Telling the Storm: Quilting Analytics, Crochet, and Remembering Hurricane Katrina in Salvage the Bones

ABSTRACT: This essay examines Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and how the protagonist Esch Batiste remembers Hurricane Katrina through quilting analytics and crochet. Quilting is a creative practice and form of storytelling in Black women’s culture and literary tradition. Ward signifies and extends these practices to crochet; she unveils a Black genealogy of crochet that, like quilting, is embedded in memory and illustrates matrilineality. I demonstrate how Esch’s narrative and memory of Hurricane Katrina mirror the process of crocheting, making it an apt metaphor for reading memory, matrilineality, and diasporicity that expands the way we remember Katrina twenty years later.