Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York MagazineTwo-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling … and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.” -Harriet TubmanIn five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth-and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward’s memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
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This book was devastatingly honest and an eye opening experience. The lives of the survivors are strewn with loss and heartbreak. A must read for anyone wishing to better understand Black Lives Matter and the current state of race relations and white privilege in our country. Hint, we are a long way from post-racial.
Author Jesmyn Ward lost five young men, including her brother, within five years. In an effort to deal with her unimaginable grief, she wrote a memoir about her own life growing up Black and poor in Mississippi, as well as brief biographies of each man and his tragic death.
As I read this, I periodically thought of that adage stating that to be a writer, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed” (I’m going to attribute this to Walter “Red” Smith, citing Quote Investigator). Ms. Ward’s pain and grief comes through in these pages almost viscerally.
Growing up poor is hard enough. But when you’re Black and poor, especially in the American South, especially in Mississippi, the cards are truly stacked against you. You can’t expect mercy from a court system that seems to believe your very existence is a crime. You can’t expect help from your White neighbors, who view you with suspicion. The few jobs in town inevitably go to White people. Layoffs affect the Black community first. Towns allocate funds to improve the White parts of town while the Black parts of town fall further and further into disrepair. This is the reality that Ms. Ward, her family, her friends, and countless others in similar situations live every day. And it takes its toll.
“One Fourth of July, [Rog] and his cousins twisted firecrackers together in a sulfurous bunch, put the firecrackers in mailboxes, and lit them. The mailboxes exploded. Someone called the police. When the police arrived, they told the kids that it was a federal offense to tamper with the mail, and they took the other two boys to a juvenile detention facility. This is how silly pranks by Black kids are handled in the South.”
The young men Ms. Ward writes about die in several different ways, but race and poverty play a role in all of them. A sense of hopelessness leads to suicide. Using drugs to beat back that same sense of hopelessness leads to an accidental overdose. Dangerous roads aren’t fixed because the town doesn’t seem to care about conditions in the Black part of town. It’s unrelenting.
But some people keep trying. Mothers keep doing their damnedest for their children. They swallow their pride, work the menial jobs, sign up for whatever assistance they can find, and keep their children fed. But keeping their children fed isn’t the same as having the opportunity to give their children more. Ms. Ward’s mother worked as a maid for a family for years to keep Jesmyn’s scholarship to a private school. But so many don’t even get that option. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle and the system is set up so that it’s only the rare, fortunate person who can break out of it.
“I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.”
The structure of the book is set up so that the reader moves forward through Ms. Ward’s own life and, in alternating chapters, backward through the deaths of her friends and brother. It all culminates with her brother’s death, obviously the one that hurt the most. In trying to deal with her own grief, she wishes she had words to soothe the sisters of the other young men.
“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it?”
I feel like I’m flailing around in this review, trying to make sense of my own thoughts, but I hope that I’m conveying that this book is powerful, important, and gut-wrenching. It’s not an easy read by any means. But if we as a country, as humans, are ever going to do better, we have to begin by walking in each other’s shoes. This is a good place to start.
More reviews and recs on my blog: https://thedanielhurst.wordpress.com
Men We Reaped is a memoir, the first I’ve ever read. It’s a memoir of grief. Jesmyn Ward shares her experience growing up in America, specifically the South, watching the men around her die in tragic circumstances. We get glimpses of the larger world that causes these tragedies, but mostly we see the humanity of the people hurt by it.
This is a tough read. There’s a lot of sorrow and heavy subject matter. But it never feels hopeless, and the writing is beautiful and powerful. I will never comprehend Jesmyn Ward’s strength, but I’m endlessly thankful for her sharing her story, helping us all grow in empathy. A must read.
As part of this years Reading Women Challenge, one of the bonus tasks was to read a book by Jesmyn Ward – who it shames me to admit that I had not heard of until I read her name on that list – which is how I came across her books. It took me reading the blurb for this book just once to be caught; officially on the hook, and definitely settled on reading it even though I could already tell its words would have the potential to hurt. And oh, do they hurt.
I’ll be honest: I cried a lot while reading this book. My emotions went for a ride. Reading about the history, even knowing what I do from extensive research and reading in regards to the horrors placed upon those deemed ‘other’ by the hands of white hate, was gut-wrenching. People always talk about racism like its in America’s past, but that past was not as long ago as people like to think. This book highlights that all too well. It also highlights that it most definitely doesn’t just remain in the not-too-distant past either. It has continued to exist, and as our current political situation will tell anyone with half-a-brain who opens their eyes – it exists today. That it went away was just a myth especially in regards to certain areas of the south, and don’t be fooled, as someone who was born and raised in the north I’ve seen proof all my life it exists here too, especially when racists go around flying the confederate flag calling it a ‘rebel flag’. It is a reality faced by many still in the good ol’ US of A, especially by the African-American/Black community, every day of their lives and Jesmyn Ward does a wonderful job of showing how its used via politics, economics, education, and more to continue to oppress. She talks about it as if it is an entity haunting every step and as you read about the experiences of herself, and her community, it seems the most accurate representation especially as women such as her mother find their lives seeming to repeat those of the women that came generations before. Or men like her father, her friends, her cousins, her brother find their footsteps occasionally walking a similar path. It almost seems inevitable, no matter how hard it’s being fought against in the first place. Systemic racism is pervasive, and a reality, that many who don’t live it choose to ignore and as long as it is ignored things will continue to stay the same; nothing will change in the grand scheme even with as much progress as we like to pat ourselves on the back for making.
There was mention elsewhere that suggested not seeing more of these men’s lives, of Jesmyn Ward’s life made it impossible to understand or connect; that in order to the full stories needed to be told – I disagree. I strongly disagree, actually. I think the nuggets of their lives interwoven with Jesmyn Ward’s own experience from child to adulthood are perfectly told. They’re genuine and deep, and each time she, or one of these men, experienced some form of a loss(a moment of childhood innocence lost, a move to a new place, a loved one dying, etc.) I felt it with her. To me, this memoir written in such a fashion makes the point that we do not need to know every single detail of a human being’s life to understand or empathize. That we do not need to know every step they took to see that they were a human being who deserved more, who deserved not to feel like nothing. That they tried to fight against the circumstances handed down to them generation after generation by circumstances beyond their control even when it seemed futile.
Anyway, I could say a lot more, but I’m trying not to write spoilers or make this a novel in itself. Instead this is the last thing I’ll say:
I’m truly glad that I came across her name on that reading challenge list, and that it lead me to this book. Even though it was not an easy read, it was worth every shed tear as I experienced grief(which, as someone who has lost loved ones, Jesmyn Ward describes in one of those most accurate ways I’ve ever read), every gut punch moment that took my breath, every moment of rage that made me curl my fist for the disgusting pride racists take in being ignorant. This is definitely a book that has had an impact and will stick with me.
This book was a book club selection. It was not a difficult read.I enjoyed reading it. Our book club had a great discussion