‘Something to save’: Rewriting Black Teenage Motherhood in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

Sinéad Moynihan persuasively reads Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, as an example of ‘literary recycling,’ showing how Ward engages in a ‘politically engaged model of rewriting’. While Moynihan focuses on Ward’s relationship to the white canon, this chapter considers the ways in which her writing addresses a lineage of Black literary foremothers and how, through this model of recycling, she reinvigorates the enduring trope of young motherhood. Salvage the Bones’ protagonist, Esch, recalls a long line of fictional pregnant Black girls in novels where recurring themes of troubled pregnancy and motherhood provide a fertile vein for the exploration of bodily and racial abjection. This chapter argues that Ward ‘recycles’ this motif: where it has been traditionally marred by tragedy, Ward’s writing resists the narrative of Black teenage motherhood as necessarily destructive. By refusing to dismiss Black teenage mothers as ‘waste’, she offers the potential of ‘a redemptive horizon’. A key aspect of Ward’s rewriting is her depiction of Black men who support Esch’s demands for agency. By considering her work through the lens of abject theory, alongside contemporary criticism on race and class, this chapter position’s Ward’s writing as a vital addition to this lineage of Black women’s writing.