Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, is devastating look at the author’s upbringing in coastal Mississippi.  While Ward does concentrate on the women in her family, but it is the men that are front in center.

The phrase, being a black man in the south, is repeated many times in this work. This phrase is brimming with swarms of challenges, frustrations, sorrows, and deaths, and is the arch of the author’s narrative.  Growing up, Ward lived in a world much like a war zone composed of the very old, and the very young. The men in her life were both strong presences, but also fleeting.  They were incarcerated, dead, addicted, or gone.  

Men We Reaped is the story of one black family.  But it is also the story of the legacy of racism in our country; the awful toll that it takes on the lives of men, women and children.