Misbehaving at the crossroads Essays & writings

Review by Booklist Review

ldquo;There is power in her crossroads: I could take one of four journeys, and then turn back around to where she started and begin again. I can call out her two identities--Black or woman--and each would be correct." So writes poet, novelist, and essayist Jeffers (The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2021) in her captivating latest collection, which blends personal essays, historical research, social commentary, and poetry and examines the various crossroads and pathways trod by Black women. Divided into seven sections, the book delves into ancestry, Jeffers' own and that of the U.S., coupled with contemporary feminism to illustrate the unique roles Black women occupy in the story of America. Throughout, Jeffers draws on the inspiration she gathered from her mother and her family as well as her literary forebears. Whether writing about her own childhood in a poem of remembrance, processing a racist interaction in the literary world through a letter, or tracing the historical lines of her mother's experiences in the Jim Crow South, Jeffers' approach is informative, creative, elegant, and unflinching, always unwaveringly insightful and honest. This necessary addition to collections of American history, social sciences, and cultural studies cements Jeffers' significant placement in the contemporary canon.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) presents a collection of incisive essays exploring "the crossroads": "a location of difficulty and possibility, a boundary between the divine and the human" prevalent "in African/Black cultures." In the West African Yoruba religion, for instance, the divine "orisha Esu," sometimes depicted as "a dual-gendered figure," can be encountered by travelers at a crossroads, and may bring "trouble or hope." Jeffers sees this same dynamic embodied in the women who raised her--"that crossroads was the blood power contained in my grandmother," she writes--and in the women whose "sudden memories... returned to a past of terrible oppression." The more autobiographical of Jeffers's essays are deeply affecting, particularly one on meeting James Baldwin when he was in Atlanta "researching the missing and murdered black children of that city." At the time, Jeffers was a teenager who herself "courted death" as she processed the emotional fallout of her father's abuse ("It seemed that my father and Death had struck up a bargain: Daddy had destroyed me, and Death would take the spoils"). Listening to Baldwin give a speech, Jeffers felt moved, but afterward, when her mother took her to meet him, Jeffers was shocked to realize they knew each other through her father and was overwhelmed with the knowledge that "the man was animatedly discussing with mama" had in fact "crawled into my bed at night." Deftly moving between sharp critique and an intimate, confessional tone, this astonishes. (June)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Bestselling, National Book Award-nominated novelist and poet Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) repeatedly demonstrates that the past and present can never be mutually exclusive. Her newest essay collection continues to excavate gardens and graveyards, in search of roots and ghosts, all while keeping her finger on the pulse of the violence and vulnerability growing around us. Like Jeffers's fiction, her essays have an expansiveness. They are not easy in terms of subject matter or prose, but much like Toni Morrison's writing (which inspires Jeffers's sense of rememory), they are well worth digging into. She brings up key concepts in womanist and feminist theory while also bringing in moments of disruption, including her own identity as a rape survivor and her understanding of how deeply people internalize their beliefs about themselves. VERDICT Jeffers has formed her garden, with the fertile roots laid down in her homage to Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, and planted seeds that will inspire readers to seek out old stories with an understanding of feminism and intersectionality. These concepts are, in Jeffers's hands, so beautifully rendered that her audience will be willing to accept the difficulty of the work she asks of them.--Emily Bowles

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

"We are not only a race, and not only a gender, but both." To call this book exclusively nonfiction is unnecessarily reductive--like Jeffers herself, it refuses to be categorized. Instead, it leaps deftly between memoir, history, academic writing, and poetry. Across all forms and ideas, it soars. "I am still alive, because my women ancestors taught me to improvise--to shapeshift," she writes. In what she terms "Soul Sister Shapeshifter," Jeffers charts the ways in which Black women are uniquely positioned at the crossroads of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and power. It's a personal, political, and literary legacy that populates these pages. It swirls around the loss of her potent mother, a woman who traveled from her upbringing in a former slave shack to what she describes as the "Black bourgeoisie." The journey includes a legacy of trauma, love, and intelligence, as her mother toggles the dual roles of "a strong Black woman" and a Black woman who is subservient to her husband. Jeffers is unflinching in her analysis, which is expansive enough to contain emotion and academic rigor in equal parts. "I found that it's different when you read about the politics of respectability versus when you've lived that phenomenon up close," she writes in one segment, noting elsewhere the exclusion of Black thought from Black experience in the historic record. With her "red dirt" matrilinear line in Georgia and literary foremothers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Jeffers crafts not just a history of Black women in the United States but an essential way of looking at their inheritance--one that folds familiarity into proficiency. Generous, wise, and fearless, she travels through the wounds of past and present with remarkable grace and gripping narratives. "Here I am, unrespectable and unashamed, waving from truthful territory," she tells readers. We would do well to meet her there. In lucid, unwavering prose, Jeffers traces a lineage of Black womanhood in the United States. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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