A Powerful, Unforgettable Memoir

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward is a very powerful memoir. She called it the hardest thing she’d ever written. It’s not a book you read, and then a few weeks later, can barely remember what it was about. The American Dream was hard won by many amidst the racism rampant in every state and institution, while others’ dreams were crushed by their sheer struggle to survive in a world where opportunity didn’t come easily, depending on the color of your skin. Jesmyn Ward and her siblings were raised in Mississippi during the 70s and 80s. Few who never saw a drinking fountain or bathroom labeled “colored” can understand there was a time when the income tax rules were the same for all races, the military cemeteries were filled with all races, but the benefits derived from freedom and tax revenues were not allocated equally because racism existed. The expression separate but equal, was, in reality, separate and unequal. It was a social crucible that burned hot, and those who came through it to reach for the dream despite everything were heroes, while those who flamed out were casualties; this book is about their faces and lives, the toll it took on them all, and the lives harvested or reaped by the process. Ward poignantly describes the dichotomy between herself and the brother she loved, “He never envisioned college for himself, a path through education to an upwardly mobile future, the American dream shining like some wishing star in the distance. For me there were hopes: a house of brick and wood, a dream job doing something demanding and worthwhile, a new, gleaming car that never ran out of gas. Joshua would hustle. He would do what he had to do to survive while I dreamed a future.”

It is a book about strong family members, those who were less strong, and how that combination affected the rising generation they parented. She describes her brother’s experience, as he spent more time living with their father, in two powerful passages, “He was never referred to a counselor, never tested for a learning disorder, never given some sort of individual attention that might better equip him to navigate junior high school and high school.” She contemplates how this affected her brother, “He knows something I don’t. Perhaps he’d looked into his own mirror and seen my father when I had only seen my father’s absence. Perhaps my father taught my brother what it meant to be a Black man in the South too well: unsteady work, one dead-end job after another, institutions that systematically undervalue him as a worker, a citizen, a human being. My mother had found a way to create opportunity for me, to give me the kinds of educational and social advantages that both Joshua and I might have had access to if we weren’t marked by poverty or race, so I was bent on college.”

Even the strongest parent who stayed the course had moments of hurt and frustration that landed hard on children, “When my mother picked me up from school one day, I began telling her about a school project, and she interrupted me, speaking to the pebbly asphalt road, the corridor of trees leading us home to our trailer, and said: ‘Stop talking like that.’ As in: Why are you speaking so properly? As in: Why do you sound like those White kids you go to school with, that I clean up after? As in: Who are you? I shut my mouth.”  

The author describes what it was like getting a college education so very far from home and family, “When I finished my master’s coursework at Stanford in April 2000, I packed my things and shipped the detritus of my life via UPS to Mississippi. I was moving home. I wanted to live in southern Mississippi or somewhere near Mississippi in the South for a few years because I was tired of being away: I was tired of being small in the big world. I was tired of being perpetually lonely. During my senior year at Stanford, I’d sat in my college dorm room, a single with shag carpeting and a sink in a closet, and stared out into the courtyard at the moon, which shone brightly through the weave of oak trees. I ached so badly for my family and DeLisle that I’d cried.” She returns to Mississippi, “This is after I’d earned two degrees, a crippling case of homesickness, and a lukewarm boyfriend at Stanford. This is before Ronald, before C. J. This is before Demond, before Rog. This is where my two stories come together. This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother.” Ronald, C. J., Demond, Rog, and her brother Joshua are the casualties she describes throughout the book, as she puts faces and lives onto what might otherwise have only been statistics on a ledger. Her words are a tribute to the lives they had, both the good and the bad, and how they mattered to her, “On the day of the first Mardi Gras parade I’d attended after my brother’s death, the reality of Joshua’s absence was soothed by Rog, his easy smile, his arm casually slung over my or my sisters’ shoulders. Hey, he said. And then: What’s up?”

Ward writes about feelings of deep depression during the years after her brother’s death when she lived far from home in New York City: “Sometimes I eyed my wrists, thought of how easy it would be to take a razor across the left one by wielding the blade with my right hand, and wondered if I could bleed out from just managing one cut. So I got a tattoo of my brother’s signature on the inside of my left wrist so that it seemed like my brother had signed his name on me before he died, had made his mark across the cutting line. I did it because I knew that I could never make that fatal cut across Joshua’s name... I got another tattoo in my brother’s handwriting across the other cutting line on the inside of my right wrist. ‘Love brother’ is how he signed the one letter he wrote me while I was in college.”

Ward later notes, “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 never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.” I find much of this true, but I hope she’s done with self loathing and feeling she has failed because Ward takes deeply painful moments, uses them with raw and sensitive observations crafted in crystalline prose to create unforgettable books affecting millions; she has 25 books on Goodreads with 1,534,308+ ratings. She’s come through the fire and the pain as a beautiful, courageous woman and writer with important things to say in such a way her message stays put. This memoir was named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine, and it won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award.  She’s the only woman and African American to win two National Book Awards for Fiction. The thing that makes me happiest is she’s living in Mississippi doing what she loves best (writing) and teaching creative writing at Tulane University, and influencing the lives of future generations, while telling unforgettable stories of the past.