Men We Reaped

In Chapter 9 Ward and her family return to DeLisle and move onto her mother’s newly purchased land and into a single-wide trailer. After constantly moving homes and jobs, their father discontinues his child support payments and moves to New Orleans. The children visit their father on weekends and during the summer.

Ward continues to attend the private Episcopalian school she began attending in elementary school; she remains one of the only Black students there. She recalls only a couple of other Black students throughout her years at the school, but despite this connection, she feels the division in their class status, as “both of these Black students [come] from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families” (183). The only other Black students she encounters are students recruited for the school’s basketball team. The similarities in race and background between her and these students give Ward “some respite, some illusion of community” (183). Ultimately, Ward retains outsider status due to her obsession with reading.

She befriends other students with artistic interests, but she remains the only Black student in these groups. To fit in, she adorns herself in the secondhand clothing of wealthier students procured from her mother’s work as a maid in their houses. Ward also “joined their religious youth groups […], became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other” (185). Unfortunately, she fails to escape this reality. Ward continues to suffer the bullying and brutality of her classmates—not because of her outsider status but because her “brown skin [is] an actual physical indicator of [her] otherness” (186). She endures their overt racism, including their casual use of the N-word and references to lynching.

On weekends her mother drives the children to New Orleans to visit their father. In anticipation of their father’s lack of preparation, she brings groceries for the children. Often left on their own until their father arrives home late at night, the children provide for themselves. When their father next leaves for an extended period of time, Ward and Josh accompany their cousin Marcus to the movies to see Boomerang. An usher soon discovers Marcus drunk and passed out in the bathroom. Ward panics while Josh navigates the situation by calmly using a phone book to call their Uncle Dwight. Their father picks them up and praises Josh for his common sense.

Ward continues to confront racism at her predominately White school. One day an older White student named Topher attempts to provoke Ward with a barrage of racist jokes while her classmates and friends sit in silent compliance. Ward imagines retaliating physically while thinking of “how good it would feel to lunge at him, to grab his throat, to sink my thumbs into the skin and muscle over his esophagus, to push and see him turning blue” (192). Ultimately, she says nothing. Encouraged by friends to join them at private boarding schools in California, she contemplates leaving Mississippi “to escape the narrative [she encounters] in [her] family, [her] community, and [her] school that [she is] worthless, a sense that [is] as ever present as the wet, cloying heat” (195). However, her mother resists, telling Ward she needs her to stay and help the family. Ward resolves to leave Mississippi for college.

Joshua, now 13 years old, moves to New Orleans for the summer to live with his father. His mother seeks male guidance for Josh to help him navigate his future as a Black man in the South. On a visit back to her father’s home, Ward demonstrates an innocence to the realities of prevalent drug use in her father’s neighborhood and avoids walking around by herself. Josh, on the other hand, exemplifies an understanding that “to be a man was to posture strength and capability; for my brother, this meant he had to be unafraid” (199). The next week, Josh experiences an assault by two neighborhood boys who “[punch] him in the back of the head” (200). Their father attempts to teach Josh the way “to avoid the violence” (200) plaguing his neighborhood. Ward reflects on the reasons for her father’s approach and his desire to break Josh away from the cycle of violence.

When classes resume, Ward occasionally accompanies her mother to work after being picked up from school. She speaks with the wife of the house as her mother cleans and experiences what she later recognizes as double consciousness as defined by W. E. B. Du Bois. Ward becomes aware of her place in both the world of her mother’s toil as a poor Black woman and the world of privilege and education that connects her to her mother’s White employer.

Ward’s father moves back to Mississippi, and Josh moves in with him full time. They are soon joined by one of their father’s mistresses and her new child. Shortly after moving in with his father and turning 14, Josh begins to steal, a change that marks “a new turn in him” (204), a first sign of Josh’s growth into manhood. He becomes adept at stealing and sees it as a way to provide for himself, to express his newfound self-sufficiency and manhood. Despite his stealing, Josh remains fairly tame and only casually experiments with marijuana. He struggles in school despite his capabilities. Ward comments on how, in reconsideration, Josh may have tested differently, a reality left unrecognized by the public school system he attended.

Ward grows increasingly more involved in her school community, even though she is “still other, racially and socioeconomically” (206). Paranoid of teenage pregnancy, her mother bans her from dating. Ward continues to find refuge in books and reads works such as Roots, Invisible Man, Native Son, The Color Purple, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Through these books Ward comes to understand “resistance and fighting for civil rights as strength”; however, she cannot express these ideas at school, where she admits she is “reticent” (207). Ward often contemplates the parallels between her experiences and those of her brother in school; she recognizes that “Josh [faces] a different kind of racism, a systemic kind, the kind that [makes] it hard for school administrators and teachers to see past his easygoing charm and lackluster grades and disdain for rigid learning to the person underneath” (208). Though their experiences differ, Ward sees their connected struggle to fight against “something larger than us” and the reality that “both of us [are] failing” (208).

The morning after her first experience with alcohol, Ward reveals the details of her night, and Josh subsequently admits that he now sells crack cocaine. Ward becomes overcome by a fear “so great and immediate” that her “whole body [tenses] for a bone-breaking blow” (211). Josh uses the money gained to help his father with his mortgage. Ward meditates on the division between her and her brother as she envisions a hopeful future complete with “a house of brick and wood, a dream job doing something demanding and worthwhile, a new, gleaming car that never ran out of gas,” while her brother “would do what he had to do to survive” (212). She ends the chapter with an understanding that, despite her position as the eldest child, Josh is the more mature one.