback. You can purchase it and the comp titles from The Bookshelf website. Receive 10% off this week by using code SUMMERREADINGS-- make sure you include the S, at checkout. This week, I'm reading The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley.
Annie Jones: From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website:
A full transcript of today’s episode can be found at:
Special thanks to Studio D Podcast Production for production of From the Front Porch and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
Our Executive Producers of today’s episode are…
Cammy Tidwell, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Stephanie Dean, Ashley Ferrell, Gene Queens, Beth, Jammie Treadwell…
Executive Producers (Read Their Own Names): Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins
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