MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
There’s a difference between being at a crossroads — weighing an important decision at a crucial moment — and being at the crossroads: a fabled space in the Black diasporic tradition where powers can be granted, whisked away or reclaimed by the spirit world, sometimes for the price of a soul. With her nonfiction debut, 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.
“Misbehaving at the Crossroads” is a matrilineal memoir that reaches back to the 1830s while incorporating slices of social history, political commentary and poetry. Jeffers uses census records and oral histories to excavate the stories of her foremothers, alongside wide-ranging essays on subjects like the 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” Roe v. Wade and the election of President Obama. The result is two parallel accounts of the American patriarchal project that, in Jeffers’s words, was designed not to “cover any Indigenous peoples, or white women, or Black folks with the grace of liberty.”
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. Dr. Trellie Lee James Jeffers was a politically active writer and educator “who grew up in tangled country woods” in Eatonton, Ga., “a place of red dirt, slavery, Jim Crow — and Indigenous echoes.” The author recalls her mother taking her canvassing through Black neighborhoods near their home in Durham, N.C., when Jeffers was 9; introducing her to James Baldwin (who knew her father, the poet and academic Lance Jeffers) as a teenager; and giving her impromptu sex ed lectures in their Dodge Dart.
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; but in keeping with her Southern Black upbringing she never descends into prurience. “While pondering whether she’d lied all those years,” she writes of her mother, “saying that she didn’t remember my calling to her in the night during one of my father’s visits to my bedroom, another snippet of memory came to me: … the prescription bottles of Valium in her bathroom.”
For Jeffers, revealing her mother’s painful, all-too-common story — a brilliant woman living under the shadow and thumb of a man who is publicly lauded while privately terrorizing her and their young daughters — carries the taint of misbehaving, of failing to live up to the codes of Black respectability, even after both of her parents have died: “I waver in telling this: Which version of the truth will indict my mother further — which one will save her legacy?”
From her own father to the founding fathers, Jeffers illustrates the myriad ways patriarchy infects the lives of the women in her family line and in this nation. 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: “May your hands stay tender and not curl into bludgeons.”
Her previous work has included a book of poems about the 18th-century Black poet Phillis Wheatley and the 2021 novel “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” which traverses centuries from the Civil War to the civil rights movement to the present. Here too she digs in the archives, citing Alex Haley’s “Roots,” Baldwin’s reportage on the Atlanta child murders and Toni Morrison’s fiction and criticism. References throughout to Alice Walker’s influential 1983 essay collection “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” carry not just a literary significance, but a personal one: Walker too grew up in Eatonton, and was taught by Jeffers’s mother. Jeffers pays homage to both women by incorporating her mother’s writing into her own, devoting a chapter to a 2008 autobiographical essay, “From the Old Slave Shack: Memoirs of a Teacher,” about her educational journey from the titular shack to the manicured grounds of Spelman College, before she returned home to teach at a “colored” school in Eatonton.
Black women are often called brave for speaking truths that others won’t, but this emotional labor comes with a cost. Jeffers writes about being “Fannie Lou Hamer tired” from the dual burden of Black expectations and white aggressions, large and small. America may be at a crossroads politically and morally, but in “letting go of the fantasy” of equal citizenship, Jeffers liberates herself from the cycle of hope and disappointment.
The book ends with Jeffers’s deeply private journal entries from the fall of 2023, detailing the final weeks of her mother’s life, and their long-awaited reconciliation following years of estrangement. “I’m a woman fully grown, sitting by the deathbed of my mother,” she writes, “this mother whose words shaped mine — whose earth called me back to the red dirt place I’d sworn I’d never return to.” 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.
MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings | By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers | Harper | 352 pp. | $30
The post For Black Women, Life in America Has Always Been a Crossroads appeared first on New York Times.
