Men We Reaped

In her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward pays tribute to five young Black men from her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi. She honors each man’s life and death in individualized chapters and explores her own personal and family history as she navigates the complex experiences of grief. Ward seeks to understand the forces that led to each man’s death and chronicle the impact of their deaths on her life and community.

Ward begins her memoir with a Prologue that establishes her defined purpose and introduces the five men—Joshua, Ronald, C. J., Demond, and Roger—whose lives and deaths she will portray. Chapter 1 documents the origins of DeLisle as well as the history of Ward’s family leading up to her birth in Oakland, California, where her mother and father search for freedom from their shared generational patterns of loss and struggle. In Chapter 2 Ward moves in reverse chronological order to tell the story of Rog, a family friend who dies at age 23 from a heart attack and is the last of the five men to die. Ward interlaces the story of Rog’s life and death with her own emotional return to Mississippi from Michigan, where she attends school.

Chapter 3 commences with Ward’s premature birth in 1977. Ward details her early struggle to survive blood tumors and a growth in her abdomen. As her father falls into cycles of infidelity, her brother Josh is born, and the family returns home to DeLisle, where the children learn the realities of violence from a young age through a moped accident and brutal pit bull attack that leaves Ward scarred for the rest of her life. Their parents’ relationship grows more and more strained.

In Chapter 4 Ward highlights the life of Demond, a young man she meets through her sister Nerissa. Ward explores Demond’s attempts to break free from the violence that surrounds their community by testifying against both an alleged shooter and drug dealer. Ultimately, Demond is unable to escape and is murdered as he returns home from work one evening.

In Chapter 5 seven-year-old Ward and her family move into her mother’s childhood home, where they reside with multiple family members. Ward finds escape by reading about confident heroines and attempts to assert her own autonomy. Instead, Ward grows increasingly disillusioned as she witnesses the inequality in treatment between men and women and the drug use of a family friend. The chapter ends with her parents’ declaration of divorce as a result of her father’s infidelity with a 14-year-old teenager and Ward’s ultimate disillusionment with the hope of her childhood fantasies.

Ward discusses the death of her cousin C. J. in Chapter 6. C. J., also the boyfriend of Ward’s youngest sister Charine, dies in a tragic car accident on the town’s ill-maintained train tracks. Ward provides a glimpse into C. J.’s humanity as an athletic young man who uses drugs and struggles to find his place after dropping out of high school. Ward investigates the negligence that limits the lives of young Black men like C. J. whose lives end abruptly and tragically.

Chapter 7 details Ward’s life in nearby Gulfport, Mississippi, as she and her family adjust to life with a single mother. Ward experiences a deepening depression due to her father’s absence and the intense bullying she encounters in school. Through her mother’s White employer, Ward attends a private school. It is through her private school’s summer camp that she meets Ronald in Chapter 8 when he is nine years old. Ward follows Ronald’s life until his unexpected death by suicide at 19. Ward contemplates the struggles with mental health within her community while contemplating her own experiences with depression.

Chapter 9 ushers in Ward’s family’s return to DeLisle and their father’s move to New Orleans. Ward continues to attend her predominately White private school and feels the weight of her status as an outsider. She endures the racist bullying of her classmates while her brother Josh moves in with his father full time due to his mother’s hopes for a positive male influence. Josh begins to steal and sell drugs, while Ward contemplates college and grapples with her place in the two different worlds of home and school. Ward discusses her return home from Stanford and Josh’s struggles to find employment after dropping out of school in Chapter 10. As Ward travels to New York for an interview and considers leaving Mississippi again, Josh is killed by a White drunk driver on his way home from his work at a casino. The driver serves a minimal sentence and never pays his ordered restitution.

Ward concludes her memoir in Chapter 11 with a list of statistics that factually describe life for Black men in the American South, a meditation on grief, and an expression of hope in the next generation’s ability to break free from the generational patterns that plague her family.