‘Freegid’ when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm.

‘Belove’ when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: ‘tetrified’ when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is one of the standout literary novels of Hurricane Katrina. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: ‘ornery’. The novel explores themes of poverty, race, family, and the destructive power of nature.

Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like ‘horny’. The novel is set in the Gulf Coast, in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and it tells the story of a poor African-American family, the Batistes, who lives in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. She scrapes out an existence with her father and three brothers who swirl around her like planets flying around the sun. “Junior, stop being orner.” It’s what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Salvage the Bonesis set in the southern Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage (literally, savage wood in French) on the eve of Hurricane Katrina.

Salvage the bones setting