Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings" (Harper, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I placed your card on the table. When you playfully demanded my own card, give it over, you said, giggling. My rage began to rise like the thickest cream. I thought about what had happened at the end of Mr. Obama's peaceful eight years as president, when 53% of white ladies had betrayed my people and voted for a racist crotch grabber.

before then if somebody had told me what would happen after that interval of a well-behaved handsome black man leading this nation i would have questioned their sanity you know i don't carry cards i said they seem so wasteful well i can just give somebody my number to put in their phone i'm not going to give you my number though because i don't ever want to talk to you again

From 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, just one in the collection Misbehaving at the Crossroads by poet, novelist, critic, scholar,

NAACP Image Award winner, and too many other honors to list, but we'll make sure to put them in the show notes, Professor Honoré Fanon Jeffers. Professor Jeffers, welcome to the New Books Network.

Thank you for having me. And that is actually not an essay. It's a short story. It's completely fictitious. But people are responding to it as if it's an essay, but it never, like, not even a little bit ever happened. Because we've all been in that meeting. That's why. We've all been in that meeting, haven't we?

We have all in some form or fashion. And I'll tell you something right now, although I have recently retired, I retire this summer after 32 years of teaching, including graduate school. I'm sad, you know, about DEI being eliminated, but not sad about the fact that we won't ever have to deal with those workshops again.

That's a silver lining if ever there was one. That's a silver lining if ever there was, sister. I'm like, Lord Jesus. Well, so as we're recording this, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, and the Washington Post have all put Misbehaving at the Crossroads on their most anticipated must-read this summer list. Probably more by the time people are listening and watching this.

I've heard you say in other interviews that you typically work on multiple projects at one time. And so I'm curious where the crafting and pulling together of the work that is in this collection, where did that fall in with the other things you've been working on in recent years?

So I'm always returning to the same things. Okay. History, Black women's lives, Black women's resilience and resistance, wisdom gained.

And I hope not to write about them in the same way, but these themes sort of pop up all the time. And so what I do is, you know, I'm nibbling at different, you know, projects. There's always one main project that I'm working on. But I always reached this point

Moment of despair when I'm writing something, I get stuck because I'm very stubborn and I just insist that what I have envisioned is going to be what happens. And that never happens. But somehow I'm always forgetting that. And so when I get stuck and when I'm in that moment of great despair, I pivot.

to another project

Like, for example, I noticed you have The Age of Phyllis on your bookshelf. And I was working at the, The Age of Phyllis was my main project. But in between then, I was writing the novel. And then I was doing sort of occasional things. Now, I do a lot of occasional things. People ask me to review something or what have you. And then the poems are always popping up.

So in terms of misbehaving at the crossroads, I came to it right after Love Songs was published. And initially it was just supposed to be a collection of occasional essays touching on the history of Black women. Now that I think about it, it was kind of dry the way that I had envisioned it.

But then I took over my mother's care and my mother and I had been estranged for several years. And when I took over her care, it became a much more emotional, vulnerable project. And it completely changed.

And but in the middle of that, I published a short story that appeared in The New Yorker online. So I'm always sort of, you know, moving and thinking. And I don't know why that is, but that's just that's just the way that I write. You talked about this being a collection of occasional essays. You also talked about reliance and resistance to.

The first words of the very first essay in this collection are on January 6th, 2021. Talk to me about the decision. Once you've got the parts and pieces and you start putting it into a collection, talk about the decision to lead with that essay, which is titled That Day in January. Let me tell you something.

It is really weird. I've spoken to a couple of people about this, that when I wrote that essay, I thought it was going to be a bookend to something historic, right? You know, just sort of a weird anomaly. It has been really shocking that in the lead up to this book coming out, we are back.

in that very fraught historical mountain.

That is deeply weird to me. The reason I wanted to begin with that essay, and I wrote it like, you know, three years ago or whatever. I wanted to begin with that essay because it was the first time in my life that I saw what I consider to be history made flesh right in front of me.

You know, as I say in the essay, it was a lynch mob of old. There was a gallows. There was, I don't think I've ever in America in my lifetime seen that kind of rage, seen that kind of intention to harm.

