Where the Line Bleeds

Where the Line Bleeds was Jesmyn Ward’s first novel, published in 2008 before the books that would make her name. It is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, a stand in for the small Mississippi Gulf Coast communities Ward grew up in, the same setting she would return to for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. The novel follows twin brothers Joshua and Christophe DeLisle the summer after their high school graduation, as they figure out what to do with their lives without the structure of school and without much money.

The brothers are inseparable but headed in different directions. Joshua finds work at the docks. Christophe, after months of looking, drifts into selling drugs for an older cousin. Their grandmother Ma-mee, the woman who raised them, has gone blind and they look after her with a tenderness that anchors the book. Their absent father, a heroin addict, hovers at the edges. Their mother is gone too. The plot moves slowly and Ward takes her time with the small details of their days, but the tension builds steadily, and by the closing chapters the choices have caught up with the choosers.

Ward would go on to win the National Book Award twice, the first writer to do so. Where the Line Bleeds shows the talent that would carry those later books. The prose is plain and rhythmic, the dialogue is accurate to the place, and the characters are written with such love that even the smaller players feel fully present. Readers who came to Ward through Sing, Unburied, Sing will find the seeds of that later masterpiece here. New readers will find a quiet, devastating debut.