Men We Reaped

After their parents’ divorce, the children and their mother move to nearby Gulfport, Mississippi, in search of an escape from the scrutiny of their small hometown. Their mother “felt smothered in DeLisle, where she knew everyone, and everyone knew her; worse, they were witness to my father’s faithlessness” (129). Ward is now 10 years old.

Ward reflects on the inequalities of her mother and father’s experiences as parents. While her father sees “a world of possibility outside the confines of the family,” her mother understands “that her vistas [are] the walls of her home, her children’s bony backs, their open mouths” (131). Her mother struggles to provide for the family with only a high school diploma. She seeks employment that will allow her to fulfill her commitment to be present as a parent. She finds work “as a housekeeper for a rich White family who [live] in an antebellum house on the beach in Pass Christian” (132). Ward explains her mother’s background as the eldest of seven children in a fatherless household who adopted the role of caretaker for her younger siblings. These experiences shaped her desire to raise her children in a two-parent household and her position as the disciplinarian in contrast to the playful antics of the children’s father. In Gulfport, Ward inherits this same responsibility as the caretaker for her own siblings.

Her parents’ divorce greatly affects Ward’s self-esteem as a child. She internalizes her father’s leaving, which feels “like a repudiation of the child I was and the young woman I was growing into. I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman” (135). These feelings of inadequacy drive Ward to escape even further into reading. She attends the local elementary school, where she fights ineffectively against the abuse of a boy before being placed in an advanced-level class. After falling into a depression precipitated by bullying at the hands of girls in her class, Ward moves to the middle school halfway through the schoolyear. In her new school, the bullying continues and Ward’s depression deepens. Eventually, her mother’s White employer offers to pay Ward’s tuition at the private Episcopalian school attended by his children. Despite her resistance to aid, her mother accepts.

Meanwhile, all of the siblings struggle to navigate the loss of their family structure. These struggles manifest at school. Their father comes to visit sporadically, and their parents discuss reconciliation. Soon, their father returns home. He dreams of opening his own kung fu school, a goal their mother supports both emotionally and financially as she continues to provide for the family. In his efforts to open his own school, their father begins teaching classes with the children as his first students. He struggles to make a profit. Tension between the couple grows once again as Ward’s mother becomes “even more silent, even more strict and remote” (144), while her father indulges in movies with the children as his escape.

One night, her mother receives a call from a DeLisle acquaintance who informs her of her husband’s continued infidelity with his teenage mistress. Ward imagines her mother’s initial reactions to this news where, ultimately, “underneath it all would have been fatigue” (145). Her mother drives to the teenage lover’s house, confronts their father, and informs him not to return home. Ward reflects on the reason for her father’s impulsive actions and concludes that “there was something at the heart of my father that felt too big for the life he’d been born into. He was forever in love with the promise of the horizon” (146). In the wake of her father’s absence, Ward falls back into her role as a caretaker for her family.

As her mother’s helper, Ward holds on to a house key. She often loses the key, and the children must wait for their mother to return home to let them in the house. On one such day as they wait for their mother, the children venture into the woods where their father has forbidden them to go alone. They enjoy playing in the woods, as they run “wild in the hours between our dismissal from school and my mother’s return from work” (149). Another day in the woods, Josh discovers a small clearing where “someone had dug into the earth, made a cellar, and then covered it over with two-by-fours before strewing pine straw to camouflage it” (150). Josh expresses his desire to go down into the cellar, but Ward rushes the children off to return home. Later that night Ward struggles to fall asleep as she pictures “the open mouth of that cellar off in the darkness, in the future, gaping as a grave” (152).

As her teenage friends begin to date and act on their interest in boys, Ward “was still reading books and playing with dolls in secret” (154). One day she allows two boys she assumes are Josh’s friends to enter the house, despite her mother’s instructions never to do so. One of the boys named Thomas attempts to assault her until her baby sister Charine intervenes and Ward kicks him out.

Ward’s mother continues to withdraw after their father leaves for the second time. Though she provides for the children, she struggles to show her affection, as “the only way she knew how beyond providing a home for us, cleaning, taking care of us, providing discipline [was] through food” (158). Her mother’s mistrust of everyone increases, as does her criticism of the children, who “felt our behavior would never be good enough” (159). Isolated and bitter, her mother fails to connect with the children and resorts to physical discipline and psychological threats of abandonment. She eventually confides in 13-year-old Ward, and they connect over their shared burdens.

The children express a desire to return to DeLisle. After saving enough money to purchase some land in DeLisle, their mother begins to clear the land so they can move. As their mother prepares for the move, Ward visits the cellar in the woods one last time. The chapter ends with Ward fully embodying her role as caretaker as she asks her brother to take out the trash and, seeing his resentment and frustration, recognizes that she and Josh have officially transitioned out of childhood.