The public's been conditioned to think of the deaths of African-Americans - particularly young black men - purely in terms of statistics. Ward, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for her novel Salvage The Bones, chronicles an existence filled with social strife, economic struggle and, all too often, death. Jesmyn Ward's superb memoir Men We Reaped finds powerful new meaning in Tubman's words, which serve as a still-relevant metaphor for the Southern black American experience. "We heard the thunder and that was the big guns and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." Escaped slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman bore elegiac eyewitness to the terrible day: "We saw the lightning and that was the guns," she said later. In the end, they were unsuccessful and lost almost half of their forces. On July 18, 1863, the Union Army's famed 54 th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry - a black military unit - made a desperate assault on Confederate forces at Fort Wagner near Charleston, S.C. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Men We Reaped Subtitle A Memoir Author Jesmyn Ward
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