The best books for understanding the American South

Salvage the Bones was the first Jesmyn Ward book I read, and I fell for 14-year-old Esch, who loves Greek myths and a boy named Manny. Set in the days before Hurricane Katrina, Esch and her beloved brothers live young lives full of – well, full lives, that’s the point. 

Ward told the Paris Review about living through Hurricane Katrina, “I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.”

Ward is an electrifying writer, and Salvage the Bones is an American classic. 

Sula is a slim book and not only my favorite Toni Morrison novel, but one of my favorite novels. Although set in Ohio, Sula reveals more about American history and American Southern history than most historical tomes. 

“What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal—for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate....”

Sula, a singular character in a singular novel by a singular writer.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild visited Louisiana many times in the years she spent researching this book, about Tea Party Christians in the small town south.

Hochschild is determined to cross what she calls the “empathy wall,” and she listens closely to residents’ resentments, which she records in ways that allow her subjects to reveal themselves and their thinking. I’ve heard arguments against this book, and most of them are less nuanced than the ones Hochschild leaves me with.

What better than a book that takes disagreements seriously and leaves you with some of your own? A book of scope and scholarship and humanity of the sort I wish there were more of.

In Edenton, North Carolina, about 45 miles from my hometown, Harriet Jacobs lived in a crawl space for almost seven years in the 1830s.

I never learned of her in the NC public schools I attended; she was erased from the history I was taught. Harriet Jacobs was a slave who had shirked the sexual advances of her owner by hiding in her grandmother’s garret, a “little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space.” Jacobs’s dark “loophole of retreat” was only nine feet long by seven feet wide.

Sometimes she heard the voices of her children nearby, but she could not call to them at risk of endangering everyone in the house. “How I longed to speak to them!” she wrote. The most extraordinary book I have ever read.

Faulkner is a problem, and for a Southern writer, he’s a problem that must be confronted.

The Bear is about the annual hunt for the “taintless and incorruptible” Old Ben, the legendary animal living along the Tallahatchie River. It’s also about ownership and inheritance and ‘manhood,’ filtered through Faulkner’s obsessions and nostalgia and limitations.

A story that taught me that grappling with, and arguing with, a work of literature is an unending struggle but sometimes a necessary one.