201. SALVAGE the BONES

Jesmyn Ward 2011

The Book Jacket Blurb:

   A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show interest in much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fifteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pit bull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
   As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to a dramatic conclusion, the unforgettable family at the novel's core -- motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce -- pulls itself up to face another day. A bighearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
  

What Hooked Me:

A motherless poverty-stricken family. Teenage pregnancy. Pit bull dog-fights. Hurricane Katrina. This book has all the elements of what sounds like a very depressing book, and that it is. In fact, it made me cry, one of a handful of books on my list that made me really cry.  Its' wonderful lyrical prose, strong characters (including the dog China), and powerful imagery will stay with me for a while. And instead of thought-provoking quotes, the quotes below are a few of the vivid scenes I will remember from this book.

The Quotes:

'China's turned on herself. If I didn't know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won't let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they're beaten soft. Only Mama's forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on their own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She'd stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.'(opening lines)

'Mornings after birth should be quiet; the air should muffle sounds. But quiet comes and goes here on the Pit like the pack of stray dogs that Daddy used to run off with his gun before Skeetah brought China here to stay. When Daddy kept hogs, in the morning the sows squealed at their sticky piglets. The chickens hatched the chicks from their hidden eggs, and they woke us with flapping and clucking. China's pups first day in the world was no different. I woke up to the hammering.'(20)

'We worm our way through the woods as we watch the house for movement. We slide on our stomachs under bushes so tangled and overgrown that we cannot crouch or crawl through them. We slither like snakes, grab dirt and pine straw with our elbows, and pull. Skeetah stops often, straw and twigs sliding off his slick head to catch on his shoulders like holiday tinsel, and he listens. I stop, too, try my hardest to be so still, to hear the threat, but the blood beats through my ears so strongly I cannot hear anything over that and the whooshing of my breath. Skeetah crawls through a stand, and we start again.'(69-70)

'They cannot tell, but it is there. Perhaps Skeetah saw when I walked from the water and put on my clothes. I do not know, but I will not give him the chance to see me again now. I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us into stone.'(88)

'I am glad to be sitting in the backseat by the window in the car, Junior's bony rump squirming on my lap, Skeetah in the middle pulling at the blunt, Marquise next to him at the other window, opaque through the cloud of smoke. Big Henry's head could be any other boy's head under his baseball cap, and Randall leans on the headrest, his eyes closed, everything still but his eyelids jumping like dragonflies. I do not think that he is dreaming. Junior shifts, and I hold him tight; he is my shield.'(140)

'On the court, Randall is already blinking hard at the sweat blinding him. His shirt sticks to him on his sides, close as a bud. He goes up for a rebound, rises up out of the cluster of players, but they buzz angrily, and he falls. The referee whistles, and Randall walks to the foul line, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Nothing about him seems to touch anything else: the court, the ball, his shirt that he picks at so that his skin can breathe. He is a bayou crane, alighting so he doesn't even sink into the black marsh before taking off in flight.'(143)

'I've crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowning in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees. When I can breathe, I leave the stall to splash cold water on my face, but my eyes still look red, my eyelids swollen in the funhouse mirror. And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying again for what I have been, for what I am, and what I will be, again.'(146-147)

'The few dirt-scratched yards and thin-siding houses and trailers of Bois Sauvage seem a sorry match to the woods, like pitting a puppy against a full grown dog. Here, there are swimming holes that are fat puddles and some the size of swimming pools fed by skinny clear creeks, but the earth makes the holes black, and the trees make them as filthy with leaves as a dog is with fleas. There are clusters of magnolias that are so tall and green and glossy, they are impossible to climb, and the air around them always smells like peaches. There are oaks so big and old that their arms grow out black and thick as trunks, which rest on the ground. There are ponds  that are filled with slime and tall yellow grasses, and at night, frogs turn them teeming, singing a burping chorus. There are clearings where deer feed, startle white, and kick away. There are turtles plowing through pine straw, mud, trying to avoid the pot.(158)

'Skeetah stands in the sun, the only boy in the yellow clearing who braves the light with the dogs. He ignores us and looks off as well, standing, never sitting. I wonder if he has trained her to do this, to stand at his side, to not dirty even her haunches with sitting so that they gleam. China is as white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does.'(162)

'When Mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew. That maybe they stuck their tongues out, pink and warm, to taste, to make sure. That the deer looked at their companions and leapt. That the foxes chattered to themselves, rolled their shoulders, and started off. And maybe the bigger animals do. But now I think that other animals, like the squirrels and the rabbits, don't do that at all. Maybe the small don't run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us. The squirrels pack feathers, pack pine straw, pack shed fur and acorns from the oaks in the bowels of their trees, line them so that they are buried deep in the trunks, so safe they can hardly hear the storm cracking around them. The rabbits stand in profile, shank to shank, smell that storm smell that hits them all at once like a loud sound and they tunnel down through the red clay and the sand, down until the earth turns black and cold, down past all the roots, until they have dug great halls so deep that they sit right above the underground reservoirs we tap into with our wells, and during the hurricane, they hear water lapping above and below while they are safe in the hand of the earth.'(215-216)

'It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. It is the rain, which stings like stone, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won't stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat fire crackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again.'(230-231)

'She left us as dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.'(255)

a Bloomsbury Hardcover Edition
258 pages
Book borrowed from the library

GIVEAWAY NOTES: After determining the valid entries and assigning numbers to the comments in the order that they posted, the winners are:

#14 - Suko and   #21 - Cialina

Congratulations!!