Men We Reaped: A Memoir

by Jesmyn Ward

I didn’t want them to look at me after saying something about

Black people, didn’t want to have to avert my eyes so they didn’t see me studying them, studying the entitlement they wore like another piece of clothing.

She embodied femininity in the way she sat, legs crossed, toes painted and polished, a bundle of curves, and then sullied it with the way she cussed easily and made them laugh.

It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom.

Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn’t, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery. 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.

I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman.

But all of us felt our father’s loss keenly, and this sense of being lost and unbalanced found its way into our schoolwork. Even though she tried her hardest, our mother could not be there in school with us during the day; there were some ways that our mother could not help us. Every day after school, we sat at the table with our books, all of us desperately trying to do better and all aware, in the bewildered way that children are, that we were failing.

What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other.

The percentage of African Americans, men and women, who do receive care for mental disorders is half that of non-Hispanic Whites. Not treating these mental disorders costs Black men and women dearly, because when mental disorders aren’t treated, Black men are more vulnerable to incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, homicide, and suicide, and all of these, of course, affect not just the Black men who suffer from them but their families and the glue that holds the community together as well. According to “Souls of Black Men: African American Men Discuss Mental Health,” Black men’s death rates from suicide are twice as high as those for Black women. And when Black males ages fifteen to nineteen years old die by suicide, 72 percent of them use guns to do so.1

I joined their religious youth groups too, became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other. But for some students, I could not escape our differences.