leweylibrary's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.75
I'd call this a memoir with a purpose which is something that's right up my alley, but this one was a little difficult to keep straight. The bouncing back and forth between personal stories and memories of the men who died just for a bit confusing in audiobook form. But it was incredibly powerful and raw. Jesmyn really doesn't pull any punches in her writing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Racial slurs, Sexism, Misogyny, Suicide, Infidelity, Car accident, and Death
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Animal death, and Animal cruelty
mnatale100's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Classism, Death, Racism, Suicide, Violence, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Abandonment, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Car accident, Grief, Suicide attempt, and Animal cruelty
Moderate: Animal death, Blood, Drug abuse, Drug use, Cursing, Addiction, Infidelity, Murder, Gore, Gun violence, and Mental illness
Minor: Domestic abuse, Incest, Pregnancy, Racial slurs, Adult/minor relationship, Cultural appropriation, Ableism, and Bullying
just_one_more_paige's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
I read my first book by Ward, her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, a few years ago. It was an affecting reading experience, emotional and expressive, lyrical and illuminative. But the story style, the slow-moving family saga and ghost story mix, is one that I have to be in the right mindspace for, because it can easily cause me to become disassociated from the characters and univested overall, which isn't really fair to the author. Knowing that, it took me a while to pick up this second work by Ward, but I'm glad I waited until the right time because this nonfiction was, if anything, even harder (emotionally) to read than her fiction.
Men We Reaped is a work of nonfiction that combines memoir and mini biographies. Ward chronicles the history of her family and her own youth/adolescence/early adulthood, alternated with chapters about the lives of five men close to her, including her own younger brother, who (over a short span of five years in the early 2000s) all died. Interspersed throughout the book are facts, statistics, questions and philosophies about why, about how being a Black man in America contributes to so many causes of death, from suicide to drugs to accidents to violence to "bad luck," in ways large and small, obvious and subtle.
First of all, reading this was a lot. It's not a very long book, and having the audiobook on hand as well means it's one that I would normally have sped right through, but that was not possible here. I purposefully took breaks throughout, reading other things (lighter things) to give my emotions a break. So trying to imagine how Ward must have felt living through these years, not just reading about it secondhand, and then opening up about it to share so publicly, is nigh on impossible. A note here: if you have a brother (especially a younger one), as I do, reading about Ward's relationship with her brother, how it changed as they got older and their lives took different trajectories, and the aftermath of his sudden death is...a struggle. It hits differently, especially hard, so just FYI. There is so much grief in these pages, as Ward revisits each of her relationships with the five men whose deaths she's recounting. And there is grief for herself and her family as well, as she details their history and day-to-day reality living in MIssissippi. The complex mix of reactions to the truths of their lives is so clearly communicated: Ward is able to conceptually understand the way that systemic racism and centuries of oppression/suppression have set up the failures and hardships she (they all) endured while also honestly telling how even knowing all that doesn't help mitigate completely the rejection and frustration and anger she felt with her parents (and especially her father) throughout her life. In addition to all the personal aspects of this book, the insights from Ward into her own life and the lives of her friends and family, she writes a compelling dual look at types of racism, focusing (though not exclusively, of course, because neither exists in a vacuum) on the more direct and interpersonal for herself (through experiences at school, etc.) and the societal/institutional for her brother and father (and the other men highlighted), and the different ways each affected them. The lines she draws from that to the circumstances of each man's death are clear, uncompromising and, with the "straight up, no flourishes" style of this book, Ward forces you to acknowledge them, face them down, and reckon with them.
As far as the writing and structure, this was set up in a really unique way. Ward told the story of her family and personal life in a regular "past to present" sort of way. But she wrote the stories of the five men who died in reverse chronology, starting with the most recent and moving backwards to finish with the first, her brother. This reverse parallel meant that the two timelines sort of met in the middle at the end of the book in a sort of crashing crescendo of the most intense emotions, that was deeply effective as a literary device. I found the writing to be a little bit jumpy, compared to the lyrical style of her fiction. It kind of moves from memory to memory in snippets that connect, but tangentially, or don't really connect in any way other than the random mental leaps that we all experience while reminiscing. It was jarring at times, but also, as this was a memoir, did fit stylistically (more or less). I loved the way that Jesmyn showed each of the five men's lives (as well as her own, her mother's her father's) in their full truths, not the perfected remembrances or "what they could have beens" that often come with memorializing someone, but the messy realities of who they actually were. Because that should have been more than enough to deserve a fuller chance to live. The authenticity of the way they were represented in these pages made them feel all the more real to me, which made the reading experience that much more difficult, in a good and necessary way. Related, Ward's speculations of each man’s last moments or other internal thoughts in moments of privacy was really impactful.
