6 Fascinating Facts About ‘Salvage the Bones’

In Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, a young Black teenager named Esch is living with her father and brothers in a low-income, rural patch of Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina arrives on the coast. As the family fights for survival, Esch carries the weight of another life-changing event: She’s pregnant. Here are some fascinating facts about what The New York Times called “a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written.”

1. Bois Sauvage translates to “wild wood,” a nod to DeLisle’s history.
2. Ward’s own experience in Hurricane Katrina inspired Salvage the Bones.
3. Ward followed William Faulkner’s approach to writing in dialect.
4. Ward used Outkast lyrics for an epigraph.
5. Ward’s characters sometimes surprised her.
6. Salvage the Bones won a National Book Award.

Bois Sauvage translates to “wild wood,” a nod to DeLisle’s history.

When Ward was 3 years old, she and her parents moved from California’s Bay Area to DeLisle, Mississippi, an unincorporated coastal town where both sides of her family had lived for generations. Many of DeLisle’s residents were poor and Black, and Ward’s experiences growing up in this community have inspired much of her work. 

In Salvage the Bones, Ward captures the varied struggles of life in her hometown, where many locals are just scraping by and the pillowy humidity is both oppressive and comforting. But instead of labeling it “DeLisle,” she presents a lightly fictionalized place called “Bois Sauvage,” French for “wild wood.” Not only does the name emulate the rural nature of the region, but it’s also a subtle reference to DeLisle’s history. When French explorers first settled there, they called it “La Riviere des Loups,” essentially “Wolf River,” which eventually became “Wolf Town.” Ward chose sauvage as a linguistic link to DeLisle’s once-savage wildlife. 

The salvage in the novel’s title is also a play on savage, a word that now often has a positive connotation. “At home, among the young, there is honor in that term,” Ward told The Paris Review. “It says that come hell or high water, Katrina or oil spill, hunger or heat, you are strong, you are fierce, and you possess hope.”

Ward’s own experience in Hurricane Katrina inspired Salvage the Bones.

Anyone who reads both Salvage the Bones and Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, will pick up on other parallels between the fictional story of Esch and the author’s real life. Ward also grew up with pit bulls, for example, and lived in a house on her grandmother’s land in rural Mississippi. But the most notable similarity by far is that Ward herself was in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

She had finished her MFA program and was spending some time back in DeLisle before returning to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start teaching in the fall. Having no idea how severe the storm would be, Ward decided to stay put until it passed. Once the hurricane hit, she and her family fled her grandmother’s rapidly flooding house and ended up parking their trucks in a field (the white land owners claimed their house was too full to shelter any more people). Ward’s family survived, but the trauma of the storm and its aftermath didn’t easily fade. “It took me a few years to commit to writing about the hurricane,” Ward told The World. “I think that the hurricane was so awful and so devastating that it actually silenced me for a while.”

Ward followed William Faulkner’s approach to writing in dialect.

The characters in Salvage the Bones talk to each other in a Southern dialect that doesn’t match their internal monologues—a contrast that Ward picked up from William Faulkner. “In Faulkner’s work, people speak one way, but then they’re allowed to have interior lives expressed with ten-dollar words because those are the words that best represent a person’s rich, complicated emotions,” she told Guernica. Though some readers of early drafts found the difference “too wide,” Ward didn’t want to sacrifice authenticity or complexity for consistency. “I thought, ‘Fuck it’—I’m going to be true to this place and these people and how they speak, but my characters are going to think in ways that people might not expect,” she said.

Ward used Outkast lyrics for an epigraph.

Ward begins Esch’s story with three epigraphs—one from the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy, one from Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes’s poem “Now,” and the third from Outkast’s song “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 1)” off their 1998 album Aquemini: 

“We on our backs staring at the stars above,
Talking about what we going to be when we grow up,
I said what you wanna be? She said, ‘Alive.’ ”

It wasn’t the first time Ward introduced a novel with hip-hop: She quoted rapper Pastor Troy before her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds. “Some people think that Southern hip-hop doesn’t have any depth,” she told Guernica. “I wanted to work against that stereotype. These are verses by Southern artists who are really wrestling with what it means to be here, young Black men who are trying to figure out how to live in the South.”

Ward’s characters sometimes surprised her.

The characters in Salvage the Bones took shape in ways that even their creator didn’t always expect. Ward was surprised when Esch’s mother, who dies in childbirth before the novel even begins, was still so present in the story; and she told BOMB that Esch’s father just “walked on the page” as a weak character. When he began exhibiting small shows of strength later on, that surprised her, too.

And while Ward intentionally included Greek mythology in Esch’s story to subvert the idea that those so-called “universal” classics are reserved for white authors, she didn’t anticipate that her young protagonist would feel such a powerful connection to the myths and relate to the sorceress Medea on such a personal level. That said, Ward always knew that Esch would have an affinity for literature—just like Ward herself did.

Salvage the Bones won a National Book Award.

Salvage the Bones beat out four other finalists for the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction: Andrew Krivák’s The Sojourn, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, and Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories. The win came as a shock to Ward, she told NPR, in part because she “wasn’t that well-known” and she didn’t feel her kinds of characters and settings were popular among many readers. In 2017, she won her second National Book Award for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.

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