Fresh Air - Through loss, Jesmyn Ward will always return to the word

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Jesmyn Ward  learned the term "respair" — the recovery of hope after despair — in 2020, shortly after her partner died suddenly. Her new book, ‘On Witness and Respair,’ is an essay collection on grief, motherhood and survival. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about writing through painful things and why she returned to her native Mississippi. Her previous National Book Award-winning novels are ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ and ‘Salvage the Bones.’  Also, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews an album from Tomeka Reid. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. There's a small town in coastal Mississippi called DeLeal. Mostly black, a few thousand people. Most of them have lived there for generations. My guest today, writer Jessman Ward, was raised there, and her family has been there for more than a hundred years. And for the last two decades, she's been writing about it. Her new book is a collection of 22 nonfiction essays that Ward wrote over 17 years. She wrote the first one in two. 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina took her grandmother's house. She wrote the last one in 2025, sitting with the loss of her brother and her partner and her grandmother, going back to the music she had grown up on, because as she writes, it was the only place that still felt like home. Ward is the first woman and the first black American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for her novels, Salvage the Bones, and Sing Unburied Sing. She is also a MacArthur fellow. The title of the essay collection is called On Witness and Respaire,

which is also the title of her 2020 Vanity Fair essay about the death of her spouse and the father of her children. Respaire is an English word that was nearly obsolete for a hundred years. It means the recovery of hope after despair. Jesmond Ward, welcome back to fresh air. It's good to be here. Thank you for having me. Re spare, that old word that is the definition, the definition being fresh hope after despair. The reader never sees it inside, and I'd love to know for you to talk to me about that word,

despair, a word that's from really the 1500s. How did you even find that word to be able to articulate the bigger thing that you wanted to say? I discovered the word in 2020, like during 2020 that year. You know, and I just lost my partner, the father of my children. I just lost him in January of that year. You know, the pandemic began. We were, you know, sequestered from each other. I was unfortunately spending a lot of unhealthy time on Twitter,

but it was serving a purpose. right, at the time, because, you know, we were also isolated. And back then, Twitter was one of those places, you know, as a social media app that we can go to where we could find a sense of community, a sense of togetherness, a sense of connection. You know, one of the reasons that I spent so much time on Twitter was because I was using Twitter as a tool to discover new writers. And so I was following a poet. And this poet was talking about how they had discovered the word despair and that they were sort of spending their time sort of meditating on it in this sort of terrible, really difficult moment, right? When so many of us, you know, no matter where we were in the world, we were dealing with, you know, the trauma of the pandemic, right? and of seeing the world remade into, you know, something that was very unfamiliar and scary.

And a lot of us, I think, you know, were feeling uncertainty. And I definitely think that a lot of us were feeling a strong sense of despair, you know. And so this poet was sort of talking about how they discovered this word and they were holding it close to them. And they would sort of return to it. And I was so struck by that idea, right, that there. There was a word that existed that was the opposite of despair. Before I even say this, I want to offer my condolences on the loss of your beloved as you call him. You describe him in this essay.

But I also was really struck by you finding this word at a time that was dark for a lot of people, but it was especially dark because you had literally just lost your beloved. right before we went into lockdown. So you were living at home with your children grieving together. Can you take me just a little bit to that moment and the things that you were doing to try to find your way as you are really sitting in your grief in isolation? Yeah, I mean, when my beloved died, I knew

that in my experience, the next two years would be just, you know, that I would be mired in the, you know, the terrible muck of grief, right? That I would sort of struggle with it, that time would escape me, that I would, you know, wrestle with. that constant pain and longing and loss. And because I'd had the experience of losing, you know, my brother, my sibling, you know, in my early 20s when he was 19. And so I knew that, that especially for me, that those first two years would be difficult. But I think having to navigate my grief. during the pandemic, when, I don't know, when the world that I thought that I knew and that I had

