Manny is the first friend to join the game, but Big Henry and Marquise also materialize seemingly out of nowhere. Usually, hurricanes divert either east to Florida or west to Texas, but this one, according to meteorologists, is coming straight for Bois Sauvage, their coastal hometown.īy the time the narrator finally rouses herself awake, her older brothers, Randall and Skeetah, and their friends are playing a game of basketball. Earlier in the day, as our narrator recounts, Daddy woke her and Junior early to join him in preparing for the hurricane, ordering them to find and rinse old moonshine bottles to fill with water later. As the narrator and her brothers watch China struggle to give birth, Daddy noisily nails plywood onto the sides of the shed to prepare for the storm, upsetting China, who hates him. Junior often plays under the porch, a ritual that remains mysterious to his sister.Īlthough he is usually a heavy drinker, Daddy’s mind is on the hurricane now. The space beneath the family’s front porch is always littered with empty moonshine bottles, the yard rotting with cars and an old RV. Papa Joseph farmed on the property, but the narrator’s father, whom she calls Daddy, has allowed the Pit to become an overgrown dump. Originally, the narrator’s maternal grandparents, Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph, owned the land they called “the Pit,” named for the clay pits in the back of the property from which Papa Joseph allowed “the white men he work with” to dig for profit until it created a pond that he feared would “spread and gobble up the property” (14).

Like China and the narrator herself, Mama was a fighter, determined not to go to the hospital even as she hemorrhaged blood after Junior’s birth.

Mama, as she calls her, birthed all four of her children in their Mississippi house, which sits on a property called the Pit. Her older brother, Skeetah, acts as China's birthing coach and is protective of the dog's comfort.įrom the start, the narrator compares China to her mother, who died giving birth to her youngest brother, Junior. Narrating in the first and third person, she intersperses a present-tense account of the scrappy pit bull’s birthing process with memories of her long-deceased mother and stories of Manny, the boy she likes, from earlier in the day. Ward’s female narrator, who goes unnamed in the first chapter, watches her family’s dog, China, give birth in her father’s shed, alongside her brothers.

Salvage the bones