Men We Reaped

“I wonder why silence is the sound of our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief. I decide this is not right, that I must give voice to this story.”

Ward expresses her memoir’s purpose in giving voice to the dead and the suffering. In opposition to the preconceived notions of race imposed on the Black community, Ward seeks to capture the true stories of the Black men she documents in her memoir, complete with complex emotions. Her use of the collective pronoun “our” connects her story to the greater community. The rage and grief that Ward details throughout her memoir represents a greater cumulative grief experienced by the Black community through generations.

“Like all children, they were the children of history and place, of southern Mississippi and Louisiana, both their family lines mixed with African, French, Spanish, and Native ancestry all smoothed to the defining Black in the American South, but even though they would have seen that history bearing fruit in each other, they would not have been thinking about that.”

Ward imagines her parents first meeting as children. Though she admits they likely thought of little beyond attraction and emotion, Ward highlights their shared bonds forged by race, location, and upbringing. For Ward, her parents’ shared identity as part of the Black community in the American South is undeniable yet subliminal. Ward seeks to unveil these connections not only for her parents but also for those whom she highlights throughout the memoir.

“Still, she felt the confines of gender and the rural South and the seventies stalking her, felt that specter of DeLisle out in the darkness, the wolf cornering her in her mother’s house which had no heat in the winter, no air in the summer.” 

Ward analyzes the burdens borne by her mother in her own youth as she attempts to escape DeLisle and begin a new life in California. Ward confronts the pressures of gender, location, and time that contributed to her mother’s life and inability to escape from cycles of poverty and overwhelming responsibility. Ward references the wolf of DeLisle representing the wildness and savagery that awaits the local Black community, which is unable to break free. Her mother’s awareness of this danger motivates her to leave DeLisle for Los Angeles after high school.

“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.” 

Throughout the memoir Ward relates this tension between her understanding of the inequality in DeLisle for those within her community and the inexorable draw she feels to return home. Over and over again, Ward returns to Mississippi in search of a sense of security and an understanding of who she is and where she fits in. Despite her achievements in college and graduate school, DeLisle lures her to return.

“Sometimes they are passively forced out by school authorities, branded as misfits or accused of serious offenses like selling drugs or harassing other students: sometimes they are pushed to the back of classrooms and ignored.”

While relaying Rog’s academic struggles that result in him dropping out in 10th grade, Ward comments on the prevalence of such experiences among Black men. She alludes to the lack of individualized attention placed on Black adolescents who face labeling that drives them out of school systems or leaves them without any support. Ward acknowledges the systems that perpetuate inequality and trap young Black men in cycles of poverty and violence.

“My mother took a picture of me while I held a can to my belly, beer dribbling from my chin, the can half the length of my torso, before taking it away. In the picture, I’m grinning, my feet planted wide, almost proud. I was part of the party.” 

Ward describes a picture taken of her as a toddler in California, hinting at her later dependence on alcohol. Ward reiterates throughout her memoir how alcohol allows her to escape from life’s harsh reality. The beer within the picture foreshadows Ward’s use of alcohol within the cruel context to which she is born.

“My brother would have to grow up and be a Black man in the South. My brother would have to fight in ways I would not. Perhaps my father dreamed about the men in his family who died young in all the wrong ways, and this forced his hand when he woke to my brother standing next to my parents’ bed: pink-mouthed and grinning, green to the world, innocent.” 

Ward’s father instructs her brother Joshua on how to navigate life as a Black man. Despite their connected upbringings as brother and sister, their paths diverge as Josh learns to adapt to a world set on destroying him while Ward maintains a level of innocence and protection as she seeks escape through education. Her father’s fear over Josh’s childlike innocence demonstrates the standards of strength and shrewdness that define the masculinity of Black men.

“Now, the long scar in my head feels like a thin plastic cocktail straw, and like all war wounds, it itches.” 

Ward is born prematurely and bears physical scars from her first difficult months on Earth. Here she references the scar she receives from an attack by her father’s pit bull that nearly kills her. Though faded, the scar is ever-present and illustrative of the lasting effects of trauma. Ward relates the scars to “war wounds” accumulated in battle. The battle that Ward fights throughout her life is one of survival, and although she survives, the scars’ itchiness denotes the indelible marks these experiences leave on her. These experiences are what comprise her memoir as she explores her grief and attempts to understand what has happened to her, her loved ones, and her community.