There is a pall of foreshadow over the whole book, knowing, as the reader does, what each chapter is leading to, and anticipating it with dread. Contrasted with the vividness of the stories Ward tells about her own and each man's life, the jumpiness of the text settles into the background and the intensity of the words and topics takes center focus. The grief is palpable and, at times, overwhelming, but the questions Ward uses that grief to raise and address are imperative. And her bravery in grappling with these memories and heartache in order to lead us into that interrogation is monumental.
“Homesickness had troubled me […] I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty, which is why I’d left, yet I loved it.”
“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s hot here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, that is what I had to believe about my brother […] But I didn’t know how to say that.”
“…did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black has always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?”
“Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either.”
“The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.”
“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 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 we’re perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.”
“We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine.”
“By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”
Men We Reaped is a work of nonfiction that combines memoir and mini biographies. Ward chronicles the history of her family and her own youth/adolescence/early adulthood, alternated with chapters about the lives of five men close to her, including her own younger brother, who (over a short span of five years in the early 2000s) all died. Interspersed throughout the book are facts, statistics, questions and philosophies about why, about how being a Black man in America contributes to so many causes of death, from suicide to drugs to accidents to violence to "bad luck," in ways large and small, obvious and subtle.
First of all, reading this was a lot. It's not a very long book, and having the audiobook on hand as well means it's one that I would normally have sped right through, but that was not possible here. I purposefully took breaks throughout, reading other things (lighter things) to give my emotions a break. So trying to imagine how Ward must have felt living through these years, not just reading about it secondhand, and then opening up about it to share so publicly, is nigh on impossible. A note here: if you have a brother (especially a younger one), as I do, reading about Ward's relationship with her brother, how it changed as they got older and their lives took different trajectories, and the aftermath of his sudden death is...a struggle. It hits differently, especially hard, so just FYI. There is so much grief in these pages, as Ward revisits each of her relationships with the five men whose deaths she's recounting. And there is grief for herself and her family as well, as she details their history and day-to-day reality living in MIssissippi. The complex mix of reactions to the truths of their lives is so clearly communicated: Ward is able to conceptually understand the way that systemic racism and centuries of oppression/suppression have set up the failures and hardships she (they all) endured while also honestly telling how even knowing all that doesn't help mitigate completely the rejection and frustration and anger she felt with her parents (and especially her father) throughout her life. In addition to all the personal aspects of this book, the insights from Ward into her own life and the lives of her friends and family, she writes a compelling dual look at types of racism, focusing (though not exclusively, of course, because neither exists in a vacuum) on the more direct and interpersonal for herself (through experiences at school, etc.) and the societal/institutional for her brother and father (and the other men highlighted), and the different ways each affected them. The lines she draws from that to the circumstances of each man's death are clear, uncompromising and, with the "straight up, no flourishes" style of this book, Ward forces you to acknowledge them, face them down, and reckon with them.
As far as the writing and structure, this was set up in a really unique way. Ward told the story of her family and personal life in a regular "past to present" sort of way. But she wrote the stories of the five men who died in reverse chronology, starting with the most recent and moving backwards to finish with the first, her brother. This reverse parallel meant that the two timelines sort of met in the middle at the end of the book in a sort of crashing crescendo of the most intense emotions, that was deeply effective as a literary device. I found the writing to be a little bit jumpy, compared to the lyrical style of her fiction. It kind of moves from memory to memory in snippets that connect, but tangentially, or don't really connect in any way other than the random mental leaps that we all experience while reminiscing. It was jarring at times, but also, as this was a memoir, did fit stylistically (more or less). I loved the way that Jesmyn showed each of the five men's lives (as well as her own, her mother's her father's) in their full truths, not the perfected remembrances or "what they could have beens" that often come with memorializing someone, but the messy realities of who they actually were. Because that should have been more than enough to deserve a fuller chance to live. The authenticity of the way they were represented in these pages made them feel all the more real to me, which made the reading experience that much more difficult, in a good and necessary way. Related, Ward's speculations of each man’s last moments or other internal thoughts in moments of privacy was really impactful.
