WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS

A family’s story reflects African Americans’ struggle for survival.

Driven by a need to understand her own identity, cultural critic Jerkins mounted an investigation into her family’s tangled history, recounting in this candid memoir the surprising discoveries that emerged from her emotional journey. Like many African Americans, her ancestors fled the South—and oppression from the Ku Klux Klan and police—some settling in the Northeast, others in California, disrupting their ties to their cultural and spiritual heritage. “No one spoke about the past—the goal was to move forward and never look back,” she writes.” This silence, though, frustrated Jerkins, leading to a search “to excavate the connective tissue that complicates but unites us as a people, and to piece together the story of how I came to be by going back and looking beyond myself.” Traveling to Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, she traced her lineage, seeking answers to questions that had bothered her throughout her life: Why, for example, was she taught to be afraid of water? Why did her family believe in conjuring, spells, and hoodoo? And, critical to her sense of self, why was she so light skinned, a trait that raised others’ curiosity, as if a child with lighter skin than her parents “was an aberration in the natural order of things.” Everything she learned underscored the power of white supremacy in the U.S. She found out that although the Jerkins family grew up near water, it was not necessarily a conduit to freedom but, more ominously, a place where blacks were drowned. On the lush resort island of Hilton Head, she realized that “beautiful landscapes masked black carnage.” From a historian, she was dismayed to learn the prevalence of black slave owners: “In 1830, in twenty-four states…there were 3,775 black owners of 12,760 slaves.” Although her search sometimes proved unsettling, in the end, Jerkins was able to “tease out the interwoven threads of who I am as a black woman.”

A revelatory exploration of the meaning of blackness.