There Are No Monsters Here

“From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths. The first was my brother, Joshua…”

Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped is beautiful and heartbreaking in a way that only stories about family and home can be. This book made me weep in the prologue. I want to be clear: this was no mere tearing up. Sobs were heard. Ward’s words don’t require a book-long, slow build-up to a crescendo of emotion and tragedy. The tragedy is there from the beginning, on almost every page.

“I chewed my funeral food on a hot Mississippi summer day and looked at my brother’s eyes, large and brown and wide, in a picture that revealed nothing of what he was, and represented everything he wasn’t.”

This is the sentence that broke me. That even the people who knew her brother Joshua could get it so wrong with a photograph that screams generic symbols and meaning without any representation of who the person was, like he was just running on a program called “thug life.”

Ward wants us to know these young men, especially her brother, Joshua. She gives each of the men who died his own chapter, a too short biography, but just enough to make us miss him when he’s gone, wonder what he might have done if he’d lived longer. Ward sets out to prove the humanity of these young black men that we, our society, see, promote, understand as “the problem.” Not lack of jobs or opportunity or education, but the men themselves, even when they’re still boys, self-made, sui generis, The Problem. She gives them names, tells us their ever-present disappointments, their unforgotten dreams, and never fails to describe their smiles.

Ward alternates their stories with the chapters of her life, growing up in Mississippi. Her family story moves forward in time so we can watch her and her brother, Joshua, grow up together, the two older siblings taking care of their two little sisters. We watch their parents’ volatile marriage (“They never touched each other in anger, but the small things in that house suffered.”) come together and fall apart, and come together only to fall apart again. We watch as Jesmyn succeeds in school while Joshua is bored. We recognize his slim choices of employment, as Jesmyn goes to college.

In real time, the five funerals started with her brother’s, but for him, Jesmyn Ward reverses time so we can know him best of all. By the end, Ward makes us love him so we can’t look away when he dies. We can’t write him off as a statistic. We weep.

“How could I know then this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”

In so few words, Ward can make you feel the humid Mississippi air, the deep hurt of a loved one and the basic humanity of everyone she describes, male and female. Ward give us aunts, uncles, and cousins, so it feels like she’s related to everyone in this small place in Mississippi, so it feels like we might be related too. These are people, struggling, finding a moment of happiness where they can. There are no monsters here.

This review was originally posted on Julia In Austin.