51 pages • 1 hour read
Jesmyn WardMen We Reaped
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Longing for Home
Over and over again, Ward ventures homeward to Mississippi, despite her expressed desire to escape the brutality of life in the South. These continual journeys homeward become subconscious, as demonstrated when she asks, “How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?” (195). It is love that calls Ward back, a love that binds her fiercely to her fractured family unit made even more precious by the loss of her 19-year-old brother Josh.
Despite this intense love for her family, Ward returns home in an ambivalent flood of emotions. Upon returning home from Michigan in Chapter 2, Ward embraces her sister Charine and, although relieved to be in the comfortable familiarity of her mother’s trailer, she is overcome with an ominous sense of dread that correctly anticipates yet another death. Despite the painful memories home harbors for Ward, she returns yet again, to settle in “this place that birthed and kills me at once” in an effort to raise her own child with the model of her mother’s resilience (240). In returning home, Ward revisits the memories of her lost loved ones and constructs this memoir in her attempt to understand what it means to be Black in America and to document that struggle. Ward credits her mother for inspiring her to “write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says, Hello. We are here. Listen” (251). It is only through her return to Mississippi and to her painful memories that Ward is able to give voice to the silenced.
History Repeats Itself
Throughout her memoir Ward explores how her own life experiences and those of the men she chronicles mimic the experiences of preceding generations. On the personal level, Ward’s mother and father, desperate to provide their children with the stable home life they never had, find themselves mirroring the struggles of the previous generation’s single mothers. Like her mother before her, Ward searches for ways to find her voice and break free from generational cycles of poverty and inequity.
These generational patterns play out in the lives of several people close to Ward. Rog suffers the same fate as his father; both men die young from heart attacks. Ward’s father teaches her brother Josh what Black masculinity looks like and what it takes to survive as a Black man in the American South. But these lessons leave Josh ill-equipped to handle the harsh reality of his life, and he never manages to escape poverty, instead falling into drug dealing and addiction before being killed by a drunk driver.
Ward also examines generational patterns on a broader scale, detailing how entrenched inequity affects her greater community. For example, C. J. enjoys a stable childhood in a two-parent household, but Ward credits his death to decaying infrastructure caused by systemic negligence. These collective patterns of struggle, death, and grief are reflected in the image of the park and the graveyard. The park is the community’s sole green area; it exists in disrepair due to the county’s lack of investment. That same park is designated to accommodate the growing graveyard next door. As Ward observes, “one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. […] In the end, our lives are our deaths” (128). Her slip into second-person narration emphasizes the communal nature of these problems.
Despite their best efforts, the Black men and women of DeLisle still fight the systems of oppression that deny them the opportunity to escape their ancestors’ brutal struggles. At the conclusion of her memoir, Ward acknowledges the progress made through courage, strength, and resilience, but she also admits, “It is not easy. I continue. Sometimes I am tireless. And sometimes I am weary” (251). Her memoir marks only the beginning of her journey to provide a voice for the voiceless and break the patterns of loss and death.
Escape Through Alcohol and Drugs
Drugs serve a dual purpose in the lives of those whom Ward loves. Taking drugs—whether cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, or something else—provides an escape from the pervasive trauma and grief fueled by poverty and inequity. Selling drugs becomes a means to overcome that poverty, a way for several people in Ward’s life—including her brother Josh—to provide for themselves and their families despite limited economic opportunities.
Though the men whose stories Ward tells understand the danger that underlies this practice, they reluctantly resort to selling drugs in hope of one day escaping their reliance on this risk. When Ward discusses the issue with Josh, he says, “You think I like to do this shit?” (219). He resents that he must sell drugs to survive, but with a dry economy, there are no other opportunities to improve his circumstances. Josh later abuses drugs to numb himself to the pain of those circumstances, and he subsequently becomes trapped in addiction. In trying to work within the system that has entrapped him, Josh becomes a product of it himself, as do C. J., Rog, and Ronald. And in the end, each man becomes a victim of that same system, as none of them escape from this dependence.
In retrospect, Ward does not judge these men for their limited choices. She herself connects to this desire for escape and uses alcohol to numb herself to the torrent of grief that characterizes so much of her life. By conveying her own story of substance abuse, Ward focuses on the circumstances that lead both herself and these men to chemical dependence to escape their realities. With this context, the men she features become fully humanized representations of themselves worthy of empathy and honor.
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