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Men We Reaped: A Memoir

Jesmyn Ward (Goodreads Author)

4.25 · Rating details · 16,435 ratings · 2,097 reviews

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breat ...more

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Hardcover, 272 pages

Published January 16th 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) (first published September 17th 2013)

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Apr 16, 2020 Cindy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This started as a 4 star, but the last part of the book really ramped up and moved me to tears. Ward writes beautifully and you can feel her grief pour through the pages. She does a great job at personalizing the statistics of young black men in poverty and honoring their lives.

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Sep 14, 2013 Moira Russell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Gorgeous and heartrending. One of the best-written books I've read in a long, long time.

(ETA I just told Kris: "That is one holy shit gorgeous book, and at the same time I don't think I've ever read a book which showed so unrelentingly what it's like to live in the modern apartheid of US racism. It reminded me of James Baldwin and "Araby." Wow. Give her a prize. Give her all the prizes. Shit, give her Jonathan Franzen's house while we're at it.") ...more

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Aug 11, 2013 Roxane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a book about grief, about grief that is unending and wide reaching. It's also a memoir about rural poverty and race, and the all too inevitable conclusions to the lives of five young men in Ward's life. The prose is bursting with pain and beauty and truth. This is a book everyone should read. Where it falls short is that it doesn't do enough to rise above the grief. Ward only briefly addresses the issues of race and poverty and how they indelibly shape too many lives, particularly in the ...more

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Apr 08, 2019 Carol rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: diaspora, non-fiction, mississippi, autobiography-biography-memoir

Ward’s writing has moments of luminescence — too many to count. But Men We Reaped is breathtakingly full of despair. You can listen to six hours of Lightnin’ Hopkins or read this memoir. Either way, if you’re listening closely, you’ll need a bottle of your favorite beverage and a big box of tissues to see your way to the end.

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Aug 18, 2020 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I read this book last night - during the dark hours - after watching the Democratic Convention. I absolutely loved the unity, the optimism, and hope.
.....which inspired to read Jesmyn Ward’s memoir.

I’m certain I read “Men We Reaped” differently than I might have even a year ago.

Reap Definition:
....receive a ( reward or benefit) as a consequence of one’s own or other people’s actions.

This year is changing me - hopefully for the better. The time is now - to keep “The Black Lives Matter” movem ...more

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Sep 26, 2018 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018

Meditative and moving, Jesmyn Ward's memoir places personal tragedy against the backdrop of systemic racism and poverty. Ward alternates between recounting her childhood in rural Mississippi and sketching biographies of five young Black men she intimately knew, all who died within the span of four years. Each chapter consists of a series of loosely connected vignettes, written in plain but powerful prose. The book's associative structure and accessible language would make it a swift read, were i ...more

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Nov 06, 2013 Trish rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, one-for-the-ages, nonfiction

I wonder now if I will ever see the title of a new book by Jesmyn Ward that does not thrill me at the same time it fills me with trepidation. Ward’s talent is such that we read what she writes even when we do not want to. Her despair and distress cuts like a blade. She wants it to hurt. So that we know. And we do, now. Has there ever been anyone who could tell this story in this way?

”I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp sm

”I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp smile lines and the thin skin at his temples was threaded through with veins. The skull beneath looked hard…'You should write about my life,' Demond said…I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about…Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims...'I don’t write real-life stuff,' I said.”

That was then. Jesmyn writes real-life stuff, in such a way that we come away changed, knowing.

”This is where the past and the future meet…This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.”

But even she admits it is hard to know, really know people. That we can never really know. But she may come closer than anyone else has. Closer than anyone else has bothered to.

“I know that sense of despair. I know that when [Roland] looked down at his copper hands and in the mirror, at his dark eyes and his freckles and his even mouth, that he thought it would be better if he were dead, because then all of it, every bit of it, would stop. The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South—being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options—all of these things would cease.”

Five deaths in five years. Young black men with a life expectancy of 23 years. Families with a shifting sense of belonging, sometimes including the community, sometimes losing members, fathers and brothers especially, to other families. The lowering heat of a muggy, buggy Mississippi night with dampness on the window crank and seats of an eighties-model gray-blue Cutlass. Drug selling as last-ditch income production. Casual racism, I don’t believe in the mixing of the races”, thrown out with lacerating results.

