'Let Us Descend,' set on a Carolina rice plantation, is a Faulknerian novel of slavery

Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner, turns to the antebellum South in her new novel "Let Us Descend."

Ward's heroine is Annis, an enslaved young woman, likely a teenager, whose world is a "Carolina" rice plantation.

This probably puts her in the South Carolina Low Country but possibly as far north as the Lower Cape Fear. Some of her fellow enslaved people know about the Great Dismal Swamp, up by Virginia, where escapees found refuge.

Annis is a house servant. She calls the owner "sire," a very precise use of vocabulary. As owner, the sire rules over Annis and others like a medieval king. He is also her biological father.

Annis lives in a cabin with her mother, who takes her in the woods at night and tells her stories. Her grandmother, it seems, was a woman warrior serving a Fon king in a part of western Africa called Dahomey. Her mother teaches Annis the basics of spear-fighting, which Grandma Aza taught her.

Annis also listens in sometimes while the tutor is teaching the sire's two daughters, her half-sisters. The title of "Let Us Descend" comes from "The Divine Comedy" of Dante, whom Annis knows as "that old Italian."

This little world is disrupted when the sire sells Annis' mother, and then Annis herself, to "the Georgia Man." She and others are marched barefoot (the men in chains, the women tied by ropes) all the way to New Orleans, where Annis passes first through the great slave market, then to a sugar cane plantation in northern Louisiana.

Physical escape is impossible, so Annis slips into the spirit world, falling into conversations with traditional African spirits of earth and water. One particularly insistent spirit poses as her Grandma Aza; this spirit is actually delighted to arrive in New Orleans since so many people worship her (or it) there.

"Let Us Descend" gives its readers a workout. Annis narrates her tale in a variant of Gullah diction, but with a vocabulary like an English grad student.

She tells her tale, moreover, in a kind of stream of consciousness, like Faulkner or Virginia Woolf. Flashbacks take us to the world of Mama Aza and how she ended up becoming enslaved.

(Annis has one memento of her, passed down by her mother: a long ivory needle from the tusk of an elephant Aza killed.)

Sometimes, it's hard to tell if Annis is describing the mundane world or the spirit realm. And Ward will send her readers off to Wikipedia nearly as often as T.S. Eliot.

Nevertheless, Ward ("Salvage the Bones")  is a consummate storyteller, and she keeps her readers moving through a narrative of love, brutality and heartbreak, toward something very close to a happy ending.

Book review

'LET US DESCEND'

By Jesmyn Ward, Scribner, $28

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward is a Faulknerian novel of slavery