Instead, Ward grows increasingly disillusioned as she witnesses the inequality in treatment between men and women and the drug use of a family friend.
Ward finds escape by reading about confident heroines and attempts to assert her own autonomy. In Chapter 5 seven-year-old Ward and her family move into her mother’s childhood home, where they reside with multiple family members.
Ultimately, Demond is unable to escape and is murdered as he returns home from work one evening.
Ward explores Demond’s attempts to break free from the violence that surrounds their community by testifying against both an alleged shooter and drug dealer. In Chapter 4 Ward highlights the life of Demond, a young man she meets through her sister Nerissa. Their parents’ relationship grows more and more strained. As her father falls into cycles of infidelity, her brother Josh is born, and the family returns home to DeLisle, where the children learn the realities of violence from a young age through a moped accident and brutal pit bull attack that leaves Ward scarred for the rest of her life. Ward details her early struggle to survive blood tumors and a growth in her abdomen. Ward interlaces the story of Rog’s life and death with her own emotional return to Mississippi from Michigan, where she attends school.Ĭhapter 3 commences with Ward’s premature birth in 1977. In Chapter 2 Ward moves in reverse chronological order to tell the story of Rog, a family friend who dies at age 23 from a heart attack and is the last of the five men to die. Chapter 1 documents the origins of DeLisle as well as the history of Ward’s family leading up to her birth in Oakland, California, where her mother and father search for freedom from their shared generational patterns of loss and struggle.
J., Demond, and Roger-whose lives and deaths she will portray. Ward begins her memoir with a Prologue that establishes her defined purpose and introduces the five men-Joshua, Ronald, C.
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