Men We Reaped

by Jesmyn Ward

Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live, and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story.

their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called “sir” in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who loved them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did.

My mother would have steeled herself, but this steel would have been worked thin, thin as aluminum over her love.