So began a 25-minute panel discussion featuring the experience, thoughtfulness and wit of writer Jesmyn Ward and writer-comedian Baratunde Thurston in conversation with Ginia Bellafante, the Big City Columnist for The New York Times.
“Has the narrative of black poverty been lost?” Bellafante began by asking, and if so, “How do we get it back?” Or, is the best answer to create a new one?
Ward and Thurston are known for writing about their experiences as black people in America, elevating voices they know and love and that Ward said she rarely came across as a young and voracious reader in rural DeLisle, Mississippi.
Ward said the characters that informed her award-winning novels — like Esch in “Salvage the Bones” (2011) and Jojo in “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) — often “come to me because they have been lost to history.” The narrative of her community hasn’t necessarily been erased, but rather ignored, and that’s why she is committed to writing about it.
“We just want to see ourselves,” Thurston said, humorously adding that earlier in the day he’d been mistaken as Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California, who participated in a panel later that afternoon.
Thurston grew up in Washington in the 1980s and wrote about his experiences in his book “How to Be Black” (2012). He and Ward discussed being called the anomalies and exceptions in their communities, the ones who were able to satisfy this “need to escape” and make it out to find success.
Ward defined such success as having the means to solve the problems that compounded with poverty, such as access to health care, a good education and the ability to save money.
Ward is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans, but she lives in DeLisle, a decision she reckoned with in a Time magazine essay published in July 2018.
Thurston said his ability to leave Washington for Boston, Los Angeles and New York City wasn’t because he was particularly exceptional or smarter. Instead, he was lucky. But the narrative around black poverty, he said, is one that’s systemic and often born of moral and personal failure.
Efforts to improve cities aren’t always developed from local communities themselves, Thurston explained, but rather via a path developed and implemented from the outside, often benefiting the new and predominantly white population.
Black people “are like the place holders for the future artisanal food truck industry,” he said, elaborating that it was then their responsibility to react to the economic changes of the neighborhood.
This often creates a pattern of displacement, meaning the community that was supposed to be helped can’t afford to reap the benefits.
The conversation continued in a discussion of rural-urban relationships, like the farm-to-table dining trend: “Is it beneficial or just hipster nonsense?” Bellafante asked.
Ward said her rural Mississippi community was still seeing the effects of Hurricane Katrina, with fewer people living near the coasts and trees growing at a slant directed by the storm’s winds. Thurston shared what he described as his girlfriend’s observation that the suburbs fit into the mix, too, as young people who grew up there moved to enjoy the benefits of a city but were more accustomed to having their own spaces and cars.
But the most prominent solution discussed was perhaps embedded in Ward’s and Thurston’s framing of their own responses: the caveat that they could only speak for themselves, and their own communities.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.