“Bodies Tell Stories”: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones as Literary Counter-Archive

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Jesmyn Ward crafts Salvage the Bones as a novel that challenges narratives that leave Mississippi out of discussions regarding Hurricane Katrina and addresses a number of preferred narratives about the storm and its aftermath. Ward uses imaginative practices of Black memory—rooted in lived experience—to contest the public narrative of Hurricane Katrina. In this way, she contributes to what I identify as the literary counterarchive by creating a narrative that encapsulates the struggles of the modern Black family and shows how, in spite of those struggles, they continue to survive through their own methods of community care.