51 pages • 1 hour read
Jesmyn WardMen We Reaped
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 Summary: “We Are in Wolf Town”
The first chapter details Ward’s family history, focusing on the years leading up to her birth. She describes her ancestors from various backgrounds as “some of them were Haitian […] others were Choctaw, said they spoke French, that they came from New Orleans or a nebulous elsewhere, searching for land and space, and they stopped here” (9). Ward then explores the history of DeLisle, her family’s hometown of many generations, which was called Wolf Town by early French settlers. DeLisle is a small town composed of intertwined families who “are conscious of the way bloodlines are so entangled in our community” (10).
Ward recalls her own family stories of navigating the complexities of being mixed race and the ability of certain family members to pass as White to evade the threat of the Ku Klux Klan at night. She features the origins of both her maternal and paternal ancestors and the connections between the two sides of her family. The women on both sides dominate; Ward’s family history is littered with “men’s bodies” while the women survive.
Ward imagines the potential close encounters of her parents as children growing up in a small town, prior to their official introduction as teenagers. She chronicles Hurricane Camille’s devastation on Southern Mississippi in 1969 and her father’s family’s government-funded relocation to Oakland, California, where he grew interest in martial arts and the ideals of the Black Panthers. Ward alludes to the impact of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the connections between both natural disasters to highlight the inequalities endured by those most affected by the hurricanes’ destruction.
Ward describes the burdens placed on both her parents from young ages, as they “were given adult responsibility too early, a necessity of growing up in fatherless households” (18). While Ward’s father experienced the freedom of his male gender “to experiment with drugs, to do some petty hustling,” Ward’s mother cared for her siblings and resented “the strength she had to cultivate, the endurance demanded of women in the rural South. She recognized the injustice, even as a child” (18-19). Eventually, Ward’s mother escaped to Los Angeles to live with relatives and attend school. Their romance, first initiated on summer visits home to Mississippi, grew and resulted in Ward’s mother relocating to Oakland to begin their new life together.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Ward officially begins her memoir by looking into the history of her family. By choosing to examine the origins of her family prior to her birth, Ward explores the forces that set the conditions under which she is born and raised. Such conditions include her family’s complex racial background, their history in DeLisle, and generational patterns of poverty and struggle. Ward first addresses the context in which she lives, modeling the context she will set for each of the men she features in her memoir. This context is essential element understanding what leads to each of these men’s deaths and to Ward’s own survival.
In her description of DeLisle’s origins, Ward introduces the symbol of the wolf, derived from the town’s early name of Wolf Town. Ward shares this nickname with those who ask about her hometown “to impart something of its wild roots, its early savagery. Calling it Wolf Town hints at the wildness at the heart of it” (9). Ward alludes to the claim over the natural land by early settlers who sought to control and tame the land. Ward hints at the connections between this struggle for dominion and her own community’s attempts to reclaim identity and power.
Ward highlights the patterns inherited by each generation. For Ward’s own family, one such pattern reveals itself in the early loss of male lives and the survival of strong women. Another pattern includes the reality of fatherless households that shape children into maturity too early, as exhibited in both her parents’ childhoods. This pattern also extends to her father’s experience with relocation due to 1969’s Hurricane Camille and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina:
This same trend of relocating those affected by major hurricanes would occur decades later, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and instead of being given the tools they needed to help rebuild home, families were offered one option: relocation (17).
These patterns subsist into Ward’s generation and demonstrate the greater, uncontrollable forces that shape the lives of Black people in the American South.
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By Jesmyn Ward
