Men We Reaped

The title of Jesmyn Ward’s stunning memoir comes from a quote by famous abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Tubman, watching a battle at the end of the Civil War. "We saw the lightning and that was the guns. We heard the thunder and that was the big guns; 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." Men We Reaped is Ward’s interpretation of that quote: refracted through the lens of Black men in the Deep South, she tells the story of her life and of five men in her life between the ages of 19 and 31, including her brother, who died in the span of four years.

Her memoir takes you by the hand and tells you the story of DeLisle and Pass Christian, her rural hometowns in Mississippi. She tells you of what it was like to grow up there, of growing up without a father and of being responsible for her siblings. She tells you about going to private school, and being the only Black girl in a wealthy, white environment. And throughout, she punctuates her own story with the story of five men: Roger, Desmond, CJ, Ronald, and her brother, Joshua. She tells them in reverse order of their deaths — chronologically, Joshua was the first to die, killed by a white drunk driver who only served two years. What struck me so much about Men We Reaped was the care with which Ward told the stories of these five men. She didn’t erase their errors, but she writes about them lovingly and movingly, so much so that you end their chapters feeling as if you know them. She captured their life.

“I know it sounds trite when I say it, but [the deaths] made me realize that I don't have a lot of time and that I'm not promised tomorrow. I hear that all the time at home, I guess because everyone in my community has lost a young person that they love, you know? So everyone always says that all the time: You're not promised tomorrow; you don't have tomorrow. So it does, it sounds trite, but it's true. It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life where I would die when I was 60 or 70 or 80 or 90. That's not a given for me, and so it actually brought me to writing,” Ward told NPR.

My favorite part of Men We Reaped, however, was how rooted in place it was; you got a real, visceral sense of the place that shaped Ward. “How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it chocked me?”

Rating: ★★★★★