I’d come up with a clever line to convince you to see Jesmyn Ward at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Reilly Room, but her work and its resonance demand an introduction more straightforward and sincere.
Last year, I didn’t come across a book more heartbreaking and important that Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped. Unlike many entries in the genre, not a single page is self-indulgent or deceptive. The Mississippi native simply recounts her experience growing up in a working-class African-American family down south, enabling the reader to connect the dots around the systemic issues that box in certain populations from having a fair shake at success.
Men We Reaped tells the stories of five young men close to Ward who lost their lives during a demoralizing four-year span. Each death further illustrates the “cycle of futility” in DeLisle, Mississippi and the byproducts of our society’s benign neglect. One close friend dies of a drug overdose. Another gets murdered after testifying in court. Her sister’s boyfriend falls victim to a train accident caused by malfunctioning crossing lights that no one ever got around to fixing. Her former crush commits suicide. Her younger brother gets run off the road by a drunk driver, a white man in his 40s who ended up only serving three years in prison.
Ward’s story is one that needs to be told. Though many of the same issues are addressed in her two novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award in 2011, the heaviness of the author’s pen when writing down her own life is palpable. It’s impossible not to be moved by her struggle, her grace, her care. She explains the difference between writing novels and memoir thusly, while encapsulating the compassion that propels her prose:
I loved [my characters in my first novel] too much as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addictions, 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. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happing to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God.
Without a benevolent God to protect her loved ones, the old adage “the devil is in the details” takes on new meaning as Ward observes her world.
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.
Though Men We Reap is a harrowing read, there is hope at its core. It is the story of a young, unfairly “other-ized” author, who has transcended the challenges embedded in gender, race, and class, one capable of imparting the following wisdom at the end of her exorcism:
We who still live do what we must. Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in a small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to home before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.
Ward’s story is not simply one that needed to be told; it’s one that needs to be heard. Open up your ears and your heart tonight.