Men We Reaped: A Memoir

This book is why I signed on to Amazon today...to leave a heartfelt, thoughtful review. When I began reading Ms. Ward's book, I mentally said, "I've got to send copies to my family to read." See, I am from Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta. And the poverty, hopelessness, internal and external reminders of your nothingness playing on a loop are all too familiar to me. I left the Mississippi Delta in 1990 for college and law school after that. Through the years, my voice has been stifled by the pain and hopelessness I feel when I watch or hear of the systemic poverty and lack of hope in Mississippi. As a lawyer people often ask me to speak on my childhood, my life after leaving Mississippi, how I feel now when I return to visit my mom, my siblings, my dwindling aunts and uncles. I have never been able to verbalized the anguish, the torment that materializes in my dreams on a monthly basis and culminates with me falling into a black hole thick with sewage. Until now, I hadn't read of a book that gave life to my childhood, to my mom's struggles and triumphs. Until Men We Reaped, I felt alone and stuck in these memories. Thanks be to Ms. Ward for trudging through her memories and giving life to the lifeless men of her family and community. This book is one of the best I've read in a long while, and I read quite a bit. I finished the book this morning, and I am picking it up again next week to highlight some of the lyrically poignant pieces that speak to my soul, the inner child that had to grow up very quickly in order to survive, to thrive. Now I know this book is not only for my Mississippi family. Not only for black folk or poor folk or oppressed folk. This is a book for humanity. For the man who can't seem to find the life that settles warmly around his shoulders. For the moms who struggle to hold it together when all they really want to do is disintegrate from the inside out. For the sons who want to leave a legacy but are too xxxx to break away and fight for their right to exist, be, do. For the daughters, like me, who are, out of necessity, taught to be strong-willed, strongest, strong-bodied, strong-24/7 but who need to be allowed to be weak and wanting and vulnerable and woman. Buy this book. Read this book. You will be different as you devour the final page of Jesmyn Ward's memoir, and it will be a good kind of different.

Jesmyn Ward is a literary alchemist. She has woven the lives/deaths of 5 young black men, together with her own memories of growing up among them, and applied her skills as a writer to elevate pain, poverty, racism, drugs, alcohol and a lack of meaningful employment for most of her contemporaries, particularly the men - to elevate all these tragic consequences of segregation and slavery - into a kind of universal tragedy, which nevertheless feels redemptive because of the telling of it. And the how of the telling. I spent much of the tail end of this book weeping. For its sadness. For its depth. For the courage to face and write so many painful truths. For the beauty of her prose, the stark honesty in revealing so much of herself, her love and grief for those cut down so young. For the wisdom and strength of black women struggling to raise children under such conditions. For the human wreckage this nation permits. For this woman, rising up to memorialize searing and painful truths. I cannot forget this book. As a writer Ms. Ward is the Hilary Mantel of Mississippi. Someone who has transformed her own personal pain into exquisite prose. Someone fearless in writing about emotions, deeply understanding of her characters, honest yet sympathetic in portraying things which might be unspeakable under most circumstances, but which in her hands become cathartic, almost religious, even when most terrible. She is my new favorite writer. And I’m just sorry that at 73, there are only so many more of her future books I’ll live to read.

A memoir about love, loss, poverty, struggle, racism and grief. Ward’s prose is beautiful and compelling. The grief here feels raw and full of despair. It is different than that in her other books (Salvage the Bones), this grief is personal. This suffering is her own and that of her family and friends. "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.” Men We Reaped looks at the racism and poverty in which Ward was raised. She shares the pain of seeing young men - her brother, her cousin, her friends die at very young ages. It tells of the racism that kept them poor, unemployed and lacking in hope, of the costs of a lack self-esteem, of fatherless homes where the women try to fill both roles, working full time and caring for their family full time, as their disenfranchised men feel powerless to help. It is also a book about pain: the pain of grief, the grief of loss. “If Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?” "...This is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a women: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.” Is this what it means to be Black and poor in the South? In America? Is this their destiny? “By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.” A difficult but important book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book is wonderfully written with so much pain but with so much bravery. Highly recommend this book to black men and women.

Jesmyn Ward is a poet. She can articulate what most of us feel but are incapable of saying or understanding about the way race class and society work together. This is a particularly tragic memoir told through the men in her life she has lost. It’s tragic, poignant and grossly unfair. I am a better after have read this powerful recount.

As an American foreigner it is amazing to listen this side of the story, that you never get to hear.

Wonderful memoir, I cannot imagine the courage required to relive these incidents while writing them again and so beautifully written.

Excellent book describing today's situation in the South with no holes barred. Terrific writer. Very personal. Very discouraging to realize how slow things have gone for our fellow countrymen...