DeLISLE, Miss. — The writer Jesmyn Ward’s brother is buried in a cemetery next to the park where they used to play as children. Graves are beginning to fill up the space between the two, and she says she worries that one day the park will be swallowed up by the headstones of friends and neighbors, too many of them dying too young. Ms. Ward returned to this coastal Mississippi town in 2011 and began working on “Men We Reaped,” a memoir that chronicles the deaths of five young men, including her brother. In DeLisle, she’s surrounded by memories of the dead, but also by the living — the friends and family members who make it possible for one another to survive so much grief. “There’s a fear that you’ll forget,” she said last week, speaking by phone, “that your memories will just adhere to pictures and you’ll forget what it was really like to be with and love this person.” Ms. Ward, 36, was the surprise winner of the National Book Award in 2011 for her second novel, “Salvage the Bones,” about a family surviving Hurricane Katrina. She established herself as an important contemporary voice: a sensitive, lyrical narrator of difficult stories from the land of Faulkner and Welty. “Men We Reaped,” to be published on Tuesday by Bloomsbury, is as much an existential detective story as it is a personal history, as Ms. Ward searches for a unifying reason that her brother, Joshua, her cousin C. J. and friends Roger, Demond and Ronald — all young black men — died within a four-year period. She writes first about Roger Eric Daniels III, who died of a heart attack at 23 while using cocaine. “They picking us off, one by one,” a friend tells Ms. Ward in the book, as they watch the hearse leave Mr. Daniels’s home. Who, she wonders, are “they”? “Was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died?” “Men We Reaped” is that larger story. With a novelist’s skill, Ms. Ward mines her memories of the men, like the girlhood crush she had on Ronald, or the night she enlisted a friend to wake her sister, who was dating C. J., to break the news of his death. What she finds are threads of the past that linger in the collective present, specifically the role that the South’s legacy of racism has played in how these young men lived and died. The deaths don’t follow a pattern. Joshua was hit by a drunken driver. C. J. was killed by a train. Ronald committed suicide, and Demond was murdered after agreeing to testify against a drug dealer. While it was not immediately apparent to Ms. Ward how they were all connected, she said she found a link in the way that poor black people in the South are told that their lives are without value, both explicitly and implicitly. “We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing,” she writes in “Men We Reaped.” “We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.” In an interview in May, Ms. Ward said she had been putting off writing this memoir for years, wary of the emotional toll that it would collect. She wrote it first as an essay when she was an M.F.A. student at the University of Michigan in 2004. Even then, she said, she delayed it until late the night before it was due, working until daylight to meet the deadline. The next year, her agent, Jennifer Lyons, urged her to turn the essay into a full-length memoir. “The work transported me to this place with a gorgeous landscape and yet with intense ironies, conflicts between the poor and affluent, and extreme racial divides,” Ms. Lyons said. But Ms. Ward wasn’t ready. “It was an almost physical reaction when she asked me to write it, because I knew that just writing the essay was hard enough for me,” she said. It wasn’t until 2010, after completing “Salvage the Bones,” that she reconsidered doing the memoir, with the last death chronicled in the book six years behind her. Ms. Ward said she didn’t come back to write her memoir, but because she missed her family. But DeLisle has been a constant in her fiction. She set her two novels — the first is “Where the Line Bleeds” (2008) — in a fictionalized version of the town called Bois Sauvage. Victor LaValle, one of the judges who selected “Salvage the Bones” for the National Book Award, said Flannery O’Connor once complained that modern writers aren’t “from anywhere.” But, he said of Ms. Ward’s novel, “one of the things that was impossible to ignore was that this was a very specific place, and Jesmyn Ward seemed to know that place incredibly well.” Ms. Ward said she wondered how writing about her community without the veil of fiction would affect her family, and the families of the young men. Mostly, she said, she worried about wounding her mother, whom she described as a private person. “The women here are the ones that hold the families together,” Ms. Ward said. “So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in a way it would be like I would have lost my entire family.” In May, Ms. Ward sat in her living room, joined by her sisters, Charine and Nerissa, who live in DeLisle. They were Ms. Ward’s sounding board as she prepared to write the memoir. “It feels good for someone to tell the truth about what really happened,” Nerissa said. “Not sugarcoating anything, and not overexaggerating anything. Just the truth.” Jesmyn Ward said that people have to look at history through clear eyes to address its role in the present. “It’s almost like I’m in the dark and I have a flashlight,” she said. “And that wolf is out there lurking, and I’m able to shine a light on it briefly. And then it disappears back into the darkness.” A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Past Lingers in Present, And the Sorrows Go On.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 18:59:32 +0000
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