Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a profound and fearless collection that blends personal narrative with cultural history, examining the lives, struggles, and triumphs of Black women in America. With her signature brilliance, Jeffers explores themes of ancestry, identity, and resistance, interrogating the burdens of respectability politics, the legacies of oppression, and the inventive ways Black women have forged paths of survival and joy. Both intimate and sweeping, the essays balance historical insight with lived experience, offering truth-telling that is as tender as it is unflinching. This nonfiction debut cements Jeffers as one of the most important literary voices of our time. I cannot recommend it enough!

Dear White Person,

As a critic, I always have to hold two truths in tension: one, I like reading and writing about books by BIPOC writers and want to write for people like me who have felt underrepresented in the book world. Two, the people who approve, promote and even just read said reviews are overwhelmingly white.

This leaves me with the task of writing a review that feels authentic to me but is also mindful of the audience who will actually read it — which even if it’s not stated, even if I actively work against it, even if I choose to write for a publication that is centered on BIPOC writers, is always, at least implicitly, you. “Misbehaving at the Crossroads,” the latest collection of essays and other writings by author, poet and professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, gave me the audacity to not care about that.

The collection opens on January 6, 2021, as Jeffers watched the insurrection from her bedroom in Norman, Oklahoma and closes with her sitting by her mother in her last days in the fall of 2023. The essays follow a non-linear arc, exploring topics ranging from Jeffers’ own family history to her late friend’s use of the N-word as a verb to the brilliance of Toni Morrison’s only published short story, “Recitatif.”

Jeffers has a strong and beautiful writing style, whether it’s poetry, letters or essays. She is no stranger to writing about difficult topics, and she’s not one to mince words about it. Her 2021 debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois,” is a nearly 800-page novel that follows a Black family from before the Civil War to the present. The prose is also interspersed with poetic passages, which provide glimpses into the protagonist’s ancestors’ history.

In this essay collection, Jeffers expresses confusion about people labeling the novel with trigger warnings on review platforms on social media: “Did anyone picking up my book really expect a breezy, amusing read?”

“The truth is that, when it comes to the United States, the actual history of my ancestors is a trigger warning,” she continues in the essay.

I won’t label the trigger warnings for you, but take the current state of America and the history of Black Americans as a trigger warning that it is. Don’t expect a breezy, amusing read this time around either. Jeffers writes trauma and abuse in her own life, in history and sometimes a blend of the two, deftly and unflinchingly.

That being said, at times, the book is genuinely really funny.

That might sound weird to say, but the asides in her open letter to Obama, where she tells the former president she loves him so much but “(Not in a creepy way. Don’t be alarmed)” are funny. The premise of the essay, “Imaginary Letter to the White Lady Colleague Who Might Have Sat Next to Me at One of the Now Eliminated University Workshops for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training,” is funny. The scene in said essay when Jeffers says what I have only fantasized about saying to nice white liberals at PWIs is funny. Having someone articulate a frustration I’ve swallowed too many times so bluntly is funny. I don’t know if you’re ready to hear that, but it is.

“Misbehaving at the Crossroads” is a love letter to Black writers, her ancestors and misbehavior. It balances the darkness and turmoil of our current moment with the ability to laugh at the absurdities while also gently reminding us how we got here in the first place. History is not made in a vacuum, and part of processing that is diving into the way that people are positioned in society. In a variety of ways, Jeffers explores the crossroads Black women find themselves at between colonialism, slavery, patriarchy and power.

It’s a reflection of contemporary life that belongs in any home library. Yes, even yours.

Sincerely,

Serena

Over on my booktube channel (Hannah's Books), I shared this book in my description of exciting books forthcoming in early July. Link to the particular discussion: https://youtu.be/rewmOEk8YaM?si=SLE6CpIbCACy1fg7&t=599

📚 🅰🆄🅳🅸🅾🅱🅾🅾🅺 🆁🅴🆅🅸🅴🆆📚

𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐝𝐬
𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗿: Harper Audio(June 24, 2025)

Thank you @librofm & @harperbooks for the gifted ALC. I’m forever grateful. 💜📚🔥

I finished Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ new book Tuesday, and I’m still sitting with it. This isn’t just a collection of essays—it’s a whole reclamation. A declaration. A reminder that being Black, brilliant, academic, and LOUD is not a flaw—it’s a force.

This book reminded me that when you’re all those things, the world will try to silence you. Sometimes even your own people will ask you to shrink, to follow the path of patriarchy, to dim your light so others can feel comfortable. But Honorée said NAH. She said you don’t have to go dark or disappear to survive. There is another way, y’all! And she shows us how.

I didn’t think anything could top 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐖.𝐄.𝐁. 𝐃𝐮 𝐁𝐨𝐢𝐬, but this one? This one might’ve just outdone it. She put her whole soul in these pages. I felt seen, affirmed, and reminded that my voice is not too much—it’s necessary.

Also, if you get the opportunity to do an immersive read, like I did, then Karen Chilton does a magical and beautiful job with the narration. Truly the perfect voice for this work.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, especially these 3 chapters:

- Chp. 19 A Brief Note Concerning My Late Brother-Friend’s Usage of the N-Word as a Verb

- Chp. 22 Leaning on the Everlasting Arms of Respectability

- Chp. 35 Toni Morrison Did That

If you can’t tell by now, go on, and quit playin’ and get this book! Honorée done laid it all out, and you gon feel it in your spirit.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

🏷 #MisbehavingAtTheCrossroads #HonoréeFanonneJeffers #blackgirlsread #wellreadblackgirl #blackbooksmatter #blackbookstagram #blackgirlsreading #bibliophile #DiverseSpines #Spelman #Talledega #Alabama #bookstagram #bookreviews #bookreviewer

Jeffers’ long-awaited follow-up book to The Love Songs W.E.B. DuBois marks her aspiration to be considered among the ranks of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis. Does she succeed with MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS? Ummm, not quite for me.

In large part this is due to an organizational issue. MISBEHAVING reads very much like a collection of shorter pieces she has published elsewhere and, in some cases, expanded for this book, thrown in haphazardly. I found the first half in particular to be less cohesive than the second half; it was hard to stay focused as Jeffers jumped from topic to topic in between essays, from the difficulty of tracing her Black American ancestry thanks to slavery, to the complexities of loving her family through abuse and inherited trauma.

Thankfully the audiobook became available through Libby, otherwise I would have had trouble finishing it. I think my issue with this collection is twofold: first, that it tries to cover soooo much, and second, it relies heavily on walking in the footsteps of greats like Morrison and Walker, to the point where the impact of Jeffers’ own words and ideas are overshadowed by her frequent references to her idols.

In MISBEHAVING, Jeffers writes about, among other things:
- racial microaggressions she receives as a Black person at school and in her workplace;
- the double challenges Black women face as they are buffeted between being support systems for patriarchal Black men or playing second fiddle to white women;
- living with, and loving, important family members that have failed to protect you from abuse.

There’s more. Way more. It’s ambitious, and perhaps a bit too sweeping for me, particularly as there wasn’t much in the way of *progression* as the essays go along, a direction or conclusion to reach.

Secondly, Jeffers clearly wants to position herself alongside the likes of Morrison, Walker, Davis, and other great Black female writers. I can believe that she will get there someday, but for me, I don’t think it’s happened with this essay collection. The challenge with relying so heavily on others’ writing in one’s book is that one’s own ideas will constantly be held up in comparison.

In MISBEHAVING, Jeffers uses Alice Walker’s own standout nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, as a sort of guide for her own nonfiction. She also repeatedly comes back to analyses of Morrison’s fiction and nonfiction to illustrate her own themes about Black female resilience, identity, race relations, etc. The result, though, is that I want to read more Morrison and Walker, not necessarily more Jeffers.

But Jeffers has decades ahead for her own writing career. She has proven herself capable of writing both niche/academic and mainstream poetry, fiction, and now nonfiction. I’d love to see how her themes will foment, and how her unique writing style will crystallize further the more she writes and publishes.

See full review on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website:

"MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS" A POETIC MEDITATION ON INTERSECTIONALITY

"Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an award-winning poet, novelist and tenured professor who readily admits she is acquisitive, especially when it concerns her family.

“I’m greedy for what I’m owed: my entire history,” she writes in “Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings,” a collection of 42 social, political and personal mediations and poems that provide fascinating insight into the author’s work and life..."

https://www.ajc.com/arts-entertainment/2025/06/misbehaving-at-the-crossroads-a-poetic-meditation-on-intersectionality/

The incomparable Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has returned with her nonfiction debut, a collection of essays that explore white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy as only she can. Weaving personal stories into historical events and wise critique, Jeffers has written a superlative volume that’s just right for our times.