Jesmyn Ward’s writing is rooted in the beauty and tragedy of rural Mississippi, where her family barely survived Hurricane Katrina, her brother and other men she grew up with died young, and she lost her husband at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the two-time National Book Award winner also has strong ties to the Bay Area. They include two stints at Stanford and start with her premature birth, at 26 weeks, at Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley. Because Ward’s parents were young, poor and Black in the 1970s, her doctors said she wasn’t expected to live. “I wanted to tell them you were a fighter,” her father later said.
Ward will talk about overcoming hardships when she returns to the Bay Area Saturday to speak at Mill College’s commencement — the final graduation ceremony that the 170-year-old Oakland school will host as an independent, all-women’s undergraduate institution. Mills merges this summer with Boston-based Northeastern University and will be known as Mills College at Northeastern and serve undergraduates of both genders.
This usually celebratory event will no doubt carry a sense of loss. Mills students, faculty and alumni will say good-bye to what they revere as the campus’ unique and close-knit culture of learning, inclusion and women’s empowerment.
For this occasion, the enduring messages of Ward’s writing should resonate, Mills officials say. The characters in her novels, “Salvage the Bones” and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” and in her memoir, “Men We Reap,” undergo monumental difficulties. But they “persist,” as Ward said in a 2018 commencement speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she is a professor of English.
“Mills was interested in having me talk about how you handle adversity, how you handle unexpected negative change but pick yourself up and move forward,” Ward said in an interview.
Ajuan Mance, a Mills professor of English and ethnic studies, said Ward offers other important messages for the Mills community. “In her writings, the voices of young Black women often represent hope and possibility, a theme that aligns her vision with the mission and legacy of Mills College, where students of all races and ethnicities are encouraged to find their voice, express their ideas, and change the world.”
Ward’s parents didn’t stay long in California. While her mother loved the Bay Area’s sense of “freedom” and its vistas of “cities rolling out over the hills,” her father missed “the close heat” of Mississippi and the familiarity of DeLisle, the wooded coastal town where her family has lived for generations.
Unfortunately, the couple struggled to provide for their growing family and eventually split. Ward writes about how it mostly fell to her mother to support her and her siblings by working as a maid to wealthy families in nearby Pass Christian.
Ward found a refuge in books and in the hope of escaping the blighted opportunities and what she has called the “casual racism” of her school. But as the first in her immediate family to go to college in the late 1990s, she didn’t realize the possibility of going to an elite university like Stanford until she received its brochure in the mail.
“After I got my acceptance letter, I visited,” Ward said. “I remember getting driven down Palm Drive, seeing Memorial Church shimmering in the distance because of the gold tiles on the church. I thought, ‘Oh God, how can I go anyplace else?’ It was like out of a fairy tale.”
The reality was something else, Ward admitted. She was a first-generation student at a campus with students from more affluent backgrounds. She felt uncertain, out of her depth and wasn’t ready to consider a career as a writer because that path didn’t seem practical.
That changed when other post-graduation jobs didn’t work out and after her younger brother, Joshua, was killed by a drunken driver in 2000. Ward started to write seriously, but she almost gave up due to struggles to get her first novel published, followed by the horrors of Hurricane Katrina.
In late August 2005, Ward was about to start teaching at the University of Michigan, after earning her MFA there. But she opted to stay with her family as they rode out what they expected to be just another storm. They had to escape a house filling with water so quickly that they feared they would drown in the attic.
“That entire experience was so rough,” Ward said. “I was really demoralized. I felt really hopeless. I had never experienced anything like that, where everything I knew and loved could be taken away from me.”
Fortunately, Ward decided to persist a little longer with writing, saying: “I heard my inner voice and it was like, ‘Just try one more time. Just try one more time.’ And so I did.”
Around the same time that Ward learned her first novel would be published, she was given a chance to return to Stanford in 2008 as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in writing. More self-assured this time and with a purpose, Ward used her fellowship to write the first draft of “Salvage the Bones,” which won her first National Book Award and propelled her to the top ranks of contemporary writers.
“I feel really lucky to have had an opportunity to return to Stanford, doing the kind of work I always dreamed of doing, and being welcomed into a community of writers, with whom I’m still friends with today,” Ward said.
More acclaim and opportunities have since followed, but, like her parents, Ward couldn’t resist the pull of DeLisle. She’s raising her two children, ages 9 and 5, there, even as she’s open about her love/hate relationship with Mississippi.
“I feel it’s something I’ll navigate the rest of my life,” Ward said. “This is a place of extremes. It can be a beautiful place It’s all about community, where it’s so welcoming and you can experience so much joy. But there’s a lot about this place that fights progress and is resistant to change.”
Ward spent the pandemic in DeLisle, mourning her husband, “my beloved.” He died of acute respiratory distress in January 2020, too early to be officially diagnosed as COVID, she said. She also pushed through her grief to work on her latest novel, about the New Orleans slave trade in the early 1800s. This weekend, she looks forward to the chance to reconnect with Bay Area writer friends.
“I really feel like I found an essential community for me, when I was living the Bay Area,” Ward said. “I felt like I found my people. This is going to sound hackneyed but I found three free thinkers, the people in believe in the power of art to create change.”
