112 pages • 3 hours read
Jesmyn WardA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
Introduction by Jesmyn Ward
“Homegoing, AD” by Kima Jones
“The Weight” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
“Lonely in America” by Wendy S. Walters
“Where Do We Go from Here?” by Isabel Wilkerson
“‘The Dear Pledges of Our Love’: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley’s Husband” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
“White Rage” by Carol Anderson
“Cracking the Code” by Jesmyn Ward
“Queries of Unrest” by Clint Smith
“Blacker Than Thou” by Kevin Young
“Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel)” by Kiese Laymon
“Black and Blue” by Garnette Cadogan
“The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” by Claudia Rankine
“Know Your Rights!” by Emily Raboteau
“Composite Pops” by Mitchell S. Jackson
“Theories of Time and Space” by Natasha Trethewey
“This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution” by Daniel José Older
“Message to My Daughters” by Edwidge Danticat
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Upon moving from Mississippi to California in 1969, Jesmyn Ward’s father was mistaken for a Latino man and a Samoan man due to his skin color and hair texture. In Oakland, he attended an all-black school after growing up in a small house in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
Like her father, Ward grew up a black child in the South as well. Once, when her father tried to make her stumble into a blonde white woman in a drug store line, Ward discovered the woman was her relative Eunice. “‘I thought you were white,’ I said, and she and my father laughed” (90). In that area, Eunice’s African heritage classified her as black, and she experienced racial prejudice from a young age.
Eunice witnessed attempts to redefine the term Creole without including those with African or Native American backgrounds. This exclusion, Ward writes, “erase[s] us from the story of the plantations, the swamps, the bayou; to deny that plaçage, those unofficial unions, during the time of antimiscegenation laws, between European men and women of African heritage had ever taken place” (91). African Americans find family trees difficult to make, as fewer records exist than those tracking European bloodlines, as Ward herself has experienced with her complex ancestry.
By Jesmyn Ward
Let Us Descend
Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward
Men We Reaped
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward
Salvage the Bones
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
Where the Line Bleeds
Where the Line Bleeds
Jesmyn Ward