Men We Reaped Quotes
"In pictures, some of my ancestors on my mother’s and my father’s sides are so light-skinned as to look white, and some are so dark the lines of the nose, a mouth, look silver in the black and white picture."
"Before DeLisle was named DeLisle, after a French settler, the early settlers called it Wolf Town."
"My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, remembers when she was very young, before her mother, Mary, and father, Harry, had all of their twelve kids, riding in her father’s old car to visit relatives farther up in the country, north of DeLisle."
"My mother’s paternal grandfather Adam Jr.’s family also bears stories like this."
"Sometimes, when I think of all the men who’ve died early in my family over the generations, I think DeLisle is the wolf."
"We come from a line of men and women who have fought hard to live."
"The artist in him fell in love with Jimi Hendrix; he put chemicals in his hair so that he could wear an afro, an afro that fell instead of stood."
"I was born early at six months, on April Fools’ Day, 1977."
"I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp smile lines and the thin skin at his temples was threaded through with veins."
"We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new."
"In California, my family sat at the center of those hills, and my mother could tend to her husband and her child only, free of family and the South."
"They do not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table at a house party."
"The walls sweated and the glass fogged with perspiration."
"Every time I felt like I couldn’t push any longer, like my arms had burned to ash and my legs would crumple under me, I wanted to ask my father, Are we almost there? How close are we? But I wouldn’t."
"She cooked huge pots of gumbo, beef and vegetable soup, pork chops, mashed potatoes, roasts, red beans and rice, cornbread, and desserts—pecan candy, blueberry muffins, German chocolate cakes, and yellow sheet cakes that she decorated with elaborate flowers and vines made of frosting."
"I didn’t know all Ronald’s demons. I don’t know the specifics of what Ronald ran from, what he felt he was outpacing when he talked about going to rehab or joining the military and if he self-medicated with cocaine so he could feel invincible and believe in a future."
"I thought that if I were younger and we were in high school together, Ronald was the sort of boy I’d fall in love with: funny, confident, charming, a bit arrogant."
"I was so depressed by the subtext I felt, so depressed I was silenced, because the message was always the same: You’re Black. You’re less than White. And then, at the heart of it: You’re less than human."
"I was still a kid. We were still kids, in love with the mystery and beauty of the woods, deriving a certain pleasure out of our scrappy self-imposed exile from the house."
"For those masters, money was never a concern, and they seemed to be childless. I imagine both my parents began to resent their roles in the family."
"I wonder if he felt something as well, standing there on the crumbling edge of that awful hole, of the awful future we would bear."
"For me, it was a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave. I know what it feels like. I know that sense of despair."
"I watched them go. After they disappeared, I watched my classmates in the student lounge, sliding drinks across the table to one another, eating pizza, chewing and talking. I felt victorious for one moment, proud that I’d stood up for myself."
"The best way to learn is to travel. Immerse yourself."
"I thought of how it felt to witness my mother at work, of how I saw her in a broader context."
"To be a man meant one should be self-sufficient; he had to provide for himself."
"This is what my brother’s life is worth in Mississippi. Five years."
"We inherit these things that breed despair and self-hatred, and tragedy multiplies."
"We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die."
"Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can."
"This is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient."