4
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713 ratings
A fever dream of the past that ripples outward to the modern world, this powerful short story by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward draws inspiration from the hidden communities built by people escaping slavery.
Afice is the last of nine generations of women who have survived enslavement, sickness, and hunger. Alone at age seventeen, she sets out through the Louisiana swamps to follow the trail of her ancestors and hear their songs anew. On this journey, Afice must decide how to honor her ancestors while embracing her own future.
Jesmyn Ward’s Mother Swamp is part of A Point in Time, a transporting collection of stories about the pivotal moments, past and present, that change lives. Read or listen to each immersive story in a single sitting.
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Print length
24 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Amazon Original Stories
Publication date
July 27, 2022
ASIN :
B0B1MH3XMC
File size :
6877 KB
Text-to-speech :
Enabled
Screen reader :
Supported
Enhanced typesetting :
Enabled
X-Ray :
Enabled
Word wise :
Enabled
About the Author
Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is a twice-over recipient of the National Book Award, first in 2011 and again in 2017. In 2016 she was selected for the Strauss Living Award, and in 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Visit her website at www.jesmynwardauthor.com.
I watch the sky, night after night. Sometimes, I think I see my grandmother, and all the mothers before her, traveling the shatter of stars across the darkness, swimming along that great river of light. In the day, I squint against the sun beyond the swamp’s wide-reaching branches, beyond the clouds. I trace messages in the tops of the trees as they twist and shake and nod. I put my ear to their trunks and hear them, after many days of rain, singing as they pull water up, up, to their great green crowns. Sometimes, when there are storms, they break and scatter branches over the mouth of my burrow, my home, the cave that First Mother dug out of hard river clay.
“Bend,” my mother told me.
“Look low,” her mother told her.
“Keep down,” Sixth Mother told her.
“Smother the fire,” Fifth Mother said.
“Hand over the smoke pipe,” Fourth Mother whispered.
“Hide,” said mother to daughters, through the years. “Hide.”
My neck pulls, my jaw tightens the girdle of my head, but I have spent my life looking up. The stars’ current glitters. I roll my shoulders straight, tighten my pack on my back. Follow the mothers’ trail across the miles. Nine generations have hidden here in this swamp. Nine generations have walked these paths across bayous, across rivers, across forests to meet our future.
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Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
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Customer reviews
4 out of 5
713 global ratings
kcmagpie
5
Love her words
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2024
Verified Purchase
Jesmyn Ward can write to conjure worlds from the page. This story seems an epilogue to Let Us Descend, continuing the journey of Annis into The First Mother. Left me wanting more of this lyrical tale.
Dana Kindle Customer
5
More: I want to read more
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2023
Verified Purchase
My imagination began to run wild with the possibilities this story brought to the fore. What type of society would grow with the melding of cultures, what traditions would develop, and what great love and kindness would surround the children of such women? I want to read more, much more from author Jeremy Ward.
T. L. Cooper
5
Survival Will Find a Way
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2023
Verified Purchase
Mother Swamp by Jesmyn Ward latches on to the psyche and won't let go. I couldn't stop thinking about this story. It enthralled me in ways I really didn't expect. The clinging to the old ways and the desire to break free battling in this story of survival demonstrate the lengths people will go to to survive and to propagate. When First Mother develops a plan to keep her lineage alive and follows through with it, it's a risk that starts a ritual that feels at once necessary, uncomfortable, and unsustainable. Ward writes beautifully of the world she creates in the woods and the relationship/non-relationship between the two communities with similar goals. Mother Swamp explores how rituals can become traditions that stymy the recognition of options to achieve goals with a subtly and brilliance that never get in the way of the story itself.
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