planned my life around suddenly did not exist anymore. You know, one world ended. And, And, you know, I've always been, I've always sort of struggled, I think, with depression, with despair, even before my brother died. But right before my partner died, I had reached this point in my life where, and probably in a large part, because I was, you know, sort of successful in my vocation, you know, as far as like the outside markers go. I had published, I had, you know, had been honored in various ways. And so there was a part of me right before my, right before my partner died, that that was actually, you know, optimistic in a way, right? That believed that I would continue to, you know, to do the work and to, you know, build my little family and nurture my little family and that things would continue to get better. It's a powerful thing to let yourself be optimistic after experiencing loss in a way, because you experienced the loss of your brother, but before that you had lost friends and other relatives and a fair amount of loss that might be more than the average person might experience. And there's an anticipatory grief that kind of lives with that, right?

where you don't quite let yourself feel wholly optimistic. And so this moment, this catastrophic thing that happens with your spouse dying, to step out of that optimism, is that what happened? Or tell me how that would happened. Oh, yeah, I just, I didn't step out of it. I feel like I, I mean, I just fell, right? I plummeted out of it. And I think that that is something that I still struggle with to this day, right? Like, losing my partner like that on top of all of the other, you know, sort of losses that I, that I experience and that I have to live with, I didn't believe in. I was no longer optimistic.

And a part of me, a very dark part of me, just felt like, you know, what is this, what is this for? Right? Like, I mean, is this, this is just a, life is just a, a senseless slide to the grave. Like, that's so dark. But that's what I felt like in those, you know, in those two years. Especially with having children in the house. Right. Right. I mean, that was one of the more difficult sort of aspects of losing my partner, right?

Because I had navigated life as a, you know, a sister who'd lost her brother, you know, a friend who's lost friends, a cousin who's lost cousins, right? you know, as a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter who'd lost, you know, grandparents and great-grandparents. But I hadn't, I still have, both of my parents were still alive, right? And I was sort of dimly aware that that kind of loss would reverberate through my children's lives. and I didn't, you know, as I was like wrestling with my own grief, right, here I have to, even though I feel you just, you know, completely devastated, right, and dark, yet I still have to remain present and try to, I don't know, to help my children to believe that, you know, to help my children to believe that, I don't know that life isn't all darkness.

Let's take a short break. But first, if you're having thoughts of suicide, help is available by calling or texting 988. That's the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Again, that number to call or text is 988. There's a moment in this essay, Witness and Respair, where I guess lack of a better term, the dam breaks for you. You know, you're in the midst of the, of COVID. And so to remind everyone, we're all at home sequestered and you turn on the TV and you see the crowds of people protesting over George Floyd's death.

Can you take me to those feelings you saw watching the people out there protesting all over the world? and what you were witnessing in that moment, that almost like it just completely overwhelmed you with emotion. Yeah, I mean, you know, so at that time, right, as I'm, you know, experiencing that first, like, terrible wave of grief. And I am also very aware of, I don't know, of, of more. my history, my family's history, my community's history, you know, what it meant to grow up and to be a black, to grow up Black in Mississippi, to be a Black Mississippian, to be a, you know, a Black Southerner. And so one of the sort of motivations for me in pursuing writing was this idea that I would push back against our erasure or what I understood as.

our erasure, right? And, and, you know, that was something that was, like, very clear for me, especially after, you know, like, after my brother died. That that was part of your purpose, right? Right, right. It was to, was to say, you know, like, no, like, we're here. We, we, you know, we live, we love, you know, because, I don't know, because especially, like, you know, In my brother's case, it just felt like he was erased, right? I mean, by the legal system who didn't hold the person who killed him responsible for his. Right. So to let the audience who doesn't know, your brother died by a drunk driver in a car accident,

and the person who was responsible for his death really did not receive the punishment that you believe that he should have. Right. Well, he wasn't charged with my brother's death at all. He was charged with leaving the scene of an accident. And that's it. That's what he received, you know, time five years for and some rest it was ordered to pay some restitution. And that's it, right? And so, and that felt like extreme erasure to me, I think, and only definitely cemented my understanding of what it meant to be.

