Misbehaving at the Crossroads

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.


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“I would follow Jeffers’s voice anywhere. Her wide-ranging symphony of essays on Black womanhood is a treat — incisive, intellectual, intimate, funny, and formally inventive. I felt like I was listening to a brave yet vulnerable big sister riff blazingly on topics of history, family, politics and culture. Above all, she writes with a poet’s heart.”

—Emily Raboteau, author of Lessons for Survival

“The poet ‘shall draw us in with love and terror’ and help us see more clearly our own times. Honorée Jeffers has done exactly that with this extraordinary collection of essays and writings. Sit with this book, revel in its use of language, struggle with the ideas, acknowledge that something intimate and vulnerable is happening on the page, and witness the expansiveness of Jeffers’s imagination.”

—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of We Are The Leaders We Have Been Looking For

“A staggering and ambitious saga…. Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. Readers will be floored.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW

“The work of Honorée’s mother, Dr. Trellie James Jeffers, has long inspired me, guided me, made me feel things familiar, and question the familiar. Honorée’s pen is as sharp as her mother’s and just as instructive. Yet different somehow still. With a poetic voice all her own, she holds our hands and ushers us (back) to places familiar, places forgotten — to the crossroads.” —Yaba Blay, author of One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

“Once again Jeffers reveals her genius for plumbing the depth and complexity of Black women’s lives. With compassion, rigor, and great beauty, she unveils the tensions that circumscribe public understanding of our womanhood while challenging the larger culture and us to see ourselves in the full flowering of our gendered humanity. A personal, moving, and revelatory tour de force of understanding, care, and analysis. And like always, Honorée leaves me wanting more. Brava!” —Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D., author of Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class