Men We Reaped

Over and over again, Ward ventures homeward to Mississippi, despite her expressed desire to escape the brutality of life in the South. These continual journeys homeward become subconscious, as demonstrated when she asks, “How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?” (195). It is love that calls Ward back, a love that binds her fiercely to her fractured family unit made even more precious by the loss of her 19-year-old brother Josh.

Despite this intense love for her family, Ward returns home in an ambivalent flood of emotions. Upon returning home from Michigan in Chapter 2, Ward embraces her sister Charine and, although relieved to be in the comfortable familiarity of her mother’s trailer, she is overcome with an ominous sense of dread that correctly anticipates yet another death. Despite the painful memories home harbors for Ward, she returns yet again, to settle in “this place that birthed and kills me at once” in an effort to raise her own child with the model of her mother’s resilience (240). In returning home, Ward revisits the memories of her lost loved ones and constructs this