Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Read Free Book Online

the repast. Rog’s shirt was made by his cousins: they gathered the pictures for the shirt, designed it, and then offered one to anyone who could afford the $20 it cost to make it. In this way, the young memorialize the young. On his memorial T-shirt, Rog has a charming grin, looks as if he is on the verge of saying,
Hey, how you doing, what we getting into tonight?
Around Rog’s larger picture, there are pictures of the other dead young men: Ronald, C. J., Demond, Joshua, and two others who had died years before and whom I was not so close to, one in a car wreck and the other by suicide. They are all smiling in what look like school photos or family reunion shots. My brother looks like a young thug in his picture, like he could run with the best of the phantom menace in New Orleans. He holds my father’s SK gun and postures for the camera, a bandana over the bottom half of his face, his hair cut close to his head. He must have been sixteen then. I had never seen this picture of Joshua before, and seeing him there with all the other dead young men made me cry while I ate. I chewed my funeral food on a hot Mississippi summer day and looked at my brother’s eyes, large and brown and wide, in a picture that revealed nothing of what he was, and represented everything that he wasn’t.
    Yagga yo and what you mean? it said on the back of Rog’s memorial shirt. This was something he said often, I was told, but his cousins did not tell me its meaning. OPT, the shirt also read. Rog’s picture was an insult to the living man,too blurry, too static for the smiling, open-armed twenty-three-year-old he’d been. Written on the front of the shirt and finished on the back was the declaration: THE SAME THING THAT MAKE YOU LAUGH MAKE YOU CRY. This was too pat, I thought as I wiped my tears. In that moment, I could not remember ever laughing, could not recall what it felt like to open my mouth and scream my loud, embarrassing laugh with Rog. I looked at my family and friends, all of us crying and looking away from each other, and I could not recall having the ability to laugh at all. Only this loss, this pain. I could not understand why there was always this.

We Are Born
    1977–1984
    I was born early at six months, on April Fools’ Day, 1977. My mother was eighteen, my father twenty. They were living with my father’s mother in Oakland, in his childhood room awash with the detritus of his teen years: Bruce Lee posters, nunchaku hung on nails, my father’s illustrations. My mother cannot remember the conversation that signaled my impending arrival, but I imagine my mother waking and telling my father, “I need to go to the hospital,” and my father laughing, thinking it a good April Fools’ joke. And then my mother would have curled over in pain on the bed. “I’m serious.” The look on her face: his doe catching a glancing blow from a car fender.
    When I was born, I weighed two pounds and four ounces, and the doctors told my parents I would die. My skin was red, paper thin, and wrinkly, my eyes large and alien. My father took a picture of me, of my entire body, cupped in the palm of his hand. Because I weighed so little, I developed blood tumors, which swelled up and out: they were bulbous, swollen maroon, an abundance of blood barely contained by thin skin. Two burst and leaked. When I was around four years old, they would shrink completely flat and leave mottled scars where they’d sprouted and grown: on my stomach, my wrist, the back of my thigh. I had a growth in my abdomen,so the doctors sliced me open millimeters below my belly button for exploratory surgery before sewing me closed. The incision must have been done across the whole length of my small belly, and I imagine myself open like a frog on the operating table. Over the years, the scar would stretch, dimple, and pull where the stitches had been sewn. When the doctors realized I would survive, they told my