to be a, you know, a black person in the South, right? To face the erasure of our humanity again and again and again and again. You know, so this is the context that I was coming to the summer of 2020 with. And, you know, and I felt like in my lifetime, you know, I was born in 1977, I'd never witnessed a movement or a, you know, a collection, right, of people coming to together of them, you know, sort of bearing witness to that systemic erasure and then standing up and pushing back against it, right? Like, I think that definitely happened, you know, during the, in the Civil Rights Movement,

and then in the 70s, right, with the Black Power Movement, but I didn't, I'd never seen it. I'd never witnessed it. And so it was, I think, I think. shocking for me to see, you know, to see people who were not black and, you know, who were not Southern and who, you know, were, you know, people from all, from, you know, all kinds of people, right, who had nothing in common with George Floyd, but people suddenly, like, sitting with that history, sitting with that fact, sitting with that erasure and saying, we see you. Yeah, that was a very overwhelming experience for you, for maybe the Black American who has really lived in this country, always having to prove and show and say this is real.

And so people are actually saying this is real. We see it. We are standing out and we are, we are, we are, we are, standing as witnesses. Right. And that part of that essay was really powerful to me because now we're in this moment. And I wonder, how do you hold the truth now that the grieving we saw as collective action in a way has turned against itself and kind of helped trigger and create this massive campaign to end civil rights? You know, it's, um, this is difficult for me to talk about because I haven't, you know, on the day that they, that the Tennessee legislature was erasing the seat, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I just. I just, I don't, it was, it was so difficult that I found myself crying. And I mean, I know that I wasn't the only one, right, who felt this sense of loss and this felt,

this sense of, you know, devastation to know that, you know, that this, that, you know, that this, that, you know, so many people who fought, you know, for this legislation and for, you know, for these rights, like, you know, with one, with a vote, like they were, that work was undone, unraveled. And I don't know, it's some, it's difficult for me to navigate. And I can almost hear your thoughts as you're trying to find them. Because like when you're sitting there and you're watching all these people, it's like you had just lost your spouse and dove deep into a depression and despair after losing him after being so optimistic. And then there's this other moment of optimism. Right.

And is it now another well of despair or are we in rest, you know? I don't know. You know, I, in the past year and a half, I continued to return. turn to the work. But then that's what I've done my entire life, right? So when I lost my brother, I did that. Losing my brother was actually one of the things that made me commit to pursuing this, right? To writing. And then, you know, after Hurricane Katrina, when I was in another moment, I think, where I thought about quitting, right, I returned to the writing, right? And I returned. and to what I think, like the good that I think that the writing is accomplishing in the world, right?

And then after my partner died, again, like I almost quit, and then I returned to the writing. And I feel that way, I feel that very strongly now, right, that, you know, because so much about what is happening right now feels, just as it did, you know, in 2020, it feels like it's, outside of my control, right? There are powerful actors everywhere who do not have my best interests or, you know, people who are like me, our best interests at heart. And what I can do in order to push back against that is I can return to the word and believe in the power of storytelling and believe that storytelling leads us to empathy and leads us to connection. And that, and that is a good thing. And then I can just sit down every day and, do the work. I've worked harder in the past, you know, year and a half than I've worked in a long

time. Our guest today is award-winning author, Jessamine Ward. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. I want to talk about the essay raising a black son in the U.S. You wrote this, and it was published in 2017 for The Guardian. And at the time of this essay, you were, I think you were 40 years old, and you had a two-year-old daughter, and you were pregnant with your son. And in this excerpt I'd like to have you read, you were about to undergo a battery of tests and also learn the gender of your child. As the months progressed, I developed gestational diabetes and agonized over the prospect of another premature birth. I wanted my second child to have the time in the womb my first didn't.

I wanted to give the second the safety and time my body failed to give the first. I also underwent an entire battery of tests for genetic abnormalities. A bonus of one of the tests was that I would learn the sex of the child I was carrying. When the nurse called to deliver my test results, I was nervous. When she told me I was having a boy, my stomach turned to stone inside me and sank. Oh, God, I thought, I'm going to bear a black boy into the world. I fake joy to the white nurse and drop the phone after the call ended. Then I cried.

Thank you for writing that and for reading it. And I will say, Jasmine, that I have never read that in a way that captures this feeling, the moment that you heard those words, that it's a boy, that the first emotion was grief. And why was it important for you to find the language to name? name it. You know, I think one of the reasons it was important for me to find the language to name it was because, one, because I was being honest about that experience, right, and what it felt like to hear those words and to, you know, given what I know of this country and of this region, to bring a child into that, right? A boy in particular. A boy, right.

And I think, you know, one of the reasons that it's important for me to write towards what hurts, to write towards grief, to, you know, to write towards pain, really, is because I know that other people are experiencing this, right? I mean, you know, whatever, when I'm writing towards, you know, grief or hurt or loss, I know that other people are struggling. I mean, maybe in a, you know, a different version, right? But I know people are struggling with that same thing. And I, you know, think back to, especially to when I lost my brother, right? And I was in my early 20s and I knew next to nothing, right? And I was searching for art that could help me understand what I was living through, and that could help me to help me better bear it. And I couldn't, it was difficult for me to find work that did that.

And so, you know, that's part of what I want to do, right? I want to write about these issues because I know that people. are living through them and I think about, you know, what I wanted someone to share with me, right? How I wanted someone to connect with me when I was living through whatever I was living through. And so, you know, that's one of the reasons it was important for me to write that essay, even though, you know, it feels uncomfortable. It can feel uncomfortable. This essay goes on to talk about how when you found out you're having a boy, you also thought about your brother. And I just, I'm curious, what have you told your children about their uncle, your brother?

I bring him up a lot. You know, they know that he died before they were born. You know, they've seen pictures of him. I will, part of the reason that I bring him up is because, you know, with them, you know, with them often is because anytime something happens that reminds me of him or reminds me of something that he said to me, you know, or some experience that we had together, like, I'll just relate it, you know, and in doing so, you know, I think I do it because, you know, there are some stories, there are some experiences that I had with my brother that we had together. Like, it was

just the two of us, right? Only you all know them. Right. Yeah. Right. Only we know them. And when I die, I don't want those stories to dissolve with me or to disappear with me. And yeah, so I share them with my kids.

And there are some stories, there are some things that I know about my or that I experienced with my brother that maybe my younger siblings. were too young, you know, to remember. And so I'll, you know, share those stories with them. Like, it's important for me, you know, that even though he isn't here, and even though my children will never have the chance to meet him, you know, that I, that I try, you know, to communicate something of who he was and of how much I loved him and just enjoyed him. you know, to them.

You're right that you hope that your son sees 12 and 21 and 40 and 62, that he and his sister is there to bury you. And that part just moved me so much because I don't even know, even as a mom, if I've thought about that moment where I will be gone for them. You know, I think I think about it. I think about death a lot. You know, and, you know, maybe that's, I think, given my past, you know, that's a logical, I think, response for me, right? Because, you know, when I was in my early 20s and, you know, my brother, again, was hit and killed by a drunk driver when he was 19, right?

when you're in your early 20s, like you just think, you never think that anything bad will happen to you and to the people that you love, right? I mean, unless you've already experienced it even earlier, right? But, I mean, at that time, I just didn't, I thought bad things will happen to other people. They won't happen. You know, I don't know. They won't happen to us. And then my brother died. And then, you know, my friends died.

And then my cousin died. And then I, I don't know, I sort of understood, you know, I understood that, you know, when you're young, sometimes, you take life for granted and you take the continuation of life for granted. And so I always think about, I think about death a lot because I know how abrupt and unexpected it can be. You know, Jasmine, I know that you've gotten some criticism for living in this space, for sitting in these hard things that are just reality, but they're hard. I mean, I think I saw one criticism of someone saying trauma porn. But what does it do for you in practical terms when you're out in the world for people to know you at such an intimate level through your most vulnerable, most painful parts of yourself? through your writing. How does being seen witnessed to this level feel? What does it do for you in managing what is a very hard stuff? That's a difficult question to answer.