There is a pall of foreshadow over the whole book, knowing, as the reader does, what each chapter is leading to, and anticipating it with dread. Contrasted with the vividness of the stories Ward tells about her own and each man's life, the jumpiness of the text settles into the background and the intensity of the words and topics takes center focus. The grief is palpable and, at times, overwhelming, but the questions Ward uses that grief to raise and address are imperative. And her bravery in grappling with these memories and heartache in order to lead us into that interrogation is monumental.
“Homesickness had troubled me […] I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty, which is why I’d left, yet I loved it.”
“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s hot here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, that is what I had to believe about my brother […] But I didn’t know how to say that.”
“…did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black has always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?”
“Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either.”
“The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.”
“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 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 we’re perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.”
“We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine.”
“By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Injury/Injury detail, Death, Drug use, Racism, Alcohol, Cursing, Drug abuse, Grief, Infidelity, Addiction, Car accident, Classism, Gun violence, and Suicide
Moderate: Violence, Fire/Fire injury, and Animal cruelty
Minor: Cultural appropriation
mandkips's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Racial slurs, Death, and Grief
Moderate: Suicide, Addiction, and Gun violence
Minor: Animal cruelty
e_flah's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
2.5
I enjoyed the two separate threads of Men We Reaped -- Ward's look at her childhood and the period of time in her twenties where she navigates a lot of grief. The two threads didn't make one cohesive narrative for me, though. There was a disconnect between the point Ward was trying to make and what the narrative actually did. Ward makes some explicit points at how poverty and racism affect life outcomes but she doesn't tie the two together as neatly as she stated in the introduction. I would have liked Men We Reaped more as a straight-up memoir.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Car accident and Death
Moderate: Addiction, Animal cruelty, Racial slurs, Racism, and Suicide
Spoiler
person attacked by a dog, alcohol abuse, drug use, suicidal ideation, death by suicide, violence, parental abandonment, death by overdosejgintrovertedreader's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Author Jesmyn Ward lost five young men, including her brother, within five years. In an effort to deal with her unimaginable grief, she wrote a memoir about her own life growing up Black and poor in Mississippi, as well as brief biographies of each man and his tragic death.
As I read this, I periodically thought of that adage stating that to be a writer, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed” (I’m going to attribute this to Walter “Red” Smith, citing Quote Investigator). Ms. Ward’s pain and grief comes through in these pages almost viscerally.
Growing up poor is hard enough. But when you’re Black and poor, especially in the American South, especially in Mississippi, the cards are truly stacked against you. You can’t expect mercy from a court system that seems to believe your very existence is a crime. You can’t expect help from your White neighbors, who view you with suspicion. The few jobs in town inevitably go to White people. Layoffs affect the Black community first. Towns allocate funds to improve the White parts of town while the Black parts of town fall further and further into disrepair. This is the reality that Ms. Ward, her family, her friends, and countless others in similar situations live every day. And it takes its toll.
“One Fourth of July, [Rog] and his cousins twisted firecrackers together in a sulfurous bunch, put the firecrackers in mailboxes, and lit them. The mailboxes exploded. Someone called the police. When the police arrived, they told the kids that it was a federal offense to tamper with the mail, and they took the other two boys to a juvenile detention facility. This is how silly pranks by Black kids are handled in the South.”
The young men Ms. Ward writes about die in several different ways, but race and poverty play a role in all of them. A sense of hopelessness leads to suicide. Using drugs to beat back that same sense of hopelessness leads to an accidental overdose. Dangerous roads aren’t fixed because the town doesn’t seem to care about conditions in the Black part of town. It’s unrelenting.
But some people keep trying. Mothers keep doing their damnedest for their children. They swallow their pride, work the menial jobs, sign up for whatever assistance they can find, and keep their children fed. But keeping their children fed isn’t the same as having the opportunity to give their children more. Ms. Ward’s mother worked as a maid for a family for years to keep Jesmyn’s scholarship to a private school. But so many don’t even get that option. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle and the system is set up so that it’s only the rare, fortunate person who can break out of it.
“I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.”
The structure of the book is set up so that the reader moves forward through Ms. Ward’s own life and, in alternating chapters, backward through the deaths of her friends and brother. It all culminates with her brother’s death, obviously the one that hurt the most. In trying to deal with her own grief, she wishes she had words to soothe the sisters of the other young men.
“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it?”
I feel like I’m flailing around in this review, trying to make sense of my own thoughts, but I hope that I’m conveying that this book is powerful, important, and gut-wrenching. It’s not an easy read by any means. But if we as a country, as humans, are ever going to do better, we have to begin by walking in each other’s shoes. This is a good place to start.
