Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Page A

they dug into my scalp. By the time I was five, my brother was three, and he came up to my waist. He wanted us to be a team, but when my mother had somewhere to go and my father stayed home and watched us, I left my brother and walked up the long drive that led to the road and played with my cousin Farrah. We played house and snuck to watch TV under the curtain that her father tacked in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sometimes we played in the field that separated our houses, and one such day my brother came looking for me. He could walk easily now, and his blond afro bloomed. He wore a diaper and nothing else. He walked from one end of the railless front porch to the other, looking off into the grass. He stopped at the edge of the steps, turned around, angled one leg behind him until he found the top step, and then slid the rest of the way down so he stood on that step before turning in a circle to face the yard again.
    â€œMimi!” Joshua called.
    I ducked lower so that only my eyes showed over the brick. I watched him. I did not want to call back, to have him comeout into the yard, to have to take care of him instead of playing my game.
    â€œMimi!” Josh yelled.
    He was so skinny, only his belly round as a ball. I did not say anything. He looked out in wonder over the yard, which must have seemed even larger to him than it did to me: it was a vast stretch of overgrown grass, and then those silent houses in the murky distance where his sister had disappeared.
    My father slammed out of the front door. He was in shorts and nothing else. He had probably been asleep. He grabbed my brother by one arm, yanked him so he dangled in the air, and began whipping him.
    â€œBoy! What I told you about going outside by yourself!”
    My brother wailed, turning in circles like a sinker on a fishing line. My father’s hand whacked my brother’s diaper again and again, and I was afraid. I’d seldom seen my father angry, violent. I could not understand why Daddy was so upset with Joshua, could not understand what lesson my father was trying to teach my brother. I could not understand why Joshua dangled like a baby doll. And even today, that whipping he received feels like my fault. I’m still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say:
Here I am, brother. I’m here
.
    My father was not usually quick-tempered. He dealt with me mostly with forbearance and tenderness; he never whipped me. But he whipped my brother. He was stricter with him. With Joshua, my father’s patience was thin. There was noroom for error in disciplining my brother, my father thought, because my brother was a boy. A son. A child who would be harder pressed to be a fighter, even more than the girl who’d been born early with the strong heart. My brother would have to be stronger than that. My brother would have to grow up and be a Black man in the South. My brother would have to fight in ways that I would not. Perhaps my father dreamed about the men in his family who died young in all the wrong ways, and this forced his hand when he woke to my brother standing next to my parents’ bed: pink-mouthed and grinning, green to the world, innocent.
    When he wasn’t disciplining Joshua, my father was playful. When my mother left us home with him one evening, after he’d had a long day of work, my father covered himself with a blanket and crouched in the middle of the mattress. Joshua and I clutched each other. We skittered around the corners of the room as my father scuttled from side to side under the blanket. He circled the bed, following us, making strange guttural noises. Joshua and I laughed. We were breathless. We tiptoed closer to the bed, and my father swiped an arm out, a great knuckle-scarred claw, and we shrieked, the joy and terror rising in our throats, almost