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"I feel like in the two novels that I've written before this memoir, the young men reflect my brother.

circumstances of his life or his behavior, just because of the way he looks, and the fact that he's a young black male, and that.

There are some people in the world that will look at my nephew and see him as a thug, and think that whatever harm or violence befalls him, that he will have deserved it, because he courted it. "But in some ways I feel like the reality that was facing us and that faces him is merciless. They see that that's more of a possibility for them, I feel like. You know, my nephew, he's 17, so there are more people in his generation now, in this community, who see college and some kind of, you know, life after college. On what DeLisle is like for young people now "I see history, I see racism, I see economic disempowerment, I see all of these things, you know, that come together, or that came together, sort of in this perfect storm here in southern Mississippi, and I feel like that is what is bearing down on our lives." Ward tells NPR's Rachel Martin that this epidemic of deaths is more than just a collection of individual choices. But even so, the place - and the memory of those she has lost - keeps pulling Ward back. It's a place ravaged by poverty, drugs and routine violence. In her wrenching new memoir, Men We Reaped, Ward takes us to her hometown of DeLisle, on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. First one friend died, then another and another - all young black men, and all of them dead before the age of 30. The writer Jesmyn Ward lost her brother in a car accident, and she was never the same - but her grief would broaden and her losses compound.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Men We Reaped Subtitle A Memoir Author Jesmyn Ward