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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.
Jesmyn Ward
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Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

FamilyCommunityPovertyWorking-ClassIdentity

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be shared when discussing community values during challenging times.

More from Jesmyn Ward

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?
Jesmyn WardRead
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.
Jesmyn WardRead
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
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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.
Jesmyn WardRead
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.
Jesmyn WardRead
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.
Jesmyn WardRead

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