Misbehaving at the Crossroads
Essays & Writings
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Beschreibung des Verlags
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for Nonfiction
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.
In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.
Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.
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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.
