Men We Reaped

Between 2000 and 2004, novelist Jesmyn Ward lost five young Black men from her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, including her younger brother Joshua. Men We Reaped moves backward through the deaths, devoting one chapter to each man, while a parallel thread moves forward through Ward's own childhood as the scholarship girl who left for Stanford and Michigan and could not stop coming back. The memoir braids her mother's domestic-worker labor, her father's absence, the rural poverty and policed-Black-masculinity that shaped her town, and the grief that gave her the voice she would carry into Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing.