MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS

“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.