Anna Hartnell's “When Cars Become Churches” begins by establishing a helpful context for understanding and fully appreciating the most recent gift to readers from Jesmyn Ward, her 2013 memoir titled Men We Reaped. In the wake of the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, and Eric Gordon, Ward's memoir is a critically important addition to our understanding of the fragility of the lives of young black men. These are lives that matter deeply to Ward and to the community of DeLisle, Mississippi – and because of Ward's fearless, honest, and emotionally searing story, they are lives that matter to her readers. She realizes one of the great achievements of literature: the transformation of the reader who looks at the other from a distance into a reader who sees with the other. As such, her work – especially Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped – helps to enhance affective and cognitive understanding of others and cultivate moral imagination.Footnote ¹

Hartnell congratulates Ward for having “written what many think is one of the most successful, if not the most successful, fictionalizations of Hurricane Katrina.”Footnote ² It is important to note that although Salvage the Bones is situated in the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina, it is not really about the disaster of the storm – and thus it is a book very different from all of the other Katrina books that those of us in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast used as part of a literary coping mechanism. The books about the storm and its aftermath that received the most attention were all written by white men, most of them published quickly in the wake of the event by journalists, academic historians, and essayists – full of rage and sorrow. In 2009 Dave Eggers published Zeitoun, the story of a Syrian immigrant in New Orleans who chose to stay in the city during the hurricane to help friends, neighbors, and abandoned animals. The result of his generosity and humanitarianism was to be arrested by the National Guard, imprisoned for twenty-three days without trial, and abused for “terrorist activities” – such as breaking into his own home. Zeitoun generated positive reviews, and Eggers scored big when universities chose the book for the first-year reading project because of its quietly powerful analysis of American–Islamic relations.

Ward tells Hartnell that in Salvage the Bones she wanted to convey the “human impact of the storm,” which was missing in other treatments of the event.Footnote ³ Although Eggers did focus squarely on the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, the book has been marketed and received as a story of a Syrian American family caught in the web of America's two biggest policy disasters: the hysterical war on terror and the tragically inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina. I am reminded of Hartnell's summary of negative assessments by numerous critics about the “failure of imagination” displayed in US-authored accounts of the 9/11 tragedy, fictions that “‘domesticate’ the crisis and fail to interrogate the notions of difference, otherness, and strangeness” that might begin to answer the incessant post-9/11question about why others hate the US.Footnote ⁴ Hartnell uses this observation to make the point that in insisting that US novelists turn to “an external other,” critics can overlook the crucial importance of depictions of characters “branded an internal other by a ruthless racist, neoliberal capitalist culture.”Footnote ⁵

In Salvage the Bones, Ward takes considerable risks in employing stereotypes connected with race and the South (e.g. a pregnant fifteen-year-old and pit bull fighting) to create a narrative of an internal other. Because the stakes were high, Ward felt that she had to be completely honest in her narrative, avoiding the temptation to love her characters too much and risk skirting the real.Footnote ⁶ She begins the book with scenes of a pit bull mother giving birth to puppies alive and dead, with the scene culminating in the dog's eating her afterbirth, a glistening blackish-purple, “looking like the inside of the last pig that Daddy had, that he slaughtered and emptied into a tub before making us clean the intestines for chitterlings: it stank so bad Randall threw up.”Footnote ⁷ The narrative is full of animal and human bodies bitten, bloodied, and broken; brutal dogfights and loveless, mechanical sex; dirt, sweat, heat, and humidity; an alcoholic father (in every way opposite to Harper Lee's beloved Atticus Finch), who leaves his motherless children to fend mostly for themselves, to survive on ramen noodles, yard eggs, and occasionally Vienna sausages or even squirrel. The scene of one of the boys hunting, skinning, and gutting a squirrel goes well beyond graphic. Survival is never pretty; it is savage.

Ward takes on the controversial subject of pit bull fighting and does not flinch. With all of the negative publicity of the scandal surrounding NFL player Michael Vick and the constant stream of accounts of pit bull maulings and killings in print media, this was a gamble. But she manages to pull it off by giving us a loving dog owner, who risks his own life for his dog. Still carrying the scars from being attacked by a pit bull when she was a child, Ward admits that her portrayal of dogs in Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped is ambivalent, conveying her own fear and admiration.