“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 choked me?”

Ah. So she is like us after all. Just like us. I expect she knows now that despair and loneliness knows not race nor income level. None of us is spared that at least. But the other, well...I'm glad she told us. I believe it makes a difference.

I came away with a vivid sense of the terrible burden of anger, frustration, and loneliness that Ward carried. I hope she does not carry it still, but only picks it up again now and again to try it on and to see it does not fit her anymore.

You may find that, having bared all, Ward intrigues more than ever. Here she talks about the writing of her memoir. Jesmimi is her blog which she doesn’t update very often, or perhaps only when she’s stuck.
...more

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Oct 07, 2018 Reggie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018-favorites

I'm predicting Jesmyn Ward will be the next Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her body of work is awesome, and I suspect it will remain that way as she publishes more work.

Fleshed out thoughts to come. ...more

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Nov 24, 2019 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir, nonfiction-november, location-usa-mississippi, read2019, around-the-usa

After discussing Sing Unburied Sing with a group, some seemed to have more insight after reading Jesmyn Ward's memoir and made me want to read it too. It isn't easy going - chapters alternate between her life and the stories of five men in her family/community that died within a period of five years. Highly recommended especially as a companion to her fiction, but really for anyone interested in how a person can share difficult personal stories in an honest way.

This is memoir 9 of my Nonfiction After discussing Sing Unburied Sing with a group, some seemed to have more insight after reading Jesmyn Ward's memoir and made me want to read it too. It isn't easy going - chapters alternate between her life and the stories of five men in her family/community that died within a period of five years. Highly recommended especially as a companion to her fiction, but really for anyone interested in how a person can share difficult personal stories in an honest way.

This is memoir 9 of my Nonfiction November project for 2019.

Bits I saved for future discussion....

"I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren't as raw as they could be, weren't real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn't pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys... experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth."

"Everything about the night seemed stolen, lived in those murky hours while others slept or worker. We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die."

"Like for many of the young Black men in my community across generations, the role of being a father and a husband was difficult for my father to assume. He saw a world of possibility outside the confines of the family, and he could not resist the romance of that. But like many of the young Black women in her generation, my mother understood that she had to forget the meaning of possibility, the tender heat of romance, the lure of the vistas of the world. My mother understood that her vistas were the walls of her home, her children's bony backs, their open mouths. Like the women in my family before her, my mother knew the family was her burden to bear."

"I was the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and I had to do as she had done and help keep the household together... [description of hanging laundry] ... This is how things were done in my mother's house."

"I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman. Undervalued by her family, a perpetual workhorse. Undervalued by society regarding her labor and her beauty. This seed buried itself in my stomach and bore fruit. I hated myself. That seed bloomed in the way I walked, slumped over, eyes on the floor, in the way I didn't even attempt to dress well, in the way I avoided the world, when I could, through reading, and in the way I took up as little space as possible and tried to attract as little notice as I could, because why should I? I was something to be left."

"...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."

"My entire society suffered from a lack of trust...Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within."

"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."

"As an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our coutnry's history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another... As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother's gifts." ...more

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Nov 20, 2013 Eliza rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

11/17/13: Another memoir? Too bad, as the Bhutan one is tough to follow. Still, even on its own, MWR is weak and inarticulate. I think Ward's memoir has two major problems. First, she has not fully processed her grief and anger about the deaths, in a relatively short span of time, of five of her relatives and friends--all young black men in the South. And second, she seems to be trying to conflate that very personal, intimate (and difficult) story with a much larger tirade against the tragedy an 11/17/13: Another memoir? Too bad, as the Bhutan one is tough to follow. Still, even on its own, MWR is weak and inarticulate. I think Ward's memoir has two major problems. First, she has not fully processed her grief and anger about the deaths, in a relatively short span of time, of five of her relatives and friends--all young black men in the South. And second, she seems to be trying to conflate that very personal, intimate (and difficult) story with a much larger tirade against the tragedy and injustice perpetrated upon blacks in the South. This seems an almost impossible task, even for a more experienced writer, one who has managed to process and contextualize her own experience. Ward is not (yet) up to the task.

