Men We Reaped

I grew up white, middle class, in a city/state/region of the country that doesn't carry the burden of the history of slavery.

Jesmyn Ward's life and DNA couldn't be more different.

If you've read any of her fiction, you know Ward has the sins of the American South deep in her bloodline. If you've taken the time to anyone like her, you know that history is nearly impossible to shake.

Ward's memoir lays in all bare: the hate, the fear, the weight... I could never truly know what it's like to grow up black in the South. With Ward's book, you can't - and, shouldn't - look away.

Her story is about the deaths of four young black men. Men she knew, men she loved, even her own brother. They die from violence and from circumstance - and, what they have in common is that their deaths feel inevitable. Ward intertwines the stories of their deaths with the story of her life. It's heartbreaking and heavy. The weight of that history makes a relatively short book feel like it will never end.

"The land the community park is built on... is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die," she writes. "One day our graves will swallow our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep."

It's a book about the scourge of poverty and of being black and poor in the South. About the things we know about and the things no one pays enough attention to. The percentage of black men and women who receive care for mental health is half that of non-Hispanic whites. It's not that they don't experience it; they don't ask for help. And, it's killing them one generation after another.

Ward "escaped" that life in a way few others do. She went to California, went to Stanford, got an education and a glimpse of life away. But, the history of the men she lost and the responsibility to those still there was stronger. She now lives back in Mississippi and writes about it so that maybe the rest of us - even those of us in the opposite corner of the country/spectrum/circumstance - might understand and finally bring about real change.