MEN WE REAPED
A Memoir
By Jesmyn Ward
256 pages. Bloomsbury. $26
DWIGHT GARNER N.Y. TIMES
Jesmyn Ward, who won a National Book Award in 2011 for her novel “Salvage the Bones,” grew up in rural Mississippi, mostly in a series of single-wide trailers. Her mother was a maid; the family was on food stamps. Her father raised pit bulls he bred for fighting. He trained them with deflated bike tires.
One of his dogs was named Homeboy. Another was Chief. Another was Mr. Cool. One day Homeboy attacked the young Ms. Ward, sending her to the hospital with severe puncture wounds and gashes and an earlobe nearly ripped off.
“My father said that if I had not fought, I would have died,” she writes in “Men We Reaped,” ...“He said the dog had been trying to rip out my throat.”
Years later, the author observes: “Now, the long scar in my head feels like a thin plastic cocktail straw, and like all war wounds, it itches.”
Men We Reaped” is a book about scars. The title comes from 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.”) Ms. Ward’s subject is what it’s like to be a black man in the modern American South.
Her memoir is, ostensibly, about the lives of five young men she knew well, including her own brother, each of whom died young. One was a suicide; the others were lost to drugs or accidents. Ms. Ward could be speaking about all of them when she writes of one, “He wanted more for himself, but he didn’t know how to get it.”
Yet, to its credit, this book isn’t easy to define. Its most vivid character is probably the author’s father, whom she loves yet soberly observes. He was a gang member when he lived briefly in Oakland, Calif.; his enthusiasms are kung fu movies, weight lifting and his motorcycle. “He listened to Public Enemy,” the author writes, “and only Public Enemy.”
He left Ms. Ward’s family and had children with other women. “Remaining faithful to my mother required a kind of moral discipline he’d never developed,” she writes, “since it was constantly undermined by his natural gifts: his charm, his sense of humor, his uncommon beauty.”
So much happens in this relatively short book, there are so many shrewd details, that it could have simply been a straightforward memoir of Ms. Ward’s life. She was born three months premature, when her mother was 18, and her father 20.
She had blood tumors, underwent operations and was lucky to survive.
Ms. Ward is eloquent about her gradual escape from the world she was born into, about how she was the only black girl in a private school, her tuition paid by one of her mother’s employers. She felt “skinny and ugly” and bullied. She was forced to watch her mother clean her classmates’ houses. ...
This at times somber book is also shot through with life, with a sense of rural community and what it felt like to be adolescent and footloose on hot Mississippi nights, all the beer cans and weed and loud music and easy sex and rolled-down car windows.
“The drinking had been insane, ecstatic,” Ms. Ward writes. “We’d taken shots of Everclear that summer, felt that liquor running through us, thrumming: for this moment, you are young and alive.” This feeling slowly vanishes with the deaths that surround her. “Now, we were subdued drinkers, drinking to forget.” ....She writes about the cops who circle black neighborhoods like vultures, the illegal strip searches in middle schools, the minimum-wage jobs that offer no way out.
Little wonder so many turned to drugs. About cocaine use, she writes, “I’d seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wit’s end did to feel less like themselves.”
About infidelity, and about so many black children being raised without fathers, Ms. Ward.... [writes] "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.”