… a mesmerizing reminder that this divide between Black and white is a false binary … the story of [Jerkins’] personal heritage, and its erasure within her own family, reveals the reductive power of the white gaze to flatten the complexities of Black lineage … Hers is a journey that exists at the crossroads of so much contemporary analysis of the African-American experience … Like these other masterly recent works, Wandering in Strange Lands is in many ways a quintessentially American story, one that posits the South as a motherland where, as Beyoncé recently declared, one’s ‘roots ain’t watered down’ … This is one of the many profound injustices Jerkins describes powerfully yet accessibly. Her writing has a featherlight touch as it takes on subjects like land dispossession, punitive taxation, a lack of public services, and environmental contamination, blending them seamlessly with the tastes of couche-couche, chitlins and crawfish étouffée … The tone of the book feels as meandering as its subject matter, verging on repetitive at times; but Jerkins herself confesses her task is Sisyphean. She has a gift for turning circular stories of identity into something conclusive … Her task is also courageous. Jerkins approaches territory that is taboo even in Black circles: the complexities of caste and colorism within Creole culture, the denial of Black claims to citizenship in Native nations, even the fraught question of whether it was possible for sex between master and slave to be consensual … Jerkins makes plain that denying space for Black identities in history is itself a legacy as American as its original sins of racism and enslavement. By exploring the truth of that past with such integrity, this memoir enriches our future.
