Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine

The two-time National Book Award winner and author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a Black man in the rural South.

"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; 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." -Harriet Tubman

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young 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 breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward's memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

JESMYN WARD is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of the 2011 National Book Award-winning novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, as well as the 2017 National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is also the editor of The Fire This Time, an anthology of short stories, and the author of Men We Reaped, a memoir that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ward was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2008 to 2010. Ward received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. She is a Mississippi resident.