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A review by jennyyates
Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots by Morgan Jerkins
4.0
This book has a really interesting premise, and it lives up to it. It’s uneven, and it wasn’t adequately edited, and there were times I was annoyed by this. But it’s full of really interesting information, intriguing ideas, and personal experiences.
The author’s message is that family stories are important, and they need to be listened to – even when documentation isn’t there, even when there’s no DNA evidence. The stories are links to forgotten or denied strands of history, especially for African-Americans. And so Morgan Jerkins starts with her family history, and goes exploring, and the things she finds are fascinating.
Along the way, she confronts her own assumptions and prejudices, and finds many of them untrue. She begins in the South, checking out the Creole culture, and learns more about the people who occupied the swamps, islands, and waterways. Then she goes to the Midwest, to investigates rumors of a Native American heritage. She ends up in Los Angeles, the promised land for many migrating African Americans, and writes about some of the reasons things went wrong there.
Let me end with some quotes. In this first quote, she’s writing about Hilton Head Island, once occupied largely by African Americans who bought land after slavery ended, and who were forced out by white land-owners over time:
< I saw the word plantation so much I was starting to get a headache. Plantation Café & Grill, Plantation Café & Deli, Plantation Shopping Center, Paper & Party Plantation, Plantation Drive, Plantation Road, Plantation Club, Plantation Animal Hospital Plantation Interiors, Plantation Cabinetry, Plantation Station Inc… With every road I passed, there was another indication of a perverse symmetry between leisure and slavery. >
< I was going to take these Seminole freedmen’s stories, as well as the stories of everyone else I would interview for this book, as valid and reorient myself to a different kind of truth, one that does not rely solely on documents and textbooks. This different kind of truth is less static and more fluid, persisting throughout generations of marginalized people and outside the traditional framework, which favors the voices of the powerful over the voices of the disempowered. >
< In the 1920s and 1930s, about 10 percent of the police in every California city were Ku Klux Klan members. William Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1950 to 1966, recruited military and police veterans from the South, seeking the most racist cops he could find. While Los Angeles black churches were trying to lure black Southerners to flee to escape the KKK, white supremacists were already in control of the city, now dressed in blue instead of white. >
The author’s message is that family stories are important, and they need to be listened to – even when documentation isn’t there, even when there’s no DNA evidence. The stories are links to forgotten or denied strands of history, especially for African-Americans. And so Morgan Jerkins starts with her family history, and goes exploring, and the things she finds are fascinating.
Along the way, she confronts her own assumptions and prejudices, and finds many of them untrue. She begins in the South, checking out the Creole culture, and learns more about the people who occupied the swamps, islands, and waterways. Then she goes to the Midwest, to investigates rumors of a Native American heritage. She ends up in Los Angeles, the promised land for many migrating African Americans, and writes about some of the reasons things went wrong there.
Let me end with some quotes. In this first quote, she’s writing about Hilton Head Island, once occupied largely by African Americans who bought land after slavery ended, and who were forced out by white land-owners over time:
< I saw the word plantation so much I was starting to get a headache. Plantation Café & Grill, Plantation Café & Deli, Plantation Shopping Center, Paper & Party Plantation, Plantation Drive, Plantation Road, Plantation Club, Plantation Animal Hospital Plantation Interiors, Plantation Cabinetry, Plantation Station Inc… With every road I passed, there was another indication of a perverse symmetry between leisure and slavery. >
< I was going to take these Seminole freedmen’s stories, as well as the stories of everyone else I would interview for this book, as valid and reorient myself to a different kind of truth, one that does not rely solely on documents and textbooks. This different kind of truth is less static and more fluid, persisting throughout generations of marginalized people and outside the traditional framework, which favors the voices of the powerful over the voices of the disempowered. >
< In the 1920s and 1930s, about 10 percent of the police in every California city were Ku Klux Klan members. William Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1950 to 1966, recruited military and police veterans from the South, seeking the most racist cops he could find. While Los Angeles black churches were trying to lure black Southerners to flee to escape the KKK, white supremacists were already in control of the city, now dressed in blue instead of white. >