This story was first published in the Sun Herald. Read more here.
An author and native to the Mississippi Coast has breached The New York Times’ 100 best books of the 21st century.
The book is “Men We Reaped” by Jesmyn Ward. Her memoir chronicles the nostalgia, grief and racism as she details the loss of five Black men she grew up with, one of them her brother, in the span of four years. It takes place in her rural hometown of DeLisle, outside of Pass Christian.
It isn’t a light read. In detail, she writes of a suicide, a deadly shooting, two fatal accidents and a terminal addiction. Violent deaths. Not statistics.
She describes growing up in DeLisle, the pressure on her, usually the only Black student, going to a white school. And a feeling that ghosts wandered the streets.
“To say this is difficult is an understatement,” Ward wrote in her memoir. “Telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people. I cannot forget that. I cannot forget that when I’m walking the streets of DeLisle…”
“Men We Reaped” debuted in 2013. It was Ward’s first published book in the nonfiction sphere. As of today, she’s published a total of eight.
It has been reviewed by The Times, NPR, The Guardian and others. Her titles, which can be found on Amazon, have been translated in Italian, French, German and Chinese.
Ward’s book placed 97th of 100 in The Times’ list, which ambitiously seeks to catalog what it defines as the most important, influential books of the first quarter of this century. To create the list, The Times disseminated a survey to hundreds of acclaimed writers, asking for their top selections.
Ward is an English professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. She’s received a number of awards in her career, chiefly she’s the only Black woman to have received two National Book Awards in fiction. She’s won another National Book Award for “Men We Reaped” and the LIbrary of Congress’ Prize for American Fiction.