Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine
**
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones,
Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear
to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.**
"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the
thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling
and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it
was dead men that we reaped." --Harriet Tubman
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life--to drugs,
accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in
poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after
another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write
about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the
truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died
because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived
with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug
addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says
the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it
nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to
write their stories and her own.
Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully
about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the
women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often
absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of
her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to
leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel
American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the
intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully,
Jesmyn Ward's memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat's
Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and Maya
Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
