Men We Reaped: A Memoir

This year I have read a great deal about what it means to be Black in a nation designed to advance the interests of White people. This was not by design. Certainly it is an area of interest for me, personal and professional, and the brutal costs of endemic racism have been thrown into stark relief over the past 5 years. The primary reason though for this immersion is that there have been a whole lot of great books published in the past few years whose authors have made themselves vulnerable, who have endured the pain of remembering unimaginable trauma, to tell their story and the stories of others in the Black community that get heard too infrequently by people outside that community. I am grateful. I owe a debt to these writers, to show more Kiese Laymon, to Anita Heiss (who wrote about this from an indigenous Australian perspective, which widened my lens), Robin DiAngelo, Angie Thomas, Eric Michael Dyson, Candice Carty-Williams, and now Jesmyn Ward.

Ward tells her story through tales of 4 young Black men she grew up with in Mississippi, all of whom died very young. They died in different ways, but all in ways that connect back to the devaluation of Black life, and the limitations placed on the dreams and goals available to the dead men in their lifetimes. The story of these men is also the story of the women who loved them, who raised them, who bore their children. Its is a story about the pain and exhaustion, physical and emotional, of those women and children left to just put down their heads and get things done. Its a story I have not heard well told, and it helped me to understand some things I had not understood before about the definition of fatherhood and the expectations placed on girls and boys nearly from birth in many communities. We need to understand the roots of a problem to make changes. The roots are exposed here, and once again the roots are strangled by systemic racism, by the ways in which we see Whiteness as the default "normal" and view success for Black people by their ability to act white, seem white. be white also-rans. Its appalling that this is still true. White folks need to get off our asses to start to change that. Ward is a beautiful writer, and her tributes do honor to the young men lost, but this book really comes together in the last chapter where she goes to the social science. I wish there had been more of that. I wanted the personal stories, but I wanted to understand them in a broader context. We need to be having a conversation about the epidemiology of racism and other types of oppression and the harm it causes. This book, the stories and the social science are a great start. show less

From 2000 to 2004, five young men who were close to Jesmyn Ward died. Each was killed in a different way, and each left an abiding mark in her life. This is their story, and hers: of growing up in rural Mississippi, Black and poor.

Jesmyn's memoir has a unique format, starting with her family history and moving forward, but interspersed the stories of the "men we reaped," working backwards through those deaths until the stories converge at the very end. Her heartbreak and wrestling with grief and why this happened permeates every page. I struggled at times to wholeheartedly accept her understanding of events, but she writes powerfully and has created a loving tribute to her friends and family.

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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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