Oh dear, I feel bad saying this; she has not had an easy time of it. I am sympathetic to her situation, having lost multiple family members in a short time myself. But perhaps this is also why I am harder on Ward; I know how disorienting, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and irrational grieving can be. And I know how hard it is to process that grief, to wrestle it into meaning (which is impossible, though we keep trying), to learn, slowly, how to leave it be, if only for a while. Grief is hard to manage, period. In MWR, I can practically taste Ward's grief, it is so close to the surface; but unfortunately, it is too raw still, and she is still wrestling. So she has no distance, perspective, or acquired wisdom; instead, she must keep telling us about it relentlessly, and her narrative quickly loses its value and power. She keeps revving her wheels, repeating her lament after every death, without ever getting anywhere. Then her grief turns to anger--who is to blame?! there must be someone to blame or this is all too senseless--and we move into the other lament, about the hopelessness of being black in the south. Exhausting, tragic, but in the end not compelling.

One more difficulty with MWR is that Ward decided to tell the story in two directions, alternating chunks of time from most distant (her family history and early childhood memories) to most recent (the last of the five men to die). Thus the two narratives end up meeting, timewise, at the end. I know this is all the rage now, telling a story in some complex chronological order, but for me, unless it's brilliantly done (see Cloud Atlas), it weakens the narrative, making it more confusing, thus distracting from the story. In addition, it lets Ward give in to the temptation to repeat her lament; without a clear narrative arc, it’s easier to end each chapter with that same cry.

Ironically perhaps, the best writing in MWR is about Ward's love of her home state of Mississippi, the bayous, the Gulf, and her home and family. When she can lay down her burden, her prose springs into life. In retrospect, the juxtaposition of these gentle, loving memories with the rest of her story is jarring. But it also gives me hope for Ward. I'd like to read more--and I will start with Salvage The Bones, which won the National Book Award in 2011. ...more

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Sep 18, 2013 Celeste Ng added it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Searing and heartbreaking. I literally picked this book up off the coffee table to carry it upstairs before bed and ended up reading the entire thing standing up there in the living room.

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Mar 16, 2018 Imani406 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Finished this book a few days ago & honestly can’t stop thinking about it. This memoir is so important, one of the most important pieces of nonfiction I’ve read to date. Ward shun a light on the ills and racists attitudes towards black boys & men in America, using the tragic stories of friends & family who have died b/c of institutional racism. The construction of the memoir is genius, Ward shared the stories of her friends, cousin and brother while intertwining her own story and reflections gro ...more

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Aug 25, 2016 Book Riot Community added it · review of another edition

This book came out a few years ago but it feels like a perfect commentary on recent events and #BlackLivesMatter. Everyone (including Amanda, who listed this as her April 2016 pick) told me this book was beautiful and gutting but I still wasn’t prepared for Ward’s incredible memoir. I’d planned to read for just a half hour or so and found myself unable to break away from her story of grief and racism, the south and home, growing up and navigating the world as a black, poor or working class, sout ...more

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Aug 12, 2013 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Ward and her family lived for generations in De Lisle. Mississippi. When she was growing up, after having assumed responsibility for her younger siblings, she only wanted to escape. She manages this when she attend college, but her brother was not so lucky. Her hometown. with its lack of educational opportunities, subsequent poverty would cost many their lives. From 2000-2004, she would find herself reeling from 5 deaths, the first her brother from a drunk driver, and then friends would follow. ...more

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Mar 11, 2019 Kathleen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aab-george-eliot-challenge, 2019-reading-women-challenge, 2019-challenges, autobio-memoir, women-writers

“Hello. We are here. Listen.”

In four years Jesmyn Ward lost five young men close to her to tragic deaths. The oldest was 32, the youngest 19, and they were beautiful, troubled, flawed and gifted. This is not an unusual story in communities experiencing poverty and racism, and when you multiply her experience out to all of these people, the weight of the loss is suffocating. Bravo to Ward for making us feel this. This book is like a Shakespearean tragedy for our times. It must have taken tremendo “Hello. We are here. Listen.”

