From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, seemingly unrelated deaths…That’s a brutal list, in its immediacy and it’s relentlessness, and it’s a list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time. To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.
Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, 2013
drunken library 