'On Witness and Respair' review: Jesmyn Ward bears witness

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once said. “It’s not even past.” Jesmyn Ward—another acclaimed Mississippi writer and a two-time National Book Award winner—knows the feeling, quoting Faulkner in her new essay collection, On Witness and Respair.

The reference appears in the author’s last entry, “You Tell Your Story: You Survive,” the Eudora Welty Lecture that Ward delivered at the National Press Club in 2019. One of three never-before-published speeches, the essay details the impact of growing up in DeLisle, Mississippi, which shaped her into “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison.”

A legacy in the making

Though several speeches have never been published, most pieces were originally published between 2008 and 2025 for outlets as varied as The New Yorker, the environmental literary magazine Orion, Vogue, Smithsonian magazine, and the introductions to assorted classic books.

As compelling as they may be—stories of her great-great-grandfather being shot and left to die by revenue agents in the woods, of her grandmother hiding in the trunk driving through a sundown town, of her brother being killed by a white drunk driver who was never charged with his death—the retrospective reveals some overlap in the narrative.

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Yet we bear witness, discovering how it feels, what it means, and why it matters to be poor and Black in the South. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately impacted poor Black Southerners, Ward and her family would not swim in the Gulf of Mexico. “The water cloaks the shoreline, and we are scared of what it holds,” she writes. “We do not swim in our cemeteries.”

“Respair” is an old, obsolete but beautiful word that means, as Ward defines it, “fresh hope after despair.” There’s plenty of that in these pages, too, of beauty, “bright and luminescent and pearly as a fish leaping out of the muddy bayou water.”