My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the profound connection between family and community, particularly in the face of adversity.
Jesmyn Ward reflects on her family's long-standing ties to a working-class background and the strong sense of belonging in a small community. The struggle of poverty is intertwined with a deep commitment to one's family, highlighting how such socio-economic conditions shape the decisions and experiences of individuals within close-knit environments. The inability or reluctance to evacuate during crises underscores the inseparability of family ties and communal identity in facing hardships.
In practice
This quote can be shared when discussing community values during challenging times.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
We grew up probably having as hard a life as anybody. A lot of times, we didn't have any food on the table. At Christmas, everybody else would always get something nice, but we'd get one T-shirt or one shirt... So I want to take care of Mom and Dad... and I'm having a damn good time doing it.
I knew it was going to be the most extraordinary thing in my life, but how powerful it is, you can never know until you have a baby.
There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas / Creation's most unique and precious pearl / And heaven help us always to remember / That the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others.
All of us remember the home of our childhood. Interestingly, our thoughts do not dwell on whether the house was large or small, the neighborhood fashionable or downtrodden. Rather, we delight in the experiences we shared as a family. The home is the laboratory of our lives, and what we learn there largely determines what we do when we leave there.
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