Morgan Jerkins

Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, Jerkins realizes as an adult that she has little connection to her family's roots and knows next to nothing about their past in the American South, so she sets out on a quest to discover her forgotten heritage. Her journey spans from Creole Louisiana and the coastal islands off the eastern seaboard to California and connections to Native American tribes in Oklahoma.

My appreciation for this book was augmented by (unintentionally) having read it nearly simultaneously with Twitty's The Cooking Gene and Four Hundred Souls. There is a significant amount of overlap among the three works, and many of the themes, events and histories became more familiar through this repetition. As a student of genealogy myself, I reveled in Jerkins' research into her family history, but I was a little concerned about the conclusions she drew regarding Carry Love. Maybe she could find a descendant of a DeBlanc to confirm via DNA testing? I delighted in Jerkins' curiosity, empathized with her disappointments and appreciated her willingness to talk about difficult and painful aspects of her family's history. Overall, an interesting read on a theme I hadn't thought much about: those who participated in The Great Migration to leave behind the places which and people who had caused their families misery and suffering for so long wished to cut ties and make a fresh start. Understandably, they often didn't wish to speak of their ancestral homes in the South, which has left subsequent generations rather in the dark about their own family histories.… (mais)

This was the perfect book to read during Halloweek, if only because the protagonist is named Hallow and born on All Hallow's Eve. The story is just barely creepy enough for a scaredy-cat like me.

I read this book in order to participate in The Free Black Women's Library monthly book discussion, but unfortunately I'm going to miss it for a birthday party–this is too bad, because the novel really bears discussion. The metaphor of Jerkins' magical, healing caul (the amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus) for appropriation, gentrification, intergenerational trauma/abuse, profit from black bodies, and according to the author, "how Black women are supposed to be everything for everyone else" might seem heavy-handed at a glance, but it's so visceral and creative in the way that she executes it that I ended up thinking more about the symbolism than the symbols, if that makes sense, which is to me a sign of any good creative work. Reading her essay "How I Overcame Anger As A Black Writer Online" gives some additional insight into her personal experiences in this vein of being a personal-trauma mercenary (https://www.lennyletter.com/story/how-i-overcame-anger-as-a-black-writer-online).

This book reminded me of Ruth Ozeki's "All Over Creation," because it pitted two such morally ambiguous yet equally sympathetic parties against each other. Although I spent most of the book waiting for a conclusion that would simultaneously solve all of these problems, which of course didn't come, and even though I'm sure that there is a moral solution in there somewhere, which I just need someone to tell me, I did not find the end of the book dissatisfying.

Some reviewers complain about lackluster prose or predictability of the plot, and although there were a couple of re-used, word-for-word phrases (a personal pet peeve), I think she wrote like a nonfiction writer, which can be a breath of fresh air in contemporary literature. And like I said before, I didn't spend any time wondering when the book was finally going to end or knowing exactly what was going to happen next (in large part because of the complex network of protagonists, like I mentioned before). I thought it clipped along at a nice pace, and even if at points I wasn't paying total attention, it's because my mind had wandered off on a rabbit trail of the moral consequences of pitting the diaspora against itself.… (mais)