Men We Reaped

Chapter 3 launches with Ward’s birth on April 1, 1977, in Oakland, California. Ward details her premature birth six months into the pregnancy and the two months she spent in the hospital as she recovered from complications, including blood tumors and a growth in her abdomen. She still bears scars from this time. The doctors warned Ward’s 18-year-old mother of “severe developmental problems,” although “they were surprised that my lungs worked well, that I fought to breathe. She has a strong heart, they said” (43). Ward’s father reiterates that he never lost confidence in Ward’s ability to survive and thrive.

During the first three years of Ward’s life, her father tames himself from his unconventional, free-spirited ways. However, he struggles to remain faithful, as “remaining faithful to my mother required a kind of moral discipline he’d never developed, since it was constantly undermined by his natural gifts: his charm, his sense of humor, his uncommon beauty” (46). Meanwhile, Ward’s mother attends community college and works toward becoming a preschool teacher. Ward’s father soon becomes homesick for Mississippi and, despite her mother’s reluctance to return, the family moves back in 1980, when the author is three and her mother is pregnant with their second child, Ward’s brother Joshua.

Born soon after the family’s return to DeLisle, Joshua arrives after a difficult delivery in which doctors had to turn him in the womb three times. As his mother describes, “he was born looking at a sky he could not yet see: sunny-side up, the doctor called it” (49). The family moves often. As the children grow older, their father is particularly strict with Joshua; his “patience [is] thin,” leaving “no room for error in disciplining” Joshua because he is “a boy” (52). While maintaining his strict discipline over Josh and raising his pit bulls to fight, their father also demonstrates an infectious playfulness. Eventually, their sister Nerissa is born after another difficult delivery, which results in their mother becoming more withdrawn and their parents’ relationship more tense.

Ward recalls moments in childhood where “the world outside our house taught me and my brother different lessons about violence” (56). Her father raises pit bulls for fighting and slices the tail of his newest dog in preparation. Joshua slices part of his tongue in a moped accident with his uncle. At five years old, Ward survives an attack by her father’s new pit bull who nearly tears off her left ear. Her father calls together the neighborhood men to hunt down the dog and kill it. The tension continues to grow between their parents as a result of her father’s infidelity, which results in his first of many children born out of wedlock and her mother’s realization that her own story would soon be Ward’s. The chapter ends with Ward hearing “the sound of glass shattering, of wood splintering, of things breaking” as her family inches toward total disintegration (61).