Men We Reaped: A Memoir

Jesmyn Ward just amazes me. Her language is exquisite, and I think I could read anything she might write on any subject whatsoever. This memoir is powerful, disturbing and extremely important. And beyond that I just don't know what to say about it. Her world, which she loves despite its brutality, is so foreign to me, and yet she has somehow made it possible in a way no other author has matched for me to grasp a bit of how growing up in that world shapes your understanding of life and your place in it, and how unbelievably hard it is to see across the dividing lines, from either side, let alone to move from one world to the other. The primary focus of the book is the lives and untimely deaths of five young men who were close to the show more author, beginning with her brother. Ward tells their stories backward, starting with the most recent death and ending with the most important, that of her younger brother Joshua, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2000. Interspersed with the sections on each lost life are chapters about Jesmyn's growing up in a working class Black family in Mississippi, where generations of women found themselves struggling to raise children with absent fathers, and generations of men strove to fill the role of protector and provider, with all the cards stacked against them. I feel better informed after reading this book, but I also feel at a loss to know what to do with this information.
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Originally posted at https://olduvaireads.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/nonfiction-november-men-we-reaped-...

Jesmyn Ward’s book is full of anger and grief. The death of four people close to you will do that. First her brother dies, in October 2000, then by summer 2004, three of her friends had died as well. She is still hurting, it is evident from every line in the book, every word that she pours out onto the page.

Ward takes us through her life, growing up poor in Mississippi, and in between these recollections of her life, she talks about the lives of her friends – and their deaths through accidents, drugs, suicide. She thinks back to the last time she saw them, to how she found out the news of their deaths, and the reactions of their show more loved ones. She also examines the socioeconomic factors that have affected their lives and their community:

“And the school administration at the time solved the problem of the Black male by practicing a kind of benign neglect. Years later, that benign neglect would turn malignant and would involve illegal strip searches of middle schoolers accused of drug dealing, typing these same students as troublemakers, laying a thick paper trail of imagined or real discipline offenses, and once the paper trail grew thick enough, kicking out the students who endangered the blue-ribbon rating with lackluster grades and test scores.”

And how she sought escape in books

“I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens. Perhaps it was easier for me to navigate that world than my home, where my parents were having heated, whispered arguments in the dining room turned bedroom, and my father was disappearing after those arguments for weeks at a time to live at his mother’s house in Pass Christian before coming back to us. Perhaps it was easier for me to sink into those worlds than to navigate a world that would not explain anything to me, where I could not delineate good and bad. My grandmother worked ten-hour-long shifts at the plant. My mother had a job as a maid at a hotel. My father still worked at the glass plant, and when he was living with us, he would often disappear on his motorcycle.”


Men We Reaped was a heartwrencher, an eyeopener. It was a very personal journey, Ward’s attempt to write away her sadness and her pain. show less

Over the course of five years Jesmyn Ward, author of National Book Award winning novel Salvage the Bones, watched as suicide, drugs, car accidents and poverty took five men from her life. Through the pages of Men We Reaped, Ward honors their memory while examining the economic and social factors continuously causing damage to her community.

The heartbreaking deaths of Ward's cousins, friends and younger brother are told between her recollections of growing up poor in DeLise, Mississippi. Though she willingly shares their flaws, Ward is able to make the vibrancy of each man and the impact he had on her life shine from every page. In the woven connections between her childhood, community and the circumstances of their deaths, Ward show more carefully considers the impact of racism and poverty on black men in the South.

“The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other loses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths."

Rich with history, filled with thoughtful questions and beautifully written, Men We Reaped is a memoir that should be widely read and carefully considered.

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What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us we were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.

What is it like to be black in America? Let Jesmyn Ward tell you. This painful memoir by the author of the award-winning novel show more Salvage the Bones, takes us from her birth to her late 20s. The oldest of four children, Jesmyn’s parents were committed to raising their children in a two-parent household (something they had not benefited from themselves), but were ultimately unable to make it work. The family moved frequently, and relied heavily on family members for support during tough times. Jesmyn was luckier than most, with a benefactor who paid for her to attend a prestigious school, which paved the way for higher education that ultimately made her “successful” by typical public standards.

But most were (are) unable to escape the systems of oppression. Interspersed with chapters about Jesmyn’s childhood are portraits of young men who died far too young: 5 men in 4 years, including Jesmyn’s brother. The circumstances of each death vary, from accidents to drugs to violence, but in every case the man was enmeshed in struggles related to race and class that are difficult for those from different backgrounds to understand. Their education tapered off during high school, and even while in school they were often ignored or labeled troublemakers, and did not get the support necessary to learn and flourish. On leaving school, their employment prospects were limited, forcing some into more lucrative pursuits like dealing drugs. In some cases these men fathered children, and perpetuated a model of absent parenthood mirroring their own experience. And so the cycle continues.

Surely life isn’t really like this, for so many people? But yes, it is, and that’s what makes this book an important read. Such complex societal issues obviously can’t be solved just by reading books, but awareness can foster an environment that leads to change, through individual action taken locally and by voting people into office who are committed to making the United States a better place for all who live here. show less

"...I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are nervous free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that made this mess."

Men We Reaped rocked me to the core. Jesmyn Ward poured her entire heart onto these pages. I related to this book on a personal level and it validated fears I thought I had buried deep inside. Ward's writing cuts like a knife but allows for cathartic relief.

I've never thought about grief the way Ward describes it: " WE INHERIT THESE things that breed despair and show more self-hatred, and tragedy multiplies." It is sinister and waiting to finally catch up to us. "DEATH SPREADS, EATING away at the root or our community like a fungus". Because of the generational traumas and circumstances that are passed down in marginalized communities death is always lurking and waiting to destroy what we love the most.

Ward ultimately explores:
🖤 how we define and create community and family
🖤 how grief is carried across generations
🖤 why we are always to drawn to home despite tragedy
🖤 how communities heal and practice resiliency
🖤 the daily anxieties and fears of marginalized communities
🖤 how communities cope with grief
🖤 the effects of unresolved mental health issues in families of color
🖤 gender differences in communities
🖤 what it means to be BIPOC and poor in the South
🖤 the strength of Black women
🖤 what survival looks like as a Black person

What sticks with me the most is the idea that grief is the validation that someone's life mattered. Grief is what is left behind to remind us of how much our loved ones meant to us even if the world says otherwise. Grief never fully goes away because it is what keeps us connected to those that left us too soon. This book was powerful, heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. show less

(4.5)
You know Men We Reaped has deeply impacted you when reading the grief Ward shares over her brother gives you the urge to reach out to your own estranged brothers. A profoundly saddening book, but it was a true honor learning about these men and their stories. Just like Ward, I will always be haunted by them for better or worse.

This book, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" should be required reading for all Americans. Ward holds nothing back in her descriptions of life as a Black family in Mississippi, heartbreaking descriptions, and her insights to systemic racism are keen. This is a book that will stay with me for quite a long time. I know this is my privilege showing when I say this: I could not read it in one sitting, for it was too raw. I needed a break. And that right there, for me, is a larger point the book makes--I could take a break from the harsh realities Ward writes about. She cannot. The men in her life cannot. I don't know what to do, other than hear and recognize these stories, and hope others read and are as changed as I show more am by her words. show less