Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Author:Jesmyn Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Both my parents had been raised without fathers in their homes, and neither of them wanted that for their children. But as children and as adults, a two-parent family eluded them. This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn’t, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery. Like for many of the young Black men in my community across generations, the role of being a father and a husband was difficult for my father to assume. He saw a world of possibility outside the confines of the family, and he could not resist the romance of that. But like many of the young Black women in her generation, my mother understood that she had to forget the meaning of possibility, the tender heat of romance, the lure of the vistas of the world. My mother understood that her vistas were the walls of her home, her children’s bony backs, their open mouths. Like the women in my family before her, my mother knew the family was her burden to bear. She could not leave. So she did what her mother did before her, what her sisters did, what her aunts did: she worked and set about the business of raising her children. She did not know it then, but she would be the sole financial provider for us until we reached adulthood.

My mother didn’t have many options regarding work: she had a high school diploma, but she had to find jobs that would allow her to be home with her children in the afternoon to ensure we did our homework, took baths, went to bed on time, and got back out the door for school in the morning. If she could have done shift work at one of the vanishing factories, she’d have had access to jobs that paid better, but she couldn’t. She had family who would help, but she felt the responsibility of her and my father’s choice to have four children keenly; she wouldn’t foist the burden of raising us on her extended family, and she wouldn’t depend on institutional child care even if she could afford it. She was our mother. So she found jobs that would allow her to raise us. Just before my father left, she worked as a laundress at a hotel in Diamondhead. She carpooled with her cousins to work because she didn’t own a car; my father had taken his car and his motorcycle. Before we moved to Gulfport, my mother saved and bought a blue Caprice from the seventies, so old the paint was matte and closing the doors took both hands. This is how she commuted to work at her next job, which was as a housekeeper for a rich White family who lived in an antebellum house on the beach in Pass Christian.

When I was older, she would tell me stories about how she raised her brothers and sisters.

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