Men We Reaped: A Memoir, by Jesmyn Ward
“Fear the reaper.”
With her memoir, Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward attempts to process horror. In the heart of of DeLisle, Mississippi, the poorest region of the most destitute state in the United States, young black men keep dying. Some perish from factors related to the plague of drugs, others vanish due to seeming indiscriminate acts. Each tragedy adds layers to a mounting sense of despair, yet the pages of Ward’s personal essays pull you along. Once you embark upon this memento mori of creative nonfiction, an unseen force prevents you from stopping.
Ward structures her book with overlapping chronologies, which works since memory occurs out of order. She provides coherency, however, by offering accounts in turn to five young black men in her life who fate strikes down. Ronald perishes by his own hand. C.J. does not survive a car accident in which he drives into an oncoming train, perhaps because of substandard safety equipment in a fog, maybe because of drugs. Demond dies from a bullet at his doorstep, perhaps due to his upcoming testimony against a drug dealer. Roger (“Rog”) succumbs to a drug-induced cardiac arrest in his sleep. At the heart of terror, Ward last relates the death of her brother, Josh, when a drunk white man plows into the back of Josh’s car, driving him into a fire hydrant on a front lawn. Along the way, she includes intermezzi about Wards’ family saga, with narratives spanning the 1970s to the early 2000’s.
On the one hand, structural racism creates an environment of hopelessness that women of color internalize into a self-immolating work ethic, whereas black men fall into the pit of nihilism. Ward acknowledges as much when she writes, “That pressure, the one that said that we are nothing, that our lives are worth nothing, that our deaths are inevitable—that pressure was everywhere. It came from the government, from the schools, from businesses, from the crack addicts walking the streets in broad daylight. It came from the police. It came from the lack of jobs.” At the same time, Ward anthropomorphizes this feeling into a creature of malevolence, like a beast who claims the souls of black folk when they let down their guard, one at a time.
As arresting as the histories of truncated lives prove, Ward’s feelings for home drive these essays. She references her experiences at elite institutions, such as an MFA program at the University of Michigan, as well as a prestigious fellowship at Stanford University, in addition to a nameless job in New York City. However, she describes as a central conflict in her life, “Yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?” The lament of the South often comes from white, and often racist, canonical authors, yet people of color can fall in love with the land too. In fact, at the time of the book’s writing, Ward was teaching at the University of Mississippi, living back in DeLisle.
While we want writers to subsist in some rarefied Platonic plane, Ward reveals her humanity. She adores her friends. She loves her family. She would not know how to live without sweltering summer evenings out with her intimates, southern black rebels without a cause. Ward interweaves arcs of downfall with accounts of her own escapades, which she cherishes to the point of pain, as well as reminisces of her parents’ disastrous relationship.
The South tells various stories about itself to itself, though predicates most of them with an almost biblical sense of downfall. In such a vein, Ward 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.” Loss has taught Ward to hold an apocalyptic worldview and horror does in fact appear to follow at her heels. Seven years after her book’s publication, her husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) related to an influenza virus in 2020.
I have quibbles with some of Ward’s stylistics, faults I find in almost all contemporary authors (passive voice, unnecessary words, etc.), but those aspects amount to matters of taste. I also don’t find Ward’s indulgence in chemical aides for the purpose of oblivion redeeming, though she does not ask for forgiveness, and who am I to judge? She refers to multiple experiences of becoming black-out drunk without commentary. She smokes a lot of weed. I am also not a big memoir reader, particularly from younger writers. Nevertheless, Ward has something to say, as well as the expressiveness to convey it.
America has not exorcised its demons. We are more segregated now than during the 1950s. Drugs continue rend communities apart. Above all, death purses black men, from the police to gun violence.
This book should frighten you. For too many, the past does not stay in its cage of time but rather lurks in the shadows of the bayou of their spirits.