Men We Reaped

Ward commences her exploration of the five men whose deaths structure her memoir by starting with the latest tragedy to affect her and her community: the death of Rog, who died at age 23. Rog was a close family friend and former boyfriend of Ward’s sister Nerissa.

The chapter starts with the author’s trip home to Mississippi from Michigan, where she attends graduate school. Her cousin Aldon flies to Detroit to help her with the long drive home. As Ward travels from Michigan, she suffers from intense allergies that make her “feel as if the very landscape of Michigan hated me, as if I were a foreign body it was attempting to eject” (20). However, as she moves closer to Mississippi, the allergies lift, and she can finally breathe, although she grapples with extreme grief over the four lives lost in four years and ominously wishes, “I hope nobody dies this summer” (21).

Ward details the homesickness that plagues her while away from Mississippi and the customary trips she makes back home during every break. She returns to her mother’s double-wide trailer where, after her brother’s death four years prior, her mother cares for Charine, the youngest sibling, and De’Sean, the young son of Ward’s sister Nerissa, who gave birth to De’Sean at 13 and cares for him only on the weekends.