Let Us Descend

Bees are a complex but important symbol for Annis, and she returns again and again to contemplate different aspects of their activity and relate it to human life. In the very beginning of the narrative, Annis eavesdrops on a lesson about bees that a tutor delivers to her white half siblings. He tells them that although Aristotle thought that the head of the hive was male, science has revealed the leader of a beehive to be female. Bees are ruled by queens. He goes on to add that bees have much to teach about labor and its fruits. Annis realizes that he is using bees as a metaphor to speak on behalf of “all of us who labor” (7), and she understands that he is drawing a parallel between the work of the bees and the work done on plantations like the one on which she herself must labor.

Annis thus understands bees to be matriarchal, and she understands that honey, the sweet fruit of all of their labor, is often stolen from their hives and that they have historically been exploited by humans. She sees that bees have their own lives to lead, lives that are easily dismissed by the very people who exploit them for their labor. She understands that although men like the tutor look at bees and see lessons to be taught and metaphors to be drawn, she sees beautiful, living beings who populate the clearing where she and her mother spar. She develops a friendly relationship with them, for they alight on her limbs as she lies resting. They communicate with one another and work together harmoniously, and so for Annis, bees are a symbol of identity and unity alike. This parallel builds throughout the course of the novel and becomes fully evident when, at the market for enslaved people in New Orleans, Annis finds what she thinks is a spear carved into the wall. Hopeful that her mother left it there for her as a message, she uses her awl to carve a small bee next to the spear. This bee symbolizes Annis and is her mark. Like the bees, she, too, was produced by a matriarchy; her labor is exploited, and her various gifts and her identity and self-worth are invisible to her exploiters. She wishes desperately to be able to dedicate her life to the sweetness of love, both the kind that she experiences with Sasha and the love of her mother. She is not a lesson to be taught or a metaphor for labor. She is a beautiful, living being.

References to Dante’s Inferno abound within this novel. Such intertextuality with works of canonical literature is common within Ward’s writing and serves as a point of connection between her various texts. These references add depth and meaning to the narrative and ground it within a particular literary tradition. In interviews, Ward has repeatedly pointed out that in white-authored texts, such engagement with classical literature is common, expected, and accepted. She notes that it tends to garner more attention in Black-authored texts because it is seen a step outside of the tradition of African American literature. However, she points out that she is Black, but she is also American, and therefore has indirect cultural ties to the established canon of classic literature that includes the works of Greek, Italian, and other world authors. Ultimately, such works are as much a part of her own heritage as African American literature is, and she wants her works to reflect that duality.

Ward’s repeated use of imagery from Dante’s Inferno is meant to draw a connection between the brutality of slavery and the realm of hell. If slavery had merely been, as contemporary revisionists would like to claim, an economic system, there would have been no sound reason to mistreat, starve, and brutalize enslaved people. According to the logic of capitalism, enslavers would have had every reason to protect and safeguard the enslaved humans whom they viewed through the framework of investment. Yet, Ward does depict such brutality, and her characters endure great mistreatment at the hands of their enslavers, just like the real-life historical figures they are meant to represent. Ward’s repeated references to Dante’s Inferno serve not only to remind of Annis’s fierce intellect and keen understanding of the world around her, but also to draw explicit connections between a figurative hell and a literal hell.

Her use of references to Dante’s Inferno, which is perhaps the text most frequently chosen to symbolize hell within the established canon of classic literature, adds depth and richness to her text. Annis overhears her white half siblings listening to a lesson on the Inferno, and although she characterizes these children as lazy and fundamentally uninterested in their education, Annis herself is sharp, quick to learn, and fascinated by everything that she can overhear at the schoolroom door. Although she initially sees a parallel to her own sire’s house in the tutor’s declaration, “let us descend” (34), the phrase will ultimately come to characterize her journey south to the markets of enslaved men and women in New Orleans. Annis returns to imagery from The Inferno again and again on her journey, finding myriad real-world examples of Dante’s images in the brutality that she and other enslaved African Americans experience at the hands of white men and white women alike.

The purpose of this imagery is twofold. Enslavement was hell, and Ward uses this imagery to paint a more impactful, in-depth, and intensely emotional portrait of that reality. The agonies suffered by the people in Dante’s representation of hell mirror those that Annis sees and experiences in North Carolina, on her journey through the swamp, and in Louisiana. However, Dante intended his own text to be a warning, a portrait of the extreme dangers posed by leading a sinful life. By contrast the “sin” Ward depicts is that of enslavement itself, and through her allusions to Dante, she suggests that the price of enslavement is not only the agony of those who were forced to live under its brutality, but also the massive and permanent stain on a country that still refuses to fully acknowledge the role that enslavement played in its history. “Hell” therefore represents both the conditions of enslavement and its long-term legacy.

Annis speaks with a number of spirits during the course of the narrative, chief among them the figure who, although she is not a direct embodiment of Mama Aza, uses Aza’s name when she appears to Annis. These spirits are not easy to characterize, and their actions cannot be interpreted in a straightforward manner. At times they are helpful, and at other times they become antagonistic, helping and befuddling Annis in equal measure. Her relationships with these spirits are troubled and ever-shifting. At times, the spirits seem to offer genuine council, and at other times, they seem to encourage Annis to give up and succumb to her despair. In a novel so focused on the representation of familial bonds, ancestry, and cultural legacy, it is jarring to encounter spirits who, although they are characterized as having an ancestral relationship to Annis, portray motives that are impossible to fully identify. Mama Aza in particular is complex, at times self-serving, and prone to fits of temper.

The spirits are one of the novel’s most complex elements, but their role in Annis’s narrative is a vital one, for their contradictory teachings nonetheless provide Annis with a source of inner guidance. Enslavement is a brutal way of life for Annis, and spirits also help her to find a strength borne of adversity and conflict. Because of their antagonism and their contradictory advice, Annis is forced to make her own decisions. They do not tell her what to do, nor do they force her to choose specific courses of action. Because of this reticence, Annis herself must learn how to make decisions, advocate for herself, and choose the right path. This is a far greater gift than the gaze of a benevolent fairy godmother who solves every problem magically. Instead, the spirits help Annis to discover her own agency, her own will.

The disorienting characterization of the spirits also speaks to the novel’s interest in complex, holistic representations of Black identity. The spirits are essentially representations of Annis’s ancestors. The one who calls herself Aza eventually reveals that she appeared to both Sasha and Mama Aza at one time or another. The actual spirit of Mama Aza appears to Annis in Louisiana, and Annis also speaks with a spirit who represents water. If these spirits are to be understood as the ancestors who, as Sasha notes, “always come when you call them” (14), then they represent beings who were once actual people. In death, these ancestors do not lose the many facets of personality that they had in life. They were surely complex, multivalent women capable of both good and bad. In death, they retain those qualities and thus become emblematic of the complexities of Black identity that persist in spite of enslavers’ attempts to eradicate and ignore them.