When Ward attended a white private school paid for by her mother's employer, students bullied her and even threatened to lynch her. She says that having that history in Mississippi made her want to bring readers to that place, a place with a people whose stories are universal stories: “In the end, it's about us as human beings trying to survive and make the best of what we have right here, right now.”Footnote ⁸ Therein lies the difference between Ward's treatment of the community of DeLisle and the treatment of Hushpuppy and the other backwoods inhabitants of the Bathtub in Behn Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar's 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. This Hurricane Katrina allegory received rapturous reviews from many critics for its originality and startling mix of the abjectly real and the fantastic. The six-year-old Hushpuppy is a survivor in a dangerous situation, due in large part to her growing up without a responsible parent, with her main companion being her alcoholic, abusive father who requires much more care than he can give. She survives through her mythic imagination, projecting her fears onto a collection of fantastic colossal beasts that she faces and conquers. This film ends up romanticizing the poverty and the feisty libertarianism of a utopic mixed-race community that lives on its own terms, free of government intrusion – drinking, dancing, eating seafood, and setting off fireworks (a Katrina allegory tailor-made for political conservatives).Footnote ⁹ The mythic elements of the film displace the absurdly fantastical portrayal of the Bathtub in the bayous where black folks and white folks simply groove together. Having lived in New Orleans for twenty-five years, I can confirm that this film's Louisiana is nowhere to be found – but the film's particular kind of wishful thinking made it the darling at Sundance. Although Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the Southern Wild are sometimes yoked together as two allegories of Hurricane Katrina that depict the ability of rural Gulf Coast communities to survive, they are nothing alike.

Hartnell observes that the line “We are savages” in Men We Reaped sounds like a reappropriation of conventional racist rhetoric. Ward responds that the term “savage” “has a different meaning for us. For us, it means that you're a fighter and that you're a survivor. And that you'll do what you need in order to survive.”Footnote ¹⁰ Significant is Ward's repetition of the phrase “for us,” because it stresses the gap, the difference between cultures in this literary transaction. Although she aims to tell universal stories, her narratives are unabashedly about individuals and communities who pose a challenge to easy empathy. The brilliance of Ward's writing is that she makes few concessions in her representations of lives situated at the periphery of the dominant culture. She feels a responsibility to write about the people of her community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast because there has not been a record of their voices.Footnote ¹¹ This resolute difference between her characters and the vast majority of her readers is central to Ward's success in cultivating the moral imagination. She probes not only that “gap between the American dream and the American reality,” which, as Hartnell reminds us, characterizes the American jeremiad,Footnote ¹² but also the gap involved in the process of moral imagination. By moral imagination, I refer to the necessity of imagination in bridging the gap between oneself and a stranger, with a sympathetic response grounded in the knowledge of incommensurable differences.Footnote ¹³ The feeling of pity is anathema to moral imagination because pity so readily stems from narcissistic pleasure. Ward's unflinching portrait of her life and the lives of those in her family and community disallows pity. She commands more from her readers.

In situating herself in the American literary canon, Ward discusses writers whose work influenced and inspired hers. She praises James Baldwin for personalizing issues and “show[ing] the reader how these larger issues really bear down on a person, and on people's lives.”Footnote ¹⁴ The same can be said of Ward's work. Men We Reaped is not only the backstory of Salvage the Bones; in fact, both work together to construct a full story – a necessary supplement – for such books as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.Footnote ¹⁵ Although Alexander's analysis is hard-hitting and compelling, many readers have come away feeling overwhelmed by a surfeit of facts and statistics that obscure human lives. Such a response often results in a shoring up of apathy as a defense mechanism. Ward, by contrast, makes us see and makes us feel.

Hartnell focusses on the importance of the car in Ward's memoir, emphasizing both the practical and the “magical” function. Ward states that cars represent freedom but also a place for introspection and intimacy for the young – “the ways that church can function, or has functioned in the past, in the community.”Footnote ¹⁶ In Men We Reaped, she explains that in order to avoid attracting police to their houses because too many cars were parked in the yards, black youth “from preteens to their twenties spent most of their twenties down at the park, a former field that sat between the priests's rectory and the graveyard.”Footnote ¹⁷ When they were not sitting in or on their cars, Ward and her siblings and friends spent their time occasionally driving to New Orleans, but more often driving nowhere in particular, just driving. The last few pages of the memoir feature a beautifully rendered, magical, unbearably poignant picture of Jesmyn's last ride with her brother Joshua, a few months before his death in a car wreck:

In her powerful memoir, the story that she could not outrun, Jesmyn Ward manages to convey hope without offering redemption – it is a story that bears down on her readers, perhaps not a story we would have sought, but a book that we needed, a gift indeed.