Reading Salvage the Bones as Ecofiction
Derek F. DiMatteo
August 20, 2025
Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, National Book Award winner in 2011, is about a poor family in a Black community in rural Mississippi that is preparing for hurricane Katrina. The main storyline—a family drama with multiple subplots—unfolds in parallel to the impending storm, its climax coinciding with the storm’s brutal arrival, its denouement tenuously proffered in the storm’s aftermath. As climate fiction, the novel redirects attention from imagined futures (often postapocalyptic climate dystopias) toward a vividly rendered present that foregrounds the effects of climate change on some of the more vulnerable members of society. By focusing on the present, Salvage the Bones reminds readers that climate change is now a powerful force that we downplay at our own peril.
The novel’s protagonist and narrator is the fourteen-year-old girl Esch (pronounced eshh), who lives with her three brothers and her father in the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel takes place over 12 days: the ten days leading up to the hurricane, the one day the hurricane hits them, and the day after. During the first ten days, Esch and her brothers Randall, Skeetah, and Junior navigate their intersecting relationships and goals: Esch’s desire to make Manny love her rather than just use her, Randall’s desire to get a basketball scholarship, Skeetah’s desire to use his pit bull China’s new litter as a way to solve his family’s financial problems, and Junior’s desire to be included as an equal. The four siblings must also confront the limitations of their father’s power after he loses several fingers in an accident a few days before the storm hits. They live through the storm, but the events of those days place each of them into a new relationship with the world.
Salvage the Bones is often critiqued for trading in negative stereotypes about Black people and for verging on misogynistic despite being written by a Black woman. In this regard, Ward’s novels have been compared to the work of Black authors such as Sapphire and her novel Push, which is lampooned in Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, while in Erasure’s film adaptation Jesmyn Ward is the target. As for critiquing Ward for trading in Black stereotypes, I can understand that perspective: the family is well below the poverty line, teetering on starvation; the father is a drunkard that works odd jobs; Esch is 14, promiscuous, and pregnant; Randall sees basketball as his way out; and Skeetah fights his pitbull against other pitbulls owned by other Black community members. At the same time, their situation and activities are not romanticized or played for pity or spectacle, and the characters are accorded dignity and are mostly well developed. And this family is not meant to be representative of the rest of the community.
Oddly (because completely opposite in terms of implied admiration), the other comparison that I’ve heard made is to Toni Morrison. I enjoyed Salvage the Bones, but I wouldn’t go so far as to compare Ward to the peerless Morrison. I cannot imagine Morrison using as many similes comparing people to nature as Ward does throughout the novel. The most egregious overuse is when Ward uses five such similes on a single page, comparing blood running down the father’s thigh to “a starving stream,” spreading over his skin “like a jellyfish,” the white hair on his head “wispy […] like dandelion fluff,” eyes “clear and shiny as the glass water jugs,” and gauze taped around the wound “like a webworm moth nest wound tight in a pecan tree” (p. 132). And yet, the very aspects of the novel that lend themselves to these critiques can also be read as elements that contribute to the novel’s impact as ecofiction.
As ecofiction, Salvage the Bones makes two fairly important points. The first is about the impact of climate change on those in poverty. Seeing on TV broadcasts the many people stranded on rooftops and in trees after the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, a common accusatory question that armchair critics voiced was “why didn’t they just leave? They were told to evacuate!” It is easy to say this from the comfort of a middle-class home with two cars and money in the bank. But some families did not have the financial resources to leave. In the case of Esch’s family in the novel, even if the five of them plus China and her puppies were able to all cram into a car, they barely had money for gas let alone for a hotel room or for food—these were folk who scrounged eggs for breakfast by looking through the underbrush. The novel in effect engaged in a type of environmental justice as recognition by making visible a class of people who are frequently forgotten. By depicting Esch’s family’s struggles to survive, the novel engages in a kind of environmentalism of the poor (c.f. Martínez-Alier, 2003).
The second important contribution as ecofiction that this novel makes is to reduce the distance between humanity and the rest of the natural world. It decreases this distance by depicting Esch’s family as close to the land, by juxtaposing the behaviors of humans and non-human beings (e.g. Esch’s pregnancy and China’s pregnancy, the scavaging and stashing of food by squirrels and the siblings), and by consistently using figurative language comparing humans to non-human elements of nature (as discussed earlier). Together these strategies bridge the distance that artificially divides nature and culture, and does so in a way that is more visceral and captivating than reading a philosophical text, even one written as accessibly as William Cronon’s classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness.”
Ultimately, Salvage the Bones is a novel that is worth reading as ecofiction despite the criticisms levied against it. I would recommend it, particularly if readers are made aware of the type of story ahead of time. Some members of our book club were caught off guard by the depictions of a 14-year-old having sex, as well as some of the misogynistic ideas espoused by certain male characters—despite the potentially feminist aspects of the story as figured by the repeated references to Medea in Greek mythology and Esch’s own rejection of her earlier dependence on the male figures in her life.
References and Further Reading
CBS. “New Orleans after Katrina: A tale of two cities” article and video.
CBS. Katrina hub.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 7–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059.
Everett, Percival. Erasure. University Press of New England, 2001.
Martínez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Penguin Random House, 1987.
National Geographic. “Hurricane Katrina Day by Day.” [YouTube].
Saphire. Push. Penguin Random House, 1996.
Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Alaimo and Hekman (Eds.), Material Feminisms, Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 188–213.
Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. Bloomsbury, 2011.
Wikipedia. “Environmentalism of the Poor.” Accessed 10 August 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_of_the_poor.