NOTE: I began “Be-Lied” as a medium for me to
publish fiction and non-fiction pieces after the loss of another publishing
platform. As it happens, I opened “Be-Lied” with a story-telling challenge. To
date, no one has taken up that challenge. Therefore, I have decided to attach a
story to each informational piece I publish on “Be-Lied.” Not all of those
stories are “true.” The one attached to this review of "Men We Reaped" is true. I originally
published this review on the Yahoo Contributors Network.
Men We
Reaped: A Memoir
Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury
2013
I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and had
relatives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
I came of age in the 1960’s when the Civil Rights Movement was pushing
the South, kicking and screaming, toward integration. “Men We Reaped” is an emotionally difficult,
insightful read. It illuminates a world
parallel to the one I grew up in, a world that was separate but NOT equal.
While this work is a memoir, it is not about Ward. It is
about Black men in the South and various factors which shaped their lives,
including endemic racism, economic hardship, and drug activity. Specifically, Ward narrates the lives of five
young Black men in her community who died within a five-year window between
2000 and 2004. These five young Black
men fell for various reasons, ranging from gun violence to drug activity to
automobile accidents.
In narrating the lives of the five young Black men, of
necessity she narrates the story of the larger community and of the women in
that community. Ward writes, “To tell
[this story], I must tell the story of my town, and the history of my
community.” To this end, Ward employs a
unique narrative structure, narrating the stories of the five young Black men in
reverse chronological order. She
interweaves the story of her family in chronological order, alternating those chapters
with chapters about the five young Black men.
In this unflinching account of a Black community on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast, Ward describes the life they led, but she never judges
or editorializes. She relates stories of
Black men dealing drugs because they cannot get jobs with decent wages, so they
deal to augment meager incomes. She
relates her father’s infidelities and multiple children out of wedlock. She relates her mother’s struggle to save her
marriage and later her struggle as a single mother to keep her family
together. Ward relates her own mixed
feelings about her mother working as a housekeeper for wealthy White families
on the Gulf Coast in order to insure that her children are fed and educated. She relates times when extended families lived
in cramped quarters, pooling resources of money, food, and child care.
My Story—The 1967-68 School Year, Baton Rouge
In the 1967-68 school year, I was in 6th grade,
my sister in 4th grade, my brother in 2nd grade, at
Howell Park Elementary School in Baton Rouge. In an attempt to comply with
Brown vs. Board of Education, Louisiana sprinkled African-American students among
the various classes. In retrospect, I wonder how these students were chosen to
be sprinkled, and how were they transported to and from our school. One lone
student, “Peter,” joined my class.
In the 1967-68 school year, my maternal grandmother was in
the final months of her lengthy battle with breast cancer. During one of her
hospitalizations, my mother took us to visit. She pulled us aside in the
corridor and admonished: “Do not tell your grandmother that you have black
children in your classes. It would kill her.” The 11-year-old me could not
quite figure out how this news would do in my grandmother; nonetheless, I took
it to heart.
In the 1967-68 school year, “Ralphie” rocked the 6th
grade classes by uttering “shit” at the water fountain at the end of recess one
day. “Mindy” became the first 6th grade girl to really need a bra. At the end of March, 1968, my grandmother
finally succumbed to her cancer. And “Peter” spent a year of his education in a
big, white bubble.