“We’d lost three friends by then, and we were so green we couldn’t reconcile our youth with the fact that we were dying, so we drank and smoked and did other things, because these things allowed us the illusion that our youth might save us, that there was someone somewhere who would have mercy on us.” 

Throughout her memoir Ward enters into cycles of drinking and partying as she searches for escape and release from the guilt and grief that seize her. The use of the collective pronoun “we” reveals the common use of alcohol and drugs in her community to numb one’s self from the realities of poverty and death. Ward explores how each of the five men she chronicles contends with this same desire to feel numb. By relating her own experiences, Ward establishes that she is not an outside observer but a kindred spirit searching for the same relief—a journey that ends tragically for the men whose stories she tells.

“We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new…did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?” 

Ward again compares the experiences of young Black men and women to war. Like those in war, Black young adults are faced with death and their communities are vulnerable. According to Ward, this war continues from generation to generation in an inescapable cycle of death and destruction. Ward highlights this endless pattern as she tells each man’s story as well as her own, complete with details of the cycles of poverty and anguish that characterize so much of a young Black person’s life in the American South.

“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.”

Ward discusses her work as a graduate student in a creative writing program and her desire to protect her fictional characters from the devastation of what their lives would be in the real world. Ward is aware of her avoidance and attempts to create new worlds where Black lives are protected and valued. Within this memoir, she confronts what she avoids in fiction, allowing the reader and herself to feel the weight of her grief.

“I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.” 

Ward’s affinity for reading begins at a young age and serves as an escape. However, her love of reading leaves her ostracized from both the Black and White worlds she inhabits. Ward explains her love for literature’s ability to open new worlds that are full of strong female characters capable of exerting control over their lives. Ward envies this ability and so escapes from her world, which is devoid of choice, power, and control.

“I did not know what it was. I did not know that I’d seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wits’ end did to feel less like themselves for a time. I did not know this need would follow my generation to adulthood too.” 

As a child Ward observes her babysitter taking drugs; in retrospect, she processes the reality of what she saw. Ward now recognizes the need to numb and escape, a need that she also experiences. Ward explores once again the notion of generational patterns and how the realities she and her loved ones are born into determine how they live their lives. Rather than make individual choices, Ward and her loved ones are controlled by undeniable forces of race, class, and gender.

“The fact that he was a Black male barely scraping by in his classes meant he was seen as a problem. And the school administration at the time solved the problem of the Black male by practicing a kind of benign neglect. Years later, that benign neglect would turn malignant and would involve illegal strip searches of middle schoolers accused of drug dealing, typing these same students as troublemakers, laying a thick paper trail of imagined or real discipline offenses, and once the paper trail grew thick enough, kicking out the students who endangered the blue-ribbon rating with lackluster grades and test scores.”

Ward further explores the public school system and how it contributes to the lack of opportunities provided to young Black men. C. J., like Rog, experiences the neglect of the public school system. Ward extends this evaluation by detailing how the system first neglects and then actively marks Black boys as “troublemakers” capable of tainting a school’s reputation. For Ward, this reality breeds the dangerous label of violence thrust upon young Black men.

“The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths.”

The only public space available to DeLisle’s Black community is slated to accommodate the growing graveyard beside it. Ward predicts that the graves, a symbol of death, will overtake the park, a symbol of connection and life. Death overpowers life in Ward’s community. She rhetorically ponders what can be done to stop this from happening. For Ward, there is no answer; grief and life’s struggles are the active forces that will inevitably kill them.

“This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn’t, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery.” 

Ward analyzes the prevalence of fatherless families in her community as she details her own family’s collapse due to her father’s infidelity. Ward acknowledges the systemic forces of inequality that threaten family structure in her community. She proffers the counterargument that race is not a factor in the prevalence of fatherless families. She supports that point with the argument that the destruction of Black American families began with the historical forced rupturing of families by slaveowners. Ward does not hesitate to connect the historical reality of slavery to the current broken state of many Black families.

“She’d tried to escape the role she’d been born to, of women working, of absent fathers, of little education and no opportunity. She’d tried to escape the history of her heritage, just as my father had.” 

Ward returns to a description of how her mother was unable to escape the generational cycles that plagued her. Ward highlights the overpowering forces of poverty, inequality, and racism that have defined her mother’s life and barred her from creating a new life for herself. This struggle is one that Ward’s father also attempts to overcome. Ward illustrates how the cycles that gripped her grandparents’ generation is inherited by her parents and, eventually, by her and her siblings.

“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.” 

Ward places the actions of young Black men and women in the context of survival, a choice that negates the dehumanizing stereotypes of violence imposed on them by society. Ward explains the misogynistic and violent actions of young Black men as desperate attempts to protect themselves from the active forces of destruction that assault them from birth. These acts of desperation carry negative effects of diminished self-worth and the loss of identity. Ward documents how such effects infiltrate the lives of Josh, Rog, Demond, Ronald, and C. J., as well as her own personal journey to find who she is.

“The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South—being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options—all of these things would cease. And this is what Ronald thought he wanted.” 

Ward lists the obstacles that Ronald faced throughout his life as a young Black man in the South. This overwhelming barrage of difficulties is unrelenting as Ward continues the list with new devastating details of what contributed to Ronald’s suicide. Ward captures the hopelessness felt by Ronald and Black men in general, who struggle to survive under the cruelty and inequality of life in the United States. She determines that Ronald’s suicide was an act resulting from personal strife as well as the real and active forces working against Black men.

“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. We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.” 

Ward discusses the failed attempts to rescue young Black men like Ronald from the clutches of depression and violence, and she addresses the greater moving parts that contribute to deaths of many Black men while hindering any attempts to save them. Ward compares these parts to a theatrical performance; the stage is set to project a story that, though appearing real, is in fact engineered. She accounts Ronald’s act of suicide as a reaction to his understanding of his life as a staged production, one whose control is completely out of his hands. Ward remarks on the pull of generational and systemic patterns throughout her memoir. These patterns, like the stage production metaphor she forms here, deny Ronald and men like him from asserting their agency. Ronald is merely the byproduct of society’s rejection of him.

“But as I watched my schoolmates, their shining faces and white, wide smiles, separated by the glass between us, I realized I’d achieved nothing. I was still myself. I was still alone.” 

Ward uncharacteristically confronts a White boy in her school who threatens her with references to the violent lynching of Black people. Ward challenges the boy and feels momentarily triumphant; she quickly realizes that, despite this new bold action, the conditions that isolate and alienate her from her White peers remain. Ward recognizes the futility of her fight against her White classmate, a representative of White society as a whole, in which the greater systems of inequality remain unchanged.

“But I couldn’t. I was so depressed by the subtext I felt, so depressed I was silenced, because the message was always the same: You’re Black. You’re less than White. And then, at the heart of it: You’re less than human.”

Ward continues to endure the racism and ostracism from her White peers. Despite her desire to confide in her teachers and seek help, Ward falls into a stifling depression. The action of her racist classmates and the inaction of her friends communicate the demeaning message that Black people are not valuable or human, a message that shapes Ward’s self-perception.

“I thought of how it felt to witness my mother at work, of how I saw her in a broader context, as a Black cleaning woman, almost cowed, and of how I was very conscious in that moment of my dark skin, my overbite, my irascible hair, the way my hands itched to help my mother. How my legs tingled as I sat and looked at my mother as she worked, and how I was aware that the wife was talking to me like an intellectual equal, engaging me, asking me about my college plans. How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.” 

Ward struggles to reconcile the two worlds she resides in: the world she was born into as a Black woman and the world of hope and education she has found entry to only through her mother’s sacrifices. As Ward navigates both worlds internally and externally in this scene, she becomes hyper aware of the physical features that connect her to her mother, who silently cleans in the background. In this moment Ward is completely aware of the injustice of her situation as she profits off the labor of her undervalued mother. Ward writes this memoir because of her mother’s sacrifice and attempts to honor the community and family that she loves through it.