In four years Jesmyn Ward lost five young men close to her to tragic deaths. The oldest was 32, the youngest 19, and they were beautiful, troubled, flawed and gifted. This is not an unusual story in communities experiencing poverty and racism, and when you multiply her experience out to all of these people, the weight of the loss is suffocating. Bravo to Ward for making us feel this. This book is like a Shakespearean tragedy for our times. It must have taken tremendous courage to write such a book.

She honors the lives of these five men by speaking of them (and in the process, of herself) honestly and specifically. I’ve read memoirs that were interesting but pretty unrelatable. This one was so relatable. We know people like this. We love people in this way.

Ward writes eloquently about family and home. She brought me new realization of how strong these bonds are, whether we want them to be or not; how much these connections are responsible for who we are, and how they continue to shape us. Forever.

What I think her eloquence accomplishes with this book is showing us how this is very similar to the way poverty and racism impact our lives. They shape us. Forever.

“Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.”

There must be something of the architect in everyone who writes a book. (When I started trying to write I was amazed at how big and difficult a part this is: the creation of something that functions and holds up.) Ward has given this book an artistic structure that goes backwards and forwards in time. This frustrated me a little as I was reading, because it made it harder to keep track of the narratives of these men. By the end though, I understood her purpose. In part I think it reflects the way you look back on your life differently after the death of someone close, and it did work. I think it works best if you spend a little extra time reading this, linger a little over these men’s lives. Perhaps this was part of her plan. They deserve our attention. ...more

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Jul 28, 2020 Vanessa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

If there ever was a book that reminded you the preciousness of every individual life this is it.

This beautifully haunting and tender memoir of sorts serves to highlight the devastation of lives lost too soon one of them being the authors younger brother.

The author shares her intimate and personal stories and describes the plight that these young men face the unfairness of a system that doesn’t value their lives, the lives of these young black men. These men for one reason or another dying far ...more

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Feb 06, 2018 Alice Lippart rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2018, non-fiction

Raw, honest and intensely personal. Very, very good.

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May 03, 2013 Wilhelmina Jenkins rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: african-american, memoir

Heart-wrenching, especially since the week that I read it is one in which the perilousness of the lives of young black men is the topic of so much national conversation. Undoubtedly the conversation will die down and some other topic will take its place, but this book stands as testimony to the loss to family and community of these young lives. Ward writes about 5 young black men, family and friends, who died within a few short years in her small, impoverished community for reasons that vary but ...more

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Dec 17, 2013 Snotchocheez rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I knew after reading the intensely personal, haunting (and a little over-exuberant) National Book Award winner Salvage the Bones about the months leading up to Katrina's landfall in rural Mississippi, Ms. Ward did not exorcise all the demons she needed to. There was a larger story-behind-the-story that was clamoring to be told.

If ever there was a book that could possibly put me in the shoes of someone growing up poor and Black, with no hope to escape the poverty and violence seemingly endemic to ...more

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Oct 31, 2013 Ann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I found SALVAGE THE BONES painful to read, and hoped some of the worst parts of those characters' lives were pure fiction. Now, having read Ward's devastating memoir, MEN WE REAPED, I realize how much truth her earlier National Book Award-winning novel told.

Ward's life is laid open like a wound in these pages, honest and unadulterated. She doesn't try to impress us with who she is, what she has done, what happened to the people (especially the men) in her life. Ward writes with deep love and res ...more

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Jul 10, 2013 Caitlin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Men We Reaped is one of the rare non-fiction books that seems destined to be a literary classic. National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward intertwines the story of her life growing up poor and Black in rural coastal Mississippi with the lives of five young men – including her brother – who died within a two year span soon after she finished college. Ward writes with fire and passion as she captures the day-to-day and systemic injustices that she and her family faced and the struggles they went thro ...more

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Dec 20, 2017 Riva Sciuto rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, bios-memoirs

Oh my God, I sobbed my way through this from the first page to the last. In this devastating memoir, Jesmyn Ward succeeds in bringing life to the fallen, meaning to the pain, and beauty to the suffering. It is a reflection of the five men she and her small Mississippi community lost — one of whom was her brother — through accidents, suicide, murder, and drug addiction. The book's title comes from the haunting words of Harriet Tubman: "...and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood Oh my God, I sobbed my way through this from the first page to the last. In this devastating memoir, Jesmyn Ward succeeds in bringing life to the fallen, meaning to the pain, and beauty to the suffering. It is a reflection of the five men she and her small Mississippi community lost — one of whom was her brother — through accidents, suicide, murder, and drug addiction. The book's title comes from the haunting words of Harriet Tubman: "...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." And reaped they did.

