Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Read Free Book Online Page A

parents I would have severe developmental problems. They were surprised that my lungs worked well, that I fought to breathe.
She has a strong heart
, they said. In another picture, the skin under my eyes wells in red bags, and my mother holds a breathing tube to my face. I look weary. I lived, silent and tenacious, in my incubator, my body riddled with multiple tubes. During the two months I lived at the hospital, my red color leached away. I slowly gained weight on my stomach, my gamy legs, my outstretched arms. My eyes shrank into my head. The medical staff discharged me, yellow, bald, fat, and scarred, on May 26, 1977: my mother’s nineteenth birthday.
    We moved out of my grandmother’s house into our own one-bedroom apartment. I sprouted hair on my head, which grew half an inch, black and fine and curly, and stopped. It would not grow again until I turned three. In pictures of me from that time, my mother combed my hair forward in a silken cap in an effort to frame my face, to make me look more like a girl. In a picture from my second birthday, I am dressed in a long-sleeved red cotton peasant-style shirt, thick with maroon embroidery, and black pants. Red was the color my mother chose to dress me in, again and again: no pink or blue or green or purple, but red. Red as the blood tumors. I was not a pink girl. In one photograph, we are high in thehills above Berkeley and Oakland, dirt and yellow grass behind me. The dust in the dry hills makes the air look golden. I look healthy, like a beautiful boy. Most of the tumors, which were just beginning to shrink from their skin stretching red, were hidden by my outfit. My expression is serious as I gaze at the person behind the camera.
    My father always told me he felt insulted when the doctors informed them that I would die. The doctor ignored me in the incubator, my head turned to the side, my lungs aflutter through the thin skin of my chest, and faced my parents and said: “Chances are she won’t survive.”
    Daddy didn’t say anything. He stood there holding my mother’s hand. She would not cry until she could do so alone. There were a lot of things the doctors said to my mother and father when I was born, about my birth, the likelihood of my death, that they did not understand. Things they would not remember later when I asked them for the story. They were young and poor and Black in Oakland in the late seventies. My father waited until the doctor left, fit his solid hand into the plastic glove sealed into the side of the incubator, and brushed my tiny hand with one finger. He could not put his pointer finger in my palm for me to grab, since his finger was the size of my arm.
    â€œI wanted to tell them you were a fighter,” he told me when I was a teenager. “I wanted to tell them that my baby wasn’t going to die because she was a warrior.”
    We come from a line of men and women who have fought hard to live. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, raised sevenchildren on her own in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Over the years, she worked and saved and transformed those two bedrooms into four. She held jobs as a maid, a hairdresser, a seamstress, and finally a factory worker at a pharmaceutical plant. “We need a woman who can work like a man.” My grandmother got that factory job after a man saw her lift and carry a full-grown hog on her shoulders. The men in my family have worked for decades as gardeners, carpenters, factory men, bootleggers, and shop owners, and have built houses from the ground up with their own hands.
    My father said he knew even then that I would not disappoint.
    I can remember little of those first three years in the Bay Area. My father had been a hellion before my mother and I showed up. He was picked up in raids when the police would target all the members of his gang for suspected drug activity, for scuffles with other gangs over narrow sidewalks, small roads. There were tens of them in holding