A Quote by Natasha Trethewey
Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways, to mourn. In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn unburies her dead, that they may live again. And through this emotional excavation, she forces us to see the problems of place and race that led these men to their early graves. Full of beauty, love, and dignity, Men We Reaped is a haunting and essential read.
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Jesmyn Ward returns to the world of her first two books, but here in the mode of non-fiction. A clear-eyed witness to the harrowing stories of 'men we reaped,' she quickens the dead and brings them, vividly alive again. An eloquent, grief-steeped account.
Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good.
If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.
I hate the term 'arm candy.' But, look, a woman's figure is a beautiful thing, and if she has shapely legs, then she should show them off, because men love to see that. Not just heterosexual men - gay men like to see a woman in her beauty and the shape of her.
There is a haunting phantom called Regret, A shadowy creature robed somewhat like woe, But fairer in the face, whom all men know By her said mien, and eyes forever wet. No heart would seek her; but once having met All take her by the hand, and to and fro They wander through those paths of long ago-- Those hallowed ways 'twere wiser to forget.
The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men and when, to gain it, she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain.
[On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting.
I found her lying on her stomach, her hind legs stretched out straight, and her front feet folded back under her chest. She had laid her head on his grave. I saw the trail where she had dragged herself through the leaves. The way she lay there, I thought she was alive. I called her name. She made no movement. With the last ounce of strength in her body, she had dragged herself to the grave of Old Dan.
Even her hair, she thought, running her fingers impatiently through the damp golden brown ringlets that curled romantically around her face. A Botticelli angel, a boy in college once called her, begging her to let it grow. Right! That was all she needed: wild curls cascading down her back like a doomed Shakespearian virgin, or a rock star.
Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.
... there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war!
The beauty of Billie Holiday is that she gave every singer after her the license to interpret and perform music in ways that were unique to each of us. Her uniqueness was very much a part of the way she sang the songs, the story she wanted to tell through the songs. I didn't really have a full understanding of Billie until I left home -- until I'd lived a little, shall we say. At different seasons of my life, when I'd sing her songs or listen to her albums, I'd hear things I didn't hear before. Wherever you are in life, you'll hear different things in her songs.
I think the relationship [in Aquarius] with her nephew shows that she's not nostalgic. She just wants to preserve what is important to her - her records, her books, even some furniture. She doesn't want to leave that house because it is her home. That is where her kids were born. After moving so much in my life, I was touched by Clara's need to stay in that apartment. I love her life, and that may be why I connected to her so strongly. We are the most alike when we are fighting for our rights.
Woman's world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.
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