As I read this, I periodically thought of that adage stating that to be a writer, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed” (I’m going to attribute this to Walter “Red” Smith, citing Quote Investigator). Ms. Ward’s pain and grief comes through in these pages almost viscerally.
Growing up poor is hard enough. But when you’re Black and poor, especially in the American South, especially in Mississippi, the cards are truly stacked against you. You can’t expect mercy from a court system that seems to believe your very existence is a crime. You can’t expect help from your White neighbors, who view you with suspicion. The few jobs in town inevitably go to White people. Layoffs affect the Black community first. Towns allocate funds to improve the White parts of town while the Black parts of town fall further and further into disrepair. This is the reality that Ms. Ward, her family, her friends, and countless others in similar situations live every day. And it takes its toll.
“One Fourth of July, [Rog] and his cousins twisted firecrackers together in a sulfurous bunch, put the firecrackers in mailboxes, and lit them. The mailboxes exploded. Someone called the police. When the police arrived, they told the kids that it was a federal offense to tamper with the mail, and they took the other two boys to a juvenile detention facility. This is how silly pranks by Black kids are handled in the South.”
The young men Ms. Ward writes about die in several different ways, but race and poverty play a role in all of them. A sense of hopelessness leads to suicide. Using drugs to beat back that same sense of hopelessness leads to an accidental overdose. Dangerous roads aren’t fixed because the town doesn’t seem to care about conditions in the Black part of town. It’s unrelenting.
But some people keep trying. Mothers keep doing their damnedest for their children. They swallow their pride, work the menial jobs, sign up for whatever assistance they can find, and keep their children fed. But keeping their children fed isn’t the same as having the opportunity to give their children more. Ms. Ward’s mother worked as a maid for a family for years to keep Jesmyn’s scholarship to a private school. But so many don’t even get that option. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle and the system is set up so that it’s only the rare, fortunate person who can break out of it.
“I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.”
The structure of the book is set up so that the reader moves forward through Ms. Ward’s own life and, in alternating chapters, backward through the deaths of her friends and brother. It all culminates with her brother’s death, obviously the one that hurt the most. In trying to deal with her own grief, she wishes she had words to soothe the sisters of the other young men.
“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it?”
I feel like I’m flailing around in this review, trying to make sense of my own thoughts, but I hope that I’m conveying that this book is powerful, important, and gut-wrenching. It’s not an easy read by any means. But if we as a country, as humans, are ever going to do better, we have to begin by walking in each other’s shoes. This is a good place to start.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Drug use, Death, and Abandonment
booksandcoffeerequired's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Car accident, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Grief, Gun violence, Murder, Racial slurs, Racism, and Suicide
Minor: Animal cruelty and Mental illness
poursandpages's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Men We Reaped is Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, & did it EVER punch me in the gut. She weaves her story in & out of the stories of 5 men in her life that died within a few years of each other.
The title comes from a Harriet Tubman quote that is presented to the reader before the book starts: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns. 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."
F u c k.
This is Jesmyn’s story, but it’s not a unique one, & that’s the truly horrific part. I was REALLY forced to sit with my privilege with this one. In particular, I had a visceral reaction to the dog fighting scenes. Of course, we love our pets & animal abuse is AWFUL, but why wasn’t I having the same EXACT reaction to the deaths of 5 young Black men? Why am I so desensitized to this? Why are we ALL so desensitized? It’s horrifying, & is the biggest reminder that this work is NEVER over.
White people really need to digest this one. Sit with it. Sit with everything it brings up. It’s not going to be pretty. This work isn’t supposed to be.
The title comes from a Harriet Tubman quote that is presented to the reader before the book starts: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns. 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."
F u c k.
This is Jesmyn’s story, but it’s not a unique one, & that’s the truly horrific part. I was REALLY forced to sit with my privilege with this one. In particular, I had a visceral reaction to the dog fighting scenes. Of course, we love our pets & animal abuse is AWFUL, but why wasn’t I having the same EXACT reaction to the deaths of 5 young Black men? Why am I so desensitized to this? Why are we ALL so desensitized? It’s horrifying, & is the biggest reminder that this work is NEVER over.
White people really need to digest this one. Sit with it. Sit with everything it brings up. It’s not going to be pretty. This work isn’t supposed to be.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Animal cruelty
Moderate: Drug abuse, Addiction, Incest, Gun violence, Suicide, and Racism
More...