Where the Line Bleeds (Ward)

Where the Line Bleeds
Jesmyn Ward, 2008
Agate Publishing
230 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781932841381

In Brief
Jesmyn Ward is an important new voice in American fiction. Her writing is distinguished by a simple, patient, and utterly focused attentiveness to the physical details of her characters and their lives. The strength and elegance of her debut novel’s story is timeless, but made new in the unfamiliarity (to most from outside this region) of the world she creates—country, but contemporary; poor and black, but rural, not urban.

Set in a rural town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Where the Line Bleeds tells the story of fraternal twins Joshua and Christophe, who are graduating from high school as the novel begins. The two boys both anticipate and dread their lives as adults. Joshua finds a job working as a dock laborer on the Gulf of Mexico, unloading cargo.

But Christophe has less luck: unable to find a job, and desperate to alleviate his family's poverty, he starts to sell drugs. Joshua does not approve, but his clumsy concern fractures the twins' relationship. When their long-missing addict father reappears, he provokes a shocking confrontation between himself and the brothers—one that will ultimately damn or save them.

Where the Line Bleeds is unforgettable for the intense clarity of how the main relationships are rendered: the love but growing tension between the twins; their devotion to the slowly failing grandmother who raised them, and the sense of obligation they feel toward her; and most of all, the alternating pain, bewilderment, anger, and yearning they feel for the parents who abandoned them—their mother for a new life in the big city of Atlanta, and their father for drugs, prison, and even harsher debasements. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—DeLisle, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A. Stanford University; M.F.A, University
   of Michigan 
• Awards—Farrar Playwrighting Award; 5 Hopwood Awards;
   Stegner Fellowship, Stanford.
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, LA

Jesmyn Ward is from DeLisle, Mississippi. The first person in her family to attain a college degree, she received a BA in English and an MA in Communication from Stanford University. In 2005, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Farrar Playwriting Award and five Hopwood Awards, as well as an honorable mention in Zoetrope magazine’s 2004 All-Story Short Fiction Contest.

Her first published short story appeared in the fifth (January 2008) issue of A Public Space. She teaches at the University of New Orleans, and has just been awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford for 2008. (From the publisher.)

More
(From a 2008 interview with Agate Publishing.)

Q: When did you decide you wanted to become a writer?

A: I grew up black and poor in the South in the 80s. Where we lived, we only got two channels on the television: ABC and PBS. Whenever my brother and my cousins and my sisters and I were not outside playing, I was reading. I knew I wanted to write by the time I was twelve.
That naïve need to create was transformed in high school. I went to a small, private, majority-white and upperclass school for five years. For much of that time I was the only black girl in the school. There was a profound disconnect between my poor, rural, brutal, beautiful black town and the privileged world of my high school. Kids called me nigger in the halls, and sat on the desk in front of me and taunted me with nigger jokes. What would it take for these kids to see me and the people of my community as human beings? As equals?

When I was in college, I tried to get away from my love of writing and stories. Everyone told me writing was impractical. But every time I explored a major other than/ English, I would literally get knots in my chest. But when I was in an English class, reading Shelley or Hemingway or Adrienne Rich or Toni Morrison, I felt as if I was doing something right. I finally realized that I couldn't fight it—that I had to write, because there was beauty, truth, and hope in the world, because writers were able to communicate that through writing, and because that is the responsibility I feel as a writer.

Q: What inspired you to write this story?

A: When my younger brother died seven years ago, at the age of nineteen, I decided to stop being afraid; I decided to write seriously. I applied to an MFA program at the University of Michigan and while there I began working on this novel. I wanted to write the life that my brother might have lived.

Q: In what ways did your own experiences growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast affect how you created this book?

A: The small town I grew up in (where everyone is related to everyone else), the back roads and the casinos, the bayou and the Gulf and the Bay and the rivers and the woods and the storms, all of these things affected my style, and also spurred my desire to write this book. There was a sense of desperation to the process, too, driven by the fact that I grew up poor, and still feel poor. At Michigan, I was aware that I had limited tools and limited time, and I was desperate to do the best that I could with the time and tools that I had been given. I was desperate to get it right, to get it down on the page, to make it true.

Q: Do you feel that the lives of people who are like the characters in your book are underrepresented in fiction? In American culture in general?

A: Yes. I think that a large percentage of the population of the U.S. is like the people in my book: poor, rural, struggling. It's hard for me to find many contemporary writers who write about places and people like this; to see them reflected on movie screens or televisions is practically impossible. However, they are often overrepresented in music, particularly hip-hop. So much of hip-hop is geared toward exaggeration, especially of people’s ideas of what will sell, but hip-hop does contain some truth—of course.

Q: Which writers have influenced you most?

A: The writers who have influenced me most are those who write about ordinary people fighting and surviving through extraordinary circumstances: William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Jean Toomer. They also taught me how important place can be in fiction. Poets like Li-Young Lee and Louise Erdrich taught me to pay particular attention to language, to rhythm, and to the power of the word. Ernest Gaines' work is so evocative of rural Louisiana, and of the hard truths of living there. Junot Diaz is so in tuned to his characters' lives. The same goes for Edwidge Danticat. And of course, the writers I studied with at the University of Michigan were instrumental in my development as a writer.

Q: You earned both BA and MA degrees at Stanford—how do you feel about returning there this fall as a newly minted Stegner Fellow?

