“How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”
And so she returned. After earning her BA and MA at Stanford, Ward drove back to Mississippi, simply “tired of being away.” But her journeys did not end there. There were no jobs for Ward on the Gulf Coast, and she had to expand her search wider and wider until she found herself interviewing in New York. Tragedy abounded—five sudden deaths in four years—and after the death of her brother at the hands of a drunk driver, Ward went to the University of Michigan to work on her MFA, where the old ambivalence returned with physical manifestations, and she had difficulty breathing due to a combination of homesickness and grief. As she and her cousin drove south one summer, her congestion dissipated and then disappeared completely as they edged into the region: “By the time we crossed the Ohio River over to Kentucky’s rolling green hills, I could inhale and exhale through my nose.” Although home for Ward was “more populated by ghosts than by the living,” so, too, was her life away from the South haunted. “How could I know then,” she asked, “that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”20
Finally, in 2010, Ward succumbed to this smothering love, embraced her ambivalence, and returned home to coastal Mississippi. In 2018, she wrote that she understands the confusion about why she would choose Mississippi, of all places, with its history of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, fire hoses, and guns, and its present-day racism and systemic inequality. But Mississippi for Ward is also seafood boils on the Fourth of July, and her sister swaying to Al Green on a hot summer night, and her grandmother on a porch swing, telling stories to the children. It’s also the place where Ward wrote her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), in which, as National Book Award judges explain, “the living and the dead confront racism, hope, and the everlasting handprint of history.” That reckoning is not limited to the pages of her fiction. In Ward’s small town of Pass Christian, the local library has chosen The Fire This Time (2016), a book Ward edited about what it’s like to be Black in twenty-first-century America, for its reading program. She now envisions community dialogues on race, days filled with family, a hurricane-proof home “in a clearing of piney Southern wood,” a small garden, and neighbors who look after each other. And she hopes that, after her death, her children will see it as their “refuge,” as well. “I hope,” she wrote in Time recently, “that at least one of them will want to remain here in this place that I love more than I loathe, and I hope the work that I have done to make Mississippi a place worth living is enough.”21
When women writers flee the South, they often dedicate their life’s work to coming to terms with the simultaneously systemic and intensely personal traumas of being raised there. Writing from far away, they might offer the South the solution of woman-centered, self-sufficient Black communities, like Walker in The Color Purple. They might use the brutally honest retellings of trauma as therapy for the queer white working class, as Allison does in both her fiction and nonfiction. In their writing, they face down the wrongs wrought by the compounding, oppressive forces of white supremacy, socioeconomic discrimination, poverty, heteronormativity, and, as a common denominator of these varied experiences, the intergenerational demands that white southern patriarchy placed on these authors and their mothers and grandmothers. Ward’s recent relocation is a kind of “circulation,” a return to the South with the hopes of making good on the political promise of Walker’s itinerant process of reclamation begun in the early 1970s. While authors of previous generations had to leave to write about the South, Ward and others, decades later and with the migratory experiences of the previous generation as their guides, are returning to reckon with, redefine, and write from within the region in an attempt to make it a place of liberation rather than confinement. At the end of her memoir, Ward envisions a place after death that looks like her “true South”: a hot, sunny road lined with pine trees, along which her brother drives to pick her up, entreating her to “come take a ride” with him the way they used to cruise the coastal backroads. Ward writes of her profound grief, and of her mother’s hard lessons. Her narrative, her mother’s narrative, is both personal and historical; their individual stories reflect the broader intersectional contexts of women’s experiences in the region. They are the stories of women’s moves to and from the South, riven with hopes and tensions and loves and traumas. Women writers have long fled the various oppressions of the South, but many were called back, determined, as Tayari Jones put it, to “write about home from home.” “Hello,” Ward pleads plainly at the end of her memoir. “We are here. Listen.”22