HOME BOUND

A Cameroonian-born lawyer and essayist explores layers of a multiracial upbringing across cultures, continents, and economic classes.

By age 14, Bee had lived in four different countries: Cameroon, which she left in infancy with her aunt and her aunt’s White husband; France, where she spent most of her childhood; England, where she lived as a preteen; and the U.S., which became her adopted home. All of her moves brought connections to cultures far different from the traditional, clan-centered traditions in Cameroon. They also gave her an early awareness that she was a Black girl moving in a White-dominated world. “My blackness was a marker that assigned me in and out of teams,” she writes. “The stark contrast against my dad’s white skin and differing last name reminded me of having been imported. An outsider in my body and in my own home.” After her aunt divorced and left for London with no job, Bee also came to know housing insecurity and that the concept of home was as impermanent and as “cumulative as a nesting doll.” The Christian faith she shared with her aunt became the impetus to join an evangelical church in Nevada, where Bee and her aunt eventually moved. Academic success led to Harvard Law School, a radical restructuring of her worldview, and the painful end of an early marriage to a fellow evangelical. Answering a calling to seek economic justice for others who faced housing insecurity, Bee took a job with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. Her life stabilized, and she bought a house of her own. Still, the meaning of home, including the Black female body that faced so much danger in the world, continued to haunt her, as did the distance between her birthplace and her present-day circumstances. Interwoven throughout with Bee’s personal and multifaceted definitions of home, this richly tapestried memoir offers a unique perspective on identity as it restlessly probes the nature of belonging.

An intimately incisive life story.