And the way that it just sort of started with people kind of marching to the Capitol or whatever, and then it just quickly became something else. And I am positive that if another hour or two had passed, there would have been intimate assaults. There would have been...

murders there would have been I'm positive I saw it was something that came through me ancestral and so when I started arranging when I realized that these weren't going to be just occasional essays and then I became confused like what was I going to do with the collection

The last line or so that says history was stalking me, but at least I could see its face. So I began thinking about what did it mean to be a Black woman, not just Black and not just woman, but both?

in these United States. And that's when I began to consider history. I'm always looking at history. And so I very much look at Misbehaving at the Crossroads as a companion piece. It's a love song, you know? And in particular, a lot of people try to figure out what about love songs is my real life?

You know, and it's not, you know, I would have loved to have had a daddy like Jeffrey Garfield. I would have loved to have had an Uncle Root.

I created Uncle Root, you know, I miss him, you know. But I think that what I wanted to show people is this is the reality. Misbehaving at the crossroads is the reality of my life because in many ways it's a memoir. But love songs is still historically possible, if that makes sense.

And I want people to really sort of grapple with those possibilities. And at this point in my life, you know, I'm 58. This is my seventh book. I wanted people to see what the cumulative is.

costs, joys, wisdom that I arrived, you know, that this particular moment has brought me to. This interplay of

I was going to say fact and fiction, but maybe I don't even mean fiction. I just mean what is, you know, autobiographical fact versus what is not, as you just talked about. You know, I opened with the reading that you said, hey, that's made up. That whole thing is made up. It reads like it happened. And in fact, there are four...

open letters or imaginary open letters in the collection. And I was so interested in how you think about the open letter as a container for whatever it is you're trying to say that is said better in your mind in an open letter versus in some other form.

So one of the things to get back to when you said, you know, fact and fiction, I think of scholar, the scholar,

Sadia Hartman and her notion of critical fabulation. And so what you have is you have the book. I do. It's behind my head. I was looking for it. And so what she talks about is, you know, again, what's possible because of what the history is. And then what you do is you leap into those gaps.

And you imagine what is possible. I think that she uttered, you know, she coined that phrase, but the idea has always been there, you know, in the African-American oral tradition. So in terms of the open letter, you know, these are all

you know, places where I can just be rage-filled, okay? So the D-E-I moment, that's completely fiction. The others are moments where they're cumulative. You know, they don't refer to any one moment, but they refer to many, many, many moments.

And so I just sort of put a cumulative, you know, recipient of the letter. The open letter to President Obama, well, that's kind of tongue in cheek. You know, if I were to ever meet him, there's no way I would say any of those things to him, you know. Yeah.

He wasn't a perfect president. And there were some real moments, you know, deporter-in-chief, droner-in-chief. They called him droner-in-chief, you know, when I met people overseas a few years ago. He wasn't a perfect president, but I think he was a good president considering that the United States is, you know, a capitalist society.

I think he did the best he could. And I think he really did move this country forward. And of course, I think there are some people who are angry that he moved this country forward. And that's how, you know, we're back here. But I think there are certain things that you can say about

And an open letter that you can't really say in an essay, if that makes sense. You know, there has to be an argument in an essay that's very overt. But for me, the open letter is almost like a short story.

which is how I got the short story about the DEI. I sort of meander, you know, my way through places. I can't do that in an essay. An essay has to be tighter. There has to be a place where you're actually going.

But it's the first time, or I guess the second time, I had an open letter. It actually linked on my website that I published in Literary Hub, and then it was republished in an anthology to the editor and poet John Freeman, who had asked me to write this letter. And even though, you know, John's a white guy,

And, you know, I guess in America with all that entails, but he is a really wonderful person, like a thought partner, a promoter of my work. And so the tender way that I address him in that letter on my website is totally different than the way, you know, I address people in the book. Mm-hmm.

One of the things I found really interesting in, because those, I was going to say those open letters are some of my favorite parts of the book, but the truth is, every chapter, every essay was my favorite part. That's so nice. Yeah.

