The verdant green of the American South and the terror of slavery are the backdrops to Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, “Let Us Descend.”

It is 1835 and Arese, an enslaved teenager, resides with her mother on a South Carolina plantation. Under moonlight, her mother teaches her to fight like a warrior, for this is all a parent can bequeath while “the sire” of the plantation leers in the distance. When Mama is sold, Arese has visions of a spirit godmother, a duplicitous “white-wreathed woman” who promises to show her a path to freedom that Arese is convinced will remain elusive. Of course, Arese’s greatest fear arises when she finds herself in the slave pens of New Orleans, struggling to make sense of the stories her mother shared about a grandmother from Africa, a member of an army of wives for a great king. “I wonder what the royal household saw in my grandmother. If they saw something in her that spoke of power, that told them she could bear more than the weight of her frame,” or if they “looked at (her) and saw a girl like me: gangly, water muscled, cup hipped.”

如果它看起来像一个lot of history to contend with in 320 pages, that would certainly be true. But Ward is one of America’s finest living writers, largely because she has never been afraid of the ugly complexities of the living, the dead and the undead. With this first foray into the historical novel, Ward does not flinch when facing down the odious institution of American slavery. Nothing about Arese’s story is new to readers who are familiar with slave narratives, but Ward’s mesmerizing sentences, her dazzling descriptions of the natural and unnatural, the way she coerces time and guides readers between a heartbreakingly familiar story of torment and moments of sublime tenderness, suggests a protean artist in her element.

As a historical fiction writer myself, I have heard plenty of readers whine about the burden of “one more slave story.” “Let Us Descend” is, indeed, a telling one might hear under a starry sky, beside a waning fire, that renders one too frightened for sleep. But there were over 8 million enslaved Black people who worked on American soil. Can we rightfully turn away from one more of their stories, even if under the guise of fiction?

The most harrowing chapters of the novel involve the depiction of long chains of humans being marched from the Carolinas to New Orleans. The journey is brutal, and it is hard to imagine a worse fate. At the end of it, Arese is sold, and as she and the other newly purchased slaves walk behind their new mistress, Arese speaks to a woman who has been separated from her child. She asks about the child’s name, and when the woman softly whispers “Temple,” Arese tells the woman it is a good name, that “temples is a place for spirits.” It is a small connection between two humans who have landed in a terrible place. The moment seems to hold out a bit of hope until the woman turns to Arese. “ ‘Ain’t no gods here,’ she says, her words a hatchet buried in the tree trunk of her wound.” This is, indeed, a place of horror.

1993年,托尼·莫里森在她的诺贝尔演讲说,“Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.” What perhaps distinguishes Ward’s novel from others is that when Arese is offered the typical guidance of foremothers, spirits and history, she turns away from them all. She has learned to trust nothing, to trust no one, for this is what this most horrid institution is best at doing — tearing away the fabric of human interdependence, creating something so craven and vile, so horrifically novel, that history, memory and even ancestors seem hardly enough.

Lauren Francis-Sharma is a freelance writer.