Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization ... If the earlier chapters struggle to find their intended audience—sometimes she seems to be addressing young students who don’t know much about early American history, other times her Black female peers or white liberals—Jeffers’s limber prose finds its stride when she talks about her mother ... Jeffers also depicts darker memories—of her father’s abuse and her mother’s failure to protect her from it—with equal precision and clarity ... In a remarkably tender reflection on the homes 'where little Black boys are made,' she says a prayer for 'these boys to evolve into kind human beings who can admit they aren’t always strong.' Her tone is at once formal and familiar ... Her mother’s influence forms the literal beginning, middle and end of this book, a gift from an ancestral altar she generously shares with us.
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Jeffers 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 ... 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.
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In lucid, unwavering prose, Jeffers traces a lineage of Black womanhood in the United States ... 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 ... Jeffers is unflinching in her analysis, which is expansive enough to contain emotion and academic rigor in equal parts ... 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.
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