I mean, it's good to feel like you're seen, right? Like it's good to be witnessed. It's good to feel like your story resonates with people and it makes them feel. I'm very invested in being honest. And so this work does that. And even though it can make me feel uncomfortable and sometimes very vulnerable because it's so intimate still, I believe that I'm fulfilling my responsibility to the people and to the place that I'm writing about. And I think that I meet readers, right? And one of the, you know, most moving experiences for me was definitely when I was on book tour for men we reaped for my memoir, you know, which is all about my brother and like the loss of my friends, right?

And this is a very like individual, particular story, right, as far as like the details are concerned. And I began to meet readers, to meet people who would, you know, come up to the, you know, table and as I'm, you know, signing their books and we're having a conversation. And they would, you know, they would get very emotional. And they would say, I heard this over and again, they would say, I felt like you were writing my life, right? because they had, you know, they were struggling with some loss, some grief, right, some person who they love, that they're, you know, just trying to figure out how to, how to navigate it. And at first it was, like, hearing that is a little jarring because, you know, a memoir is so particular to the person who writes it and so particular to you. But then I realized, I was so grateful that they, that readers, you know, shared that sentiment with me because it made me feel less alone. You know, Jasmine, my mother lost her brother at 19 too, so I'm kind of like your children, you know.

And I asked her once naively, as a young adult, I asked her how often she thinks about him. And she said every day. And she told me that sometimes when she meets people, she wants to say, I had a brother. Because can you really know me unless you know that? and I've been sitting with that for years because I think like wow my mom never talked about her brother to me and did I ever this whole part of her that I just didn't know

that every day that was the thought that was running through her mind is her brother and your writing just really puts that in such focus for me that you writing about these things allows me to understand you to see you in such a fuller way And then to understand your mother in a different way, right? And to understand, I don't know, what that, you know, that continuous, like, wrestling with grief, like what that experience was like, you know, for her.

And the fact that that was a private battle that she fought every day, you know, to sit with that loss, but then still figure out a way to live with it. Yeah. Our guest today is award-winning author, Jessman Ward. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. Your parents had this same relationship with Mississippi that you do. I find this fascinating.

They left and then they came back. And Mississippi is such a... The state has hurt your family for generations. And every generation has gone back. What is it about Mississippi that pulls you home? You know, we've had conversations about Mississippi and about California. And, you know, my mom, she really, you know, like, my mom won't leave, I think, in part for the reason that me and my sisters, I think, struggle with leaving because it was the last place that we knew our brother, right, and that she knew her son. And so I think that that makes it really difficult, right, for us to, I don't know, to live in another place, right, away from this place where, you know, where this is the last place that he was alive.

But my mom has also said that if she could do it over again, that she would not have returned to Mississippi when we moved back when I was three. And she was pregnant with my younger brother, right? Who's her second child? You know, that she would have stayed in California. My mother, mother, she really loved it there in the Bay Area. You know, I think she felt a sense of sort of freedom, a lifting of that weight, right? There's also the possibility of another story, you know, especially with your brother. Right.

Like, you know, and I'm pretty sure she thinks about that too, right? Like, would he have lived past 19? What would his life, you know, look like now? Would she have been able to create sort of more opportunities and different choices for him if we would have remained in the Bay Area? I don't know. So I chose to return because I, you know, this is the place that inspires me. This is the, you know, these are the people, right?

The community, my family. My extended family, like they inspire my work and inform the stories, you know, that I tell. And so I just, I wanted to be in that place and to see if I could create in that place. And then also I felt like working as a writer and living as a writer in Mississippi would keep me honest. because I'm living around the people who I'm writing about so it's more difficult for me to you know for me to gloss over the details

and for me to you know make the story easy and for me to you know like I think if I were farther away and more disconnected from that my family and my community in this place that you know that that you know that it might make it easier right for me to begin to gloss over the facts, you know, of what life is like for the people who I love.

