'Men We Reaped' traces woman's journey of pain
Published 4:07 pm, Friday, October 11, 2013
October 2000. A funeral service for Jesmyn Ward's younger brother, Joshua. in DeLisle, Miss., a small rural community in the Gulf Coast pinewoods. There are other young black men among the family and friends gathered in the crowded church that day, of course, and over the next few years, four of them - four more boys whom Ward grew up with and loved - would be taken and mourned, as well, the victims of violence, addiction, calamity.
At its essence, Ward's devastating new memoir, "Men We Reaped," is her attempt to honor, come to terms with and explain this string of tragedies that visited DeLisle in the years between 2000 and 2004. And in doing so, Ward - a two-time novelist who won the National Book Award in 2011 for "Salvage the Bones" - has written a beautiful, riveting book that moves both backward and forward in time with poignant, plainsong prose, taking readers chronologically through her own remarkable upbringing as interspersed chapters address the lives and deaths of these five young men in reverse temporal order.
In her prologue, Ward explains the reasoning behind this structural approach:
'Men We Reaped: A Memoir'
By Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury, 257 pp., $26.
"My hope is that learning something about our lives and the lives of the people in my community will mean that when I get to the heart, when my marches forward through the past and backward through the present meet in the middle with my brother's death, I'll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here."
"Men We Reaped" is as much about understanding a tragedy as it is about the "here" of which Ward speaks. Ward, in her painful search for answers, focuses much of her attention on one of the few tangible links between these five "seemingly unrelated" deaths: her home, DeLisle.
Of DeLisle (or "Wolf Town," as the community was called by early settlers), Ward writes:
"The Wolf River, brown and lazy, snakes its way through DeLisle, fingers the country in creeks, before emptying into the bayou. When people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled. I want to impart something of its wild roots, its early savagery. Calling it Wolf Town hints at the wildness at the heart of it."
Note the dual "hearts" in play here: the death of Ward's brother Joshua, but also this beautiful phantom wolf that has come to represent so much of what Ward both loves and fears about her home. With "Men We Reaped," Ward has set aside the fictional "Bois Sauvage" setting of her two novels (a clear nod to DeLisle) and instead lends her considerable talents to introducing readers to the place itself. To the people who live and die there. To those who love and lose and are lost. In many ways, this book is her wolf hunt, Ward's attempt to record what she knows in order to give shape to what she does not.
Ward, obviously, is a writer with many stories to tell, whatever the form, but "Men We Reaped" is an important and, perhaps, even essential book, in large part because this accomplished and deservedly lauded novelist somehow summoned the strength to bring us all home with her to the white-hot center of her pain, to the place where that wolf resides.
As a kindness to her mother, the woman who had suffered and sacrificed so much to provide for her family, Jesmyn Ward wrote a poem to be read at her brother's funeral service on that October day in 2000. In effect, "Men We Reaped" is the stunning perfection of that elegy. Her refusal to let these young men go quietly. Her reminder that before there was loss, there was a love that will endure. Her gift to her mother and her family, to her community and to us.
Skip Horack wrote this review for the San Francisco Chronicle.