A: I am suffering from several feelings I felt as a college freshman: awe at the prospect of working with such amazing writers, nervous excitement at wondering if I can cut it, and anticipation at being given the opportunity to create.

Q: What do you hope that readers will get out of Where the Line Bleeds?

A: I want Joshua and Christophe to stay with these readers after they close the book. I want them to feel as if they were friends with these young, black, poor kids for a while. I want them to fall in love with the characters and with Mississippi, and to see the people in this place as human beings and not drug dealers or loafers or niggers. I want them to find beauty, truth, and hope. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews
A remarkable first novel...a lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted.
Anna Mundow - The Boston Globe

Her prodigious talent and fearless portrayal of a world too often overlooked make her novel a powerful choice for our seventeenth Essence Book Club Recommended Read.
Essence

I feel like I have read the debut work of the next Faulkner, or Capote, or O’Connor, a great Southern writer whom my children might some day read in their college classes.
Kenneth Jones - Oxford Eagle

The greatest strength of this novel is Ward's ability to capture in perfect nuance the smallest gestures and details of setting in order to bring the world she depicts to life, often through the wordless way in which the characters communicate.
Jennifer Deitz - Palo Alto Weekly

Impoverished twins living along the Mississippi Gulf Coast struggle to survive after high school in Ward's starkly beautiful debut. Abandoned by their mother and raised by their loving but ailing grandmother, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle know job prospects are slim in rural Bois Sauvage, so they spend their days playing basketball and flirting with the local girls. Eventually, even with no work history, Joshua is hired to work on the docks, but Christophe falls in with the brothers' drug-dealing cousin. Too ashamed to admit that he spends his days in the park selling marijuana, Christophe secretly contributes to the family's expenses with regular "deposits" to his grandmother's purse. But when Christophe decides to start selling more dangerous drugs, tensions between the twins grow, and the arrival of their long-absent drug addict father sparks a violent confrontation. A fresh new voice in American literature, Ward unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope.
Publishers Weekly

African-American twins Joshua and Christophe graduate from high school and try to find jobs. While Joshua has success becoming a dockworker, Christophe is less fortunate and desperation eventually finds him turning to drug dealing. The teens are loyal to their grandmother, who raised them after their mother moved to Atlanta to start a new life and their addict father disappeared. While this plot (and the book's cover) may be reminiscent of an urban fiction title, the setting is unique-rural Mississippi-and the writing is distinctive. Ward's beautiful language allows the location and characters to come alive, while her dialogue, written in a Southern vernacular, adds further texture. The plot is as leisurely as a hot Mississippi summer day, and although not much happens until the somewhat violent and surprising ending, this fully realized character study will appeal to teens who can see themselves here or who are interested in discovering realities far from their own lives. —Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
School Library Journal

In her debut, Ward successfully escapes first-novel awkwardness, obviously knowledgeable of and comfortable with the milieu in which she sets her narrative: a hardscrabble town on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Local language, personal relationships, teenage angst, the male psyche, and the grind of poverty all ring authentic as the author positions two male twins, at the point of their high-school graduation, taking divergent paths as they seek to make their way in the world.... A resonant novel for any reader. —Brad Hooper
Booklist

Blues on the bayou, and blood to boot. The piney woods of southern Mississippi aren't much of a place. Everyone knows everyone's business, nobody has enough to do, and in between hurricanes there's only trouble to get into. Ward's first novel opens with Christophe and Joshua DeLisle, fraternal twins, preparing to jump into the swirling waters of a muddy river-to cool off, not to kill themselves. It's a portentous moment, for just as each will jump differently, so will their lives take a different course. Caring for an ailing grandmother and just out of high school, the boys are holding their own in this backwater world until temptation presents itself: Joshua finds himself with some folding money after finding a job on the wharves, Christophe with yet more folding money after he takes up selling a little weed after not finding licit work. Danger insinuates itself in the form of the boys' long-absent father, a bad actor with a mean drug habit who likes stronger blends than Christophe has to sell, and the story thenceforth takes turns that can be seen coming from a long way off. Ward's plotting is predictable, but her story is closely observed, full of telling details: "Christophe had fallen asleep in the middle of counting his money, and was stretched out with his arms thrown over his head as if he had been surprised, his mouth open, the bills ragged and bunched underneath him." The author, a native of the Mississippi coast, serves up a world that has been little depicted: the rural African-American South, a place of grinding poverty but enduring loyalties, tragic but somehow noble at the same time. A promising debut.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Where the Line Bleeds:

1. Talk about the influence of grinding poverty on the human spirit, particularly young African American men. Consider its impact on the characters of this book.

2. How are the twins different from one another...and what indication of those differences do we see from the opening pages of the novel?

3. Discuss the impact that their parents' dual abandonments had on the two boys. How different might their lives have been with the presence of one or both parents?

4. Why does Christophe take the path he does? Was their an inevitably to his choice...did you see it coming? Was the plot from that point fairly predictable, or were you surprised by the later developments?

5. What is the significance of the book's title? What does it mean?

6. In the last question from the interview above, Ward says she wants readers to fall in love with her characters and to see them as human beings...not just drug dealers and loafers. What do you feel about her characters? Can you view them as struggling, flawed human beings but still worthy of our caring? Or not?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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