Men We Reaped

Ward begins her memoir with a description of her journeys to New Orleans to spend weekends with her divorced father. From her mother’s commands to “lock the doors” to her brother’s ominous declaration that “Somebody died here” to her father’s devotion to raising fighting dogs, violence and death permeate Ward’s environment from a young age (1-2). She navigates the racism she endures in her “majority White Episcopalian Mississippi private school” as “a scholarship kid, only attending the school because my mother was a maid for a few wealthy families on the Mississippi coast who sponsored my tuition” (2). She alludes to the implied stereotype of Blacks as violent that permeates many of her interactions with her White peers. As a young adult, Ward attempts to reconcile the violent stereotypes of New Orleans she overhears with the humanity she observes firsthand. She witnesses the Black residents of New Orleans in their daily lives and “wondered what the men were talking about. I wondered who they are. I wondered what they were like” (4).

Ward dreads returning to school in Mississippi, anticipating the racism she has and will continue to endure. On the drive back home from New Orleans, Ward confesses, “I didn’t want them to look at me after saying something about Black people.