Men We Reaped

In Chapter 5 Ward is seven years old and her family has moved once again. Her father purchases a motorcycle with money set aside to purchase land. He seeks adventure and entertainment as his marriage becomes increasingly fractured. Within the year, the family moves again, this time into her mother’s childhood home populated with her mother’s extended family. The house belongs to Ward’s maternal grandmother Dorothy who, abandoned by her husband with seven children, “took what my grandfather left her with, and she built it into something more, and she survived” (83). A total of 13 family members reside in the home. Ward’s youngest sister Charine is born during this time.

Fueled by a desire to escape her tumultuous reality, Ward falls in love with reading. She feeds her imagination by creating an imaginary world named Kidsland in the woods for herself, her siblings, and her cousin. She proclaims, “I wanted to be my own heroine” (86). As she grows and observes the tireless efforts of the women around her to work and care for the family, Ward becomes increasingly aware of the inequality between men and women, realizing “that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ” (88). In an act of investigating these differences, Ward finds one of her uncle’s recently disposed cigarettes and attempts to smoke it. The children avoid punishment when their aunt discovers them and spares them, but five-year-old Josh divulges what happened to their mother later that evening. Their mother punishes them.

Ward’s father loses his job at a glass factory and moves from job to job while the family survives off of food purchased with government support. Her father continues to commit adultery, while her mother continues her grueling work as a hotel maid. As the years progress, Ward’s parents attempt to reconnect and leave the two oldest children with friends. One day, after the family friend leaves them alone for a period of time, Ward searches for her babysitter and discovers her in an apartment snorting cocaine with the upstairs neighbors.

Eventually, Ward’s parents inform her and her brother that they are getting divorced. Later, Ward discovers that the impetus for the divorce was her father’s relationship with a 14-year-old daughter of a coworker. Ward escapes into her books and feels “shocked by the rejection of my father’s leaving, which felt like a rejection not of his wife or his domestic life but of me” (101). Six-year-old Joshua escapes outside, circling “the house for hours” until he falls “to his knees, his sobbing dying to hiccups and moans” (101). Soon thereafter, the children and their mother move into Section 8 housing. Before leaving, 10-year-old Ward wanders “around Kidsland again,” fruitlessly trying “to conjure some of the old magic, the belief” (101).