When we went to gather the crops, what we found was dead men. "And then we heard the rain falling and it was the drops of blood dropping." Ida B. Wells Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life over the course of five years to drug use, accidents, suicide, and other tragedies in addition to the terrible luck that sometimes befall those who are poor, especially black men. Jesmyn was forced to confront these losses one after another and wonder: why? And when she started to write about the experience of surviving all the deaths, she came to the realisation of the reality, which completely caught her off guard. Due to their racial backgrounds and history of hatred, her brother and her friends all passed away as a result of who they were and where they came from. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.