This memoir is Ward's attempt to make sense of the senseless. She reminds us all that her "ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that." Her words help her process her ever-growing grief. "I wonder why silence is the sound of our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief," she writes. "I decide this is not right, that I must give voice to this story ... Men's bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts." This book is the story of those ghosts, a reminder that they once lived and breathed and loved and laughed and struggled and failed. "We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new," she writes.

The ghost that visits Ward most often is, of course, her brother Joshua's. As someone who lost my younger brother -- also at 19 -- I remain painfully haunted by her words. Told in reverse order, she concludes the book with Josh's death -- "where the past and the future meet ... this is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is." Suddenly confronted with the finality of his absence, she finds that her "misery and grief and loneliness were so close." She writes, "It slept with me. It walked with me down the crowded streets. I imagined my brother sometimes, when I was more lonely and desperate, imagined him walking to my right and slightly behind me, throwing an arm across my shoulders, and it would comfort me until I realized I was still alone and he was still dead, that he could not walk with me through those building-shadowed streets, through the garbage-stinking heat and the insidious icy snow, that he could not pull a coat over my head and protect me." And perhaps one of the most profound and accurate statements on grief I've ever read comes from the pages of this memoir: "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." Beautifully, she reminds us that the reason we grieve is because we love. "But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters," she says. "It is worth more than I can say. And there's my dilemma, because all I can do in the end is say." As she concluded the chapter about Joshua, I felt her words in my bones, giving a voice to the pain I too feel at the senseless loss of my own brother: "I write these words to find Joshua, to assert that what happened happened, in a vain attempt to find meaning. And in the end, I know little, some small facts: I love Joshua. He was here. He lived. Something vast and large took him..." Heartbreaking.

With each young man she buries -- Roger, Demond, CJ, Ronald, and Joshua -- Ward explores both the stories of their lives and the tragic senselessness of their deaths. In doing so, she helps us understand the depth and complexity of human suffering: the often irreparable dangers of drug addiction, the struggle to help those you love survive, and the inability to escape a cycle of poverty into which one is born. Moreover, her description of Ronald's "demons" gives us a deeper understanding of those suffering from depression: "I don't know what that debilitating darkness, that Nothing that pursued him, looked like, what shape his depression took. For me, it was a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave."

Not only does Ward expand our understanding of these demons; she sheds light on the endless cycle of poverty and racism that, far too often, make such demons inevitable. She writes, "... Pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside." Ward brings so many horrifying statistics to life -- through the deaths of the men she loved -- about what it means to be poor and Black in the South. The numbers are staggering; the loss of loved ones proof of how difficult it is to outrun what follows you.

I love this book for all of its heartbreaking and devastating and real emotion. For its rawness. For its beauty. For its exploration of grief and human suffering in its most painful forms. For its reminder that we always carry those we love. That their ghosts are part of us. "We who still live do what we must," she writes. "Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach." Five well-deserved stars. ...more

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Aug 22, 2017 Brandice rated it liked it · review of another edition

Jesmyn Ward's memoir, Men We Reaped, is depressing yet well-written. It is a story of loss, mourning, hardship, and numerous calls (or perhaps the perpetual call) Home, again and again.

Ward and her family faced many struggles, most of which were not self-induced, although her father constantly made poor decisions. Her mother was resilient, enduring immense sacrifices to keep the family afloat, and surviving.

Each of the stories about the men Ward shared were depressing. Some were more engaging ...more

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Feb 23, 2018 CaShawn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

So damn beautiful. All the sadness, all the desolation, all the poverty and all the loss and STILL, Ms.Ward managed to make it so beautiful it hurt.

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Sep 15, 2013 Sarah Weathersby rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, african-american, public-library

The title comes from a quote by Harriet Tubman, "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."

Jesmyn Ward is becoming one of my favorite authors. This memoir was painful to read, but held together by her beautiful prose.

She tells the story of lost young men, her cousins and brother, growing up poor, black and male in Mississippi. Mississippi of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," Mississippi of Nina Simone's "Missi ...more

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Aug 31, 2013 Michelle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Beautiful writing but I often felt that she skipped some practical parts. It's a memoir that works in reverse order. The chapter alternate between her childhood and the reverse chronological order of deaths of young black men she knew, culminating with the death of her only brother. This builds the dawning horror of the deaths.

She details the difficulty of growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi. I was a bit disappointed that she didn't bring in in facts about poverty and racism and death ...more

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Mar 14, 2020 Gayle Pritchard rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: books-in-my-library

New York Magazine named Men We Reaped one of the Best Books of the Century. Although I look forward to trying another of her best-selling books, I just can't agree with their assessment on this one.
I have been seriously trying to diversify my reading list, adding James Baldwin, more Alice Walker, Laurie Jean Cannady, Ivelesse Rodriguez, Tyrese Coleman, Patrico Gopo and Machael Ondaatje, among others, to my stack of books. I have read Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, still the standards by which New York Magazine named Men We Reaped one of the Best Books of the Century. Although I look forward to trying another of her best-selling books, I just can't agree with their assessment on this one.
I have been seriously trying to diversify my reading list, adding James Baldwin, more Alice Walker, Laurie Jean Cannady, Ivelesse Rodriguez, Tyrese Coleman, Patrico Gopo and Machael Ondaatje, among others, to my stack of books. I have read Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, still the standards by which all others are judged for me. This book comes nowhere close to that level of skill and literary genius.
Men We Reaped jumped all over the place. I didn't care for the backward revelations of death jumbled in with her deep longings to be back in her southern home. It seemed to be a device, like Ward's serious binge drinking, designed to keep both author and reader from truly feeling what was happening. Just as the author approached what felt like deep truth and pain, she would switch gears and talk about the status of minorities in this country. Justified facts and grief, yes, but less powerful in the way they were used throughout the book as a result.
Though I am a white, college-educated woman, I was also the first in my family to leave my childhood home and take a step up the ladder. After I left, I never wanted to go back. Though I do get how being born white includes a space of automatic privilege, the community I grew up is not that different than the one Ward grew up in where the economic pecking order still exists and poor, uneducated rural white people have few good jobs available to them, where farmers are going under, where the opioid epidemic is most severe, where groceries and downtowns are disappearing, and where healthcare outcomes are terrible. Neither of my parents finished high school. An astute guidance counselor gave me a leg up, and later made sure that my college applications went out. A small private college gave me a full scholarship. Short of reading the experiences of people of color with similar childhoods, I could not imagine having to cope with the added pressure, barriers and physical and emotional hardship of systemic racism. I am grateful for those words at my fingertips which can inform and educate me. That said, being a woman has its own problems, white or not.
My favorite part of the book and of Ward's use of language is the end, when she finally starts to focus the story and write about her brother. This is the meat of the memoir, and I wish the rest of the book had been written in this passionate, pained, lyrical way. ...more

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Aug 11, 2015 Liz Janet rated it liked it · review of another edition

“Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.”
This is literally a regular memoir with a chronologically backwards biography of five men.

This memoir tries to link the death of men in Jesmyn Ward's life to the injustices done to those that are underprivileged. And even though I do not feel that it achieved it, it is still an incredible read that introduces us to identity and home, and how tha ...more

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Jun 27, 2018 Wyndy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: southern-us, nonfiction-read, 2018-reads

"When I was born, I weighed two pounds and four ounces, and the doctors told my parents I would die."

Jesmyn Ward did not die that day in DeLisle, Mississippi. She went on to become a two-time National Book Award-winning author and associate professor at Tulane University. But over the course of five short years, when Ward was in her 20's, five men close to her did die. One of those men was her brother. This is her homage to those five men, her extensive family, and her community: “To say this is ...more

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Oct 26, 2019 Nohemi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A powerful memoir about growing up Black and poor in the South. About self-esteem, racism, death, grief, and family.

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About Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward

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Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University.

Her work has appeared in BOMB, A Public Space and The Oxford American.

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Quotes from Men We Reaped

“I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.” — 74 likes

“We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.” — 36 likes

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