The closing essay in this book, it's called You Tell Your Story, You Survive. And you first delivered this as a lecture in 2019. You give a name to a verb that you've been reaching for, kind of, I feel like you've been reaching for it, salvage. And the word is from, your national book award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, and you write a very particular and interesting reason why you love that word. Can you read a little bit of why? Sure.

When I settled on the title for Salvage the Bones, one of the reasons I was so invested in using the word salvage is because it is so close phonetically to the word savage. At home, young people in my community have redefined the word, have stripped it of its racist meaning and instead recast it. They call themselves savages and declare that they are resourceful. They call themselves savages and declare that they have the courage necessary to fight the systems that seek to devalue them.

And not only will they survive, they will thrive in spite of it. Wow, that connection. You in words, you know, you're finding these connections here between salvage and Savage, which is also a word that has been sort of taken and owned in a pretty powerful way as well. Yeah. I mean, I feel like them sort of remaking and using the word savage just says something about their resilience. It says something about their scrappiness, you know, really all of it, right?

I mean, you know, because one of the things that I hold on to and that I attempt to return to throughout my life is this understanding that we have survived what we have, right, through generations, because we are scrappy, right? Because we are resilient, because we embrace hope, because we hold on to the belief that life is worth living. it is worth fighting for, that we can work our way to a better tomorrow. And I see that in their reclamation of that word, right? It's just like the latest iteration of it to me. Jessman Ward, thank you so much. Thank you. Jessman Ward's new essay collection is called On Witness and Respair.

Coming up, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews a new album, from cellist and composer Tamika Reid. This is fresh air. Cellist and composer Tamika Reid has a distinctive sound, both as a player and a writer. Jazz critic Martin Johnson says her instrument is uncommon in jazz, though no longer rare. Reid, who won a MacArthur in 2022, has two new recordings out, one is a sidewoman to pianist Greg Taborn, also a MacArthur winner, and another with her long-standing quartet. Martin says her music often has a bounce to it, as if her cello can exaggerate and accelerate the sound of a walking bass. But the bounce, he says, is only the beginning.

Sprite isn't a word often associated with the jazz avant-garde, a style more commonly linked with either aggressively loud dissonance or austere meditative music. But Tomiko Reed would like to change that. Her quartet makes music full of movement inspirations, modern dance or child's play. The cascading figure there on the title track of her new recording, dance, skip, hop, feels like sunny afternoon hopscotch.

And later in the track, you can hear the magic of the band's arrangements. No one player dominates the others. All four members of the quartet contribute equally to an appealing hole. Reed first recorded with this band 11 years ago, and the rapport and instrumentation allows them exceptional range. That's 2019 MacArthur scholar Mary Halverson on guitar, drummer Toma Fujiwara, and bassist Jason Rebke. At times they sound like a string trio with a perceptive percussionist, and at others they have an austere intensity of a chamber ensemble, as they illustrated on Aways for CC and CC.

Reed has appeared on several dozen recordings in recent years, but one of the most compelling was released this January. Dream Archives is by the pianist and composer Craig Taborne, and it features the cellist and drummer Chess Smith. On this track, Feeding Maps to the Fire, we can hear Reed's distinctive accents to Taborne's rhythmic keyboard playing. Reed grew up in the greater Washington, D.C. area, but her career really took off when she moved to Chicago in the 2000s. She immersed herself in both classical and jazz scenes and found her voice as an improviser. She was inspired by classic works like the bassist Oscar Petterford's 1960 departure, My Little Cello, and by contemporary players like Deirdre Murray. Now Tomika Reid belongs to an array of cellist in jazz, such as Akua Dixon, Marika Hughes, and Fred Longborg home, who are expanding the sonic possibilities in the genre. Jazz critic Martin Johnson writes for the Wall Street Journal and Downbeat.

He reviewed Dance Skip Hop. the new album by cellist and composer Tamika Reid. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, how can a politician lie to the electorate and not face legal consequences? Even a lie as consequential as President Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election? And a new book, Andrew Weissman, explains how he got here

and suggests ways to hold politicians accountable. Weissman was a lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Our Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Roberta Shorak directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Muslin.