So I'm being a little bit disingenuous. I'm being disingenuous when I say this is my favorite. But I really took no prisoners in this book. And so it is my it is my most frightening book. And so it's lovely when people are saying, oh, I love this because I just laid it all out.

You know, I said, if if if something happens to me or, you know, you know, I die early or whatever. I think about death a lot. Having, you know, watched my mother decline. I said, well, here it is. People know exactly who I am. It feels needed at the moment, though.

That's why it's so weird. I mean, that's why it's so weird that I'm talking to people. It's so weird because it feels like I wrote this book for this moment and I didn't. I didn't. But that's the same thing that happened with Love Song.

Right when I was, you know, there was a way that you could address race relations and history and all of that. I've also said to myself, I'm going to be completely honest in these interviews. OK, there's a way that you could not be honest.

As a black person talking about these issues, because first of all, you were supposed to be addressing a white audience.

And you're supposed to be negotiating with them. And you're supposed to not hurt their feelings, but at the same time, provide them with a blueprint for how we move forward. And that's how I came up in the game. I'm 58. And I'm part of that, you know, maybe first 20, 30 years of

of when Black folks started going to these institutionalized creative writing programs. Okay. And we were very careful because we were the only Black people in the room and people would be telling us we needed glossaries.

for our poems, for our stories. And then, and many of these people were controlling our careers. So we had to, you know, our professors or people we met at, you know, conferences. And so there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of fear.

And, you know, that's why that open letter to this man that said he wanted to mount me. You know, I remember going to these conferences and having these older white men say inappropriate things. And I would giggle and I would because I was terrified. But then what happened was my playing along didn't even help my career.

because white supremacy is arbitrary that's what people don't understand you you can play the game and you might get ahead or you can play the game and you don't get ahead and so um one of the you know one of the things that happened is after you know um

After Love Songs, and I remember, you know, going through my, it was virtual then because we were in the middle of the pandemic. And I remember, but I remember saying this, and I want to say I was very grateful to be on CBS this morning. Incredibly grateful. But I remember being on CBS this morning and saying, I wrote this book for Black women and seeing the faces of

Because I wasn't supposed to say that. I was still supposed to be, you know, this is what we do. But I had decided I'm not doing this anymore. And so this book feels prescient because this is this. And I'm not just the only Black person doing this. There are a lot of Black people where we're like, well, we played the game and we did this.

And we negotiated with you. And, you know, with Black women, we gave you our breast milk. And we loved you. And we coddled you. And this is how you repaid us. You know, and so now my thing is, what I'm hoping, I always write for Black women. That's my first reader. But now what I'm hoping is that

I want everybody to read the book. It's just, you know, my audience is Black women. But I'm hoping that people who aren't Black women will be grateful that I'm at least telling them the truth, you know, because don't you want to know the truth? Do you want somebody to be lying to you and coddling you? Or do you want to hear these conversations that are taking place when you're not in the room?

So I think that's why it feels prescient because for the first time, I think Black people are not, particularly Black women are, as I call us, the 92%, right? You and I are part of the 92%, right? And we're just like, okay, we did what we were supposed to do. We delivered everything.

that election to you in 2020. Okay? And then we got out there, you know, and Kamala Harris, God bless her. I mean, she raised all that money. She was cute. The silk press was immaculate. She was charming. She was all of that. And now here we are. And I think Black women are like, we're done. We're tired. You do it. You get out there. So, you know, that's...

But I didn't expect to be here, but I'm glad I am here, you know.

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Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store. In so many places in the collection, there is what I think about as being a calling in of the reader. And these Black women that you're writing for with the use of we and us and our...

And sometimes there is what I think about being as the calling out of the reader with the use of you in some of the pieces. And even as you just talked about, you know, I'm always writing for Black women. I'm curious, though, as you're writing, where in the editing process or the crafting process is

Does the reader make themselves known to you? I mean, especially if the reader is not solely Black women. If you're talking to other people...

Never talking to anybody but Black women. I'm always aware that someone else is listening. Okay? I'm always aware that non-Black, non-female people are listening. And I want to make very clear, I believe that there are more than, you know, two genders. Okay? So I want to be very clear on that. And I say that.

you know, as much in the collection. But again, I really want to have these open, honest conversations, woman to woman, Black woman to woman, and allow others to witness it. Okay.

