Men We Reaped

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title comes from a quote by 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."

Jesmyn Ward is becoming one of my favorite authors. This memoir was painful to read, but held together by her beautiful prose.

She tells the story of lost young men, her cousins and brother, growing up poor, black and male in Mississippi. Mississippi of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," Mississippi of Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam."

She survived as the oldest girl of her parents, on the determination of her mother to get her out of the cycle of poverty, especially after her father left. A single mother can teach her daughter how to hold the family together, but she can't teach a son how to be a man. So many of the young men growing up in DeLisle, MS were lost, school drop-outs, caught up in a drug culture, or merely in the wrong place at the wrong time at two o'clock in the morning.

It's a mournful story, and the author still mourns the loss over thirteen years after those deaths.

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