Jesmyn Ward’s poignant memoir Men We Reaped tackles the interplay between inequality and education in poverty-stricken southern black communities in Mississippi. In recounting the deaths of four childhood friends and her brother Joshua, Ward sheds light on racial, class, and gender inequality honestly. Education both ameliorates and exacerbates inequality in her community – it is a matter of who is receiving quality education and who is not. Throughout the book, Jesmyn Ward does not explicitly place any blame on any individual or event. A sense of helplessness and grief permeates her text, and everyone in the community seems doomed to certain predestined ends. However, she does allude to some larger mechanism and system looming behind this inevitability, which she advocates for changes and societal support with profound emotions.
The memoir weaves real-life stories with succinct language, communicating to the audience about inequality, education, and the interplay between these two serious social issues in the southern community. Inequality is severe both between races and within races. Black communities in general do not have the privileges and cultures that nurture the importance of education and family stability as white communities do. A substantial socio-economic gap exists between white and black neighborhoods, breeding more educational injustices and the inaccessibility of quality schools for children in certain communities. Ward said that “[her] entire community suffered from a lack of trust: [they] didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system” (169). This distrust further deteriorates young black males’ freedom and willingness to get educated: school is just not their thing. They resort to nomadic life, drugs, alcohols, and develop severe depressions encouraged by “racism, poverty, and violence” (175). Ward also mentions Joshua’s encounter in his school, where the only thing he could get was benign neglect, sometimes even worse, malignant treatment from faculty. Joshua faced systematic racism that deemed him “just another young Black male destined to drop out anyway” (208). Black children like Joshua cannot see any hope or possibility under such circumstances.
Inequality also exists within one race and between genders. In the private school Jesmyn Ward went to, the upper-middle-class black boy had no word with her. Neither the lukewarm rich African American boyfriend she met at Stanford can emotionally relate to her miseries and sufferings. Education lifts Ward and enables her to attend the same elite school as privileged upper-middle-class youth, but she still does not hold the same worldview. Ward discovered that “going to an elite college far from home hadn’t molded [her] into an adult… instead it confused [her]” (214). Her five-year relationship boyfriend, a middle-class African American was shocked by “ill luck befell [Ward’s] family” and “wanted to be young and moneyed and have fun” (228).
Between genders, despite the devaluation and disadvantage that emerge for both black males and females, the maleness and fatherlessness in the South and stereotypical gender roles are fully described in Ward’s words. Black males are oppressed socially, and they subsequently oppress women domestically.
On the other hand, education serves as enlightenment for so ill-treated a group as southern black people, but the chance of getting a quality education is minimal. Reading provides Ward with power and intellectual independence. She becomes an “intellectual equal” (203) of a rich white woman through the privilege of her education. Her opportunity to attend private schools serves as a starting point for her later admission into one of the most selective colleges nationwide, where she was trained to put her thoughts into words and powerful oratory. A lot of italicized words in her memoirs are expressions that she later came up with after she gained verbal empowerment through education. However, even Ward herself is aware of how “unfair” the situation seemed (203). The difference between Joshua and Ward depicts the limited accessibility of good education for black youth. Education may even distance Ward from her people, making her the “other” both inside and outside the family(208). When stereotypes and rampant desperation drag down the whole community, education may further exacerbate the already highly stratified society.
Although Jesmyn Ward does not explicitly hold any specific person or event responsible for the tragic deaths of her friends and her brother, and all other black souls who died in these impoverished communities, she does mention repetitively, throughout the whole memoir, that something is stalking these young black folks. She uses “they” (38), a collective pronoun, to indicate systematic establishment looming behind all the incidents. Who are they? The answer is ambiguous and difficult. Yet it is worth noting that the inequality, poverty, horrible crimes committed, and lack of social remedy have their root cause in systematic discrimination that is so subtlely weaved into every individual’s judgment so as to make it extremely hard to be identified. Ward adopts a series of rhetorical techniques to convey her judgment. Her concise and powerful language, her analogy of death as someone chasing behind most of the young people in her community, her reference to data, and even her heartfelt account of the tragic deaths of friends further prove her point – “we drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered” (249).