Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings

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 [Baldwin] 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)