Tracking a family fleeing Katrina

Author’s life inspires novel

When Jesmyn Ward writes in “Salvage the Bones” about the cruelty of Hurricane Katrina or the terror of a pit-bull fight, she’s not relying solely on imagination. She and her family watched from a truck in a field as the Category 5 storm devastated her area of coastal Mississippi in 2005. Her father and brother raised and sometimes fought pit bulls, and as a child she saved her own life by repeatedly punching one as it attacked her. “Narrative ruthlessness” is what she calls her gift for creating visceral fiction from her own experiences.

Ward’s novel, a 2011 National Book Award winner and the 2016 Memphis Reads selection, describes the days leading up to the deadly hurricane for a broken family living on the remote edge of a town called Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. It is also the story of the heroic stand the family makes against the traumatic thing itself.

With neglect that amounts to abuse, the drunken father in “Salvage the Bones” barely maintains a house for his children — three sons and a daughter — after his wife dies in the birth of the youngest. The girl, 15-year-old Esch, narrates the story, beginning with the grueling birth of puppies to her brother’s beloved pit bull, an event that conjures memories of her mother’s home delivery and death. Esch soon realizes that she is pregnant, and though she is miserably in love with the father of her child, he views her merely as a source of sexual relief.

Ward was born in Oakland, California, and earned degrees from Stanford and the University of Michigan, but she grew up in the tiny town of DeLisle, the inspiration for Bois Sauvage, or “savage wood,” where both “Salvage the Bones” and her previous novel, “Where the Line Bleeds,” are set. In