David Robinson-Morris
Review of Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds. Agate, 2008. The river was young and small. At its start it seeped from the red clay earth in the piney woods of southern Mississippi, and then wound its way, brown and slow, over a bed of tiny gray and ochre pebbles through the pines, shallow as a hand, deep as three men standing, to the sandy, green lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico. (1)
The epigraph begins Where the Line Bleeds, the 2008 debut novel by
Jesmyn Ward. Vivid in its description of a rural Mississippi landscape, the setting immediately segues into readers’ first introduction to the novel’s protagonists, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle, fraternal twins. As the narrative weaves through the lives of the brothers and other family members who reside in the town of Bois Sauvage (translated as “wild wood”), the characters reflect the contradictions inherent within their environment; the beauty and lushness of the terrain juxtaposed with a region barren of opportunity and the disquiet nature of hopelessness. In Where the Line Bleeds, Ward depicts the strained outlook for African American boys growing up in a small, rural, town in the deep South; an outlook that has rarely been properly written of and even lesser known to contemporary literary audiences. As the novel begins, the brothers are preparing to jump from a bridge that runs over the river. With their impending high school graduation, the jump can be read as both a baptism and as a sign of approaching changes in their lives. Each brother’s leap into the awaiting river below will be different from the other’s and for each, their rise to the surface will be equally different as well. This scene serves as the novel’s exposition, establishing the tone, and setting the story in motion for the respective paths Christophe and Joshua will assume. However, despite the apparent contrasts between the fraternal
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