When Jesmyn Ward won 2011’s National Book Award with her second novel, Salvage the Bones, about a Mississippi Gulf Coast family hit by Hurricane Katrina, she drew attention to a part of the country that’s largely missing from contemporary literature with a piercing lyricism that didn’t prettify her characters’ brutal circumstances. Even more potent is her elegiac, essential-feeling memoir, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury), which returns to her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, to recall the poor but close-knit community she grew up in, a place where the American dream shone like “some wishing star in the distance.” At the center of Ward’s personal history is a startling tragedy: the deaths of her brother, cousin, and friends—all young black men—who died between 2000 and 2004. Piecing together their stories and the constellation of factors that led to their seemingly unconnected deaths, Ward, with a survivor’s haunted, propulsive urgency, writes: “We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing.” Vogue talked with Ward, now 36, about the necessity of writing their stories—and how she manages to alchemize rage and grief into art.
What was it like to write about these experiences—as well as the virulent racism you encountered as a schoolgirl at a mostly white school—without the veil of fiction?
The memoir is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It was so hard for me that I plan to never write another memoir again. Every day was a struggle. Reliving the events that I wrote about was difficult, but reliving the racism and my brother’s and friends’ deaths wasn’t the hardest part of writing it. What was most difficult was sitting with the experience and attempting to understand it from my present perspective, and then transforming that understanding into connective narrative tissue for the reader. That process took a long time, and it broke me in some ways. The metaphor it calls to mind is when a doctor re-breaks a bone that has broken and healed wrong in order for it to heal in a way that is healthier for the patient. Hackneyed, but true.
Another author might have focused on her own triumph over a difficult childhood, but you examine the fate of the men around you in chapters that alternate with your own story. At what point did you decide to write overtly about these men, and structure the book this way?
I knew from the start that I would structure the memoir like this. At the very beginning of my first draft, I sat down and wrote a detailed outline. This outline changed a little during the revision process, but mostly it remained the same. I tried to think of other, easier ways to structure the memoir, but I had a physical reaction when I did so. It felt wrong to think about telling the story in a different way. I had to tell it even as I told the reader about the lives of those I’d loved and lost, and I had to end the book with my brother.
Your memoir culminates in the terrible injustice surrounding your brother’s death—he was killed at nineteen by a white drunk driver, who was charged merely with leaving the scene of the accident, and not with the crime of your brother’s death. The message is pretty clear: Young black men still aren’t safe in many parts of this country. There’s a grim timeliness to that message, coming as it does in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin. How would you like to see your book received?
Ideally, I’d like readers to see the young men and women I write about as human beings: complicated and alive and unique. And I hope that the experience of seeing my characters as real, of sympathizing with them, would change the reader so that the next time another young black man or woman is killed, someone will be held accountable. Perhaps, in addition to the person who commits the crime, even the culture that engenders the phenomena as well? But that’s the optimist in me. The pessimist simply wants readers to find something that speaks to them, that makes them feel, that takes them outside of their experience and makes them live another reality.