Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward

In the final chapter of Jesmyn Ward’s new memoir, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury), she writes about one of the last times she saw her brother, Joshua, who died in 2000. They drive along the outskirts of DeLisle, Mississippi, where they grew up together, listening to Ghostface Killah’s “All That I Got Is You.”

“This reminds me of us,” Joshua tells her, singing along to the lyrics that celebrate the rapper’s impoverished childhood, the importance of family, his mother’s love. In the song, Ghostface warns his listeners never to forget the past:

Because see, that’s the child I was

What made me the man I am today

See cause if you forget where you come from

You’re never gonna make it where you’re goin,

Because you lost the reality of yourself

So take one stroll through your mind

And see what you will find

And you’ll see a whole universe all over again.

Thirteen years later, Ward decides it’s time to take that stroll.

Now 36, Ward, who won a National Book Award in 2011 for her novel, Salvage the Bones, returns to the Gulf Coast with a memoir so honest and raw it sometimes takes your breath away.

Steeped in the imagery of battle, Men We Reaped centers around five young men — Ward’s brother, her cousin and three friends — who died within a four-year period, victims of a perfect storm Ward calls, variously, “a plague,” “this epidemic,” and “a great darkness bearing down on our lives that no one acknowledges.”

One kills himself, another is shot. One dies when his car collides with a train, another of a heart attack. Joshua is hit and killed by a drunk driver who never pays a penny of the fine his sentence stipulates, who serves three out of only five years.

To make sense of these tragedies, Ward looks for answers in the history of her town, her community, and her family. Beginning with “the distant past” when her great-grandparents first settled in DeLisle, she alternates between a chronological account of her life and portraits of the five men, starting with the most recent death, in 2004, and working backward to her brother’s.

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And the winner is … Salvage the Bones

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award, announced Nov. 16 at the 62nd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner.

Imagine a movie camera, one that stays focused on a poor family in coastal Mississippi, Claude Batiste and his four children—Randall, Skeetah, Junior and their sister Esch—in late August of 2005.

Now imagine that the camera follows them everywhere for twelve days, that it never looks away.

It records the poverty and the daily squalor in stark black and white, documenting each scene with gritty realism. The camera finds the youngest child eating uncooked ramen noodles, and captures the father, shambling home drunk, as he tries to pick a fight with his older sons.

It zooms in when the family pit bull gives birth in a filthy shed, and it follows the pregnant 15-year-old daughter into the single bathroom each morning as she throws up, while her brothers bang on the door to get in.

It will be running even when Hurricane Katrina hits.

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury, $24, 272 pages) is the implacable lens that captures in grainy, dramatic close-ups a family’s hopes tied up in the narrowest of futures: A basketball scholarship. The price a litter of prize fighting dogs might bring. The money to be made after a hurricane “by a man with a dump truck.” A young girl’s dreams of becoming a goddess in the eyes of a boy who never looks at her.

Like her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2009), Ward’s second takes place in the fictional Bois Sauvage, based on the author’s hometown of Delisle, Mississippi.

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