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.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
This quote can be shared when discussing community values during challenging times.
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?
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.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
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.
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.
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.
My life had been very work-orientated, and all in close-up. Once I had the family, it went into sudden widescreen.
You have to pay attention to who you are. You need to know your family history as well as you can. It is important for young women to have preventive care. If you catch any women's cancers early it's the difference between life and death. Do you really want to leave your kids without a mother?
I need to stop carving out four-hour chunks to do random things and go home and watch my children grow up.
The three things you can offer your children to change them: attention, appreciation and affection.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.