But, you know, I mentioned that I just recently retired. And but when I did teach because I taught creative writing as well as literature. But when I did teach creative writing, one of the things I always said to my students is the first draft is for you. OK, the second draft is for your audience. And the third draft is for your audience. You always need to be aware that there's an audience there now.

Part of that also was a defiance because rapidly as I was moving through my poetry career, there became this moment where lyrical poetry, subjective verses,

crowded out narratives. Okay. So to call someone's poetry accessible is an insult now. Okay. But the issue is, is that I am an African American person. And so in my community, literature has always engaged someone else. That's the whole point.

So this is at odds, right? So, you know, non-Western literature has always been aware that there's someone there, okay?

So, and I really have to thank you for that excellent question because sometimes you don't even know what you're doing until somebody asks you and then you have to, you know, really think about. So when, you know, I'm engaging with the reader, there is a moment of defiance saying, yes, this is my African identity.

American and Africana heritage, where I am going to be aware of the reader. Okay. I want to be accessible, even as I sometimes have these high intellectual moments.

But then I reach my hand out to the reader and say, I know you're smart. Come on, follow me. You know, there were moments like that in love songs, too. And it was just a great joy to receive, you know, DMs on Instagram and different things like that from Black women saying, you know, I was really scared to read this book, but girl, you did that, you know, because I

I want people to understand you are far more, you are far smarter than you think you are. Don't let this, you know, be daunting to you. So there's that, but there's also a tenderness, you know, where I'm, I'm letting my reader know I'm, I'm being vulnerable.

OK, or I'm being angry or I'm saying something black woman that we both have gone through. Can you feel me? Do you hear me? It's very much again in African-American cultures. It's a call and response like a preacher, you know, even.

You know, come on, talk to me. You know, like I remember when I would be in the church when I was a little girl and the priest would be like, y'all don't hear me. And then somebody say, well, you know, so it's it's it's it's a whole thing. And so even though I am a high intellectual, but I'm very much made by a working class society.

you know, Black Southern tradition. So it's all of them. You mentioned this before, but all of your books across genres are deeply rooted in U.S. history. And I'm curious about how you think about your role as a historian.

given the genres that you write in. Or even if you use that word for yourself. I know there's one place in the collection where you actually, you differentiated yourself between you and Nell Painter. I mean, I love you, Tanya. I know. She does belong in her own thing. I mean, she's like a genius and a legend and now a friend, which I am so, you know, honored.

You know, that she would consider me her friend. I met her once, and that was it. She's wonderful. And, you know, she also paints. So to know that this deeply intellectual woman is also an artist is just like, you know. But so I've had other people call me a historian.

I can't remember, like, I can't rattle off dates and stuff like that, right? So that's always been...

like an insecurity of mine, you know, even though you can love historians where they don't do all of those little granular, you know, things. But for me, I always, you know, considered that if I was going to be an historian, that I would be able to rattle off the dates or whatever. I do consider myself a scholar, but let me tell you, there is a lot

of gatekeeping in academia. And of course, I'm sure some of it has to do with the fact that I'm African-American and a woman. Some of it has to do with the fact that I don't carry myself with the kind of gravitas that people expect scholars, you know, of scholars. And there's a reason for that.

First of all, it's just, it takes a lot of energy. And what I do is,

takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of intellectual energy, takes a lot of spiritual energy, takes a lot of creative energy. And I don't have time to try to bleach my accent, to get rid of it, to try to walk around serious all the time so that I'm inhabiting a particular role that people think I should inhabit. As I say all the time, I don't talk about it, I be about it.

And so, you know, one of the things that was hilarious to me, I always knew I was super smart. But then when Love Songs came out, you know, I remember this colleague of mine wrote me and he said, you just published The Age of Phyllis last year. And now you publish this 800 page novel. And I wrote him back and I said, y'all needed to know what I was working on.

So now, you know, I don't talk about it. I beat it down. OK, this is what the face of brilliance is. My people are brilliant. You know, my mother's people were brilliant and some of them couldn't even read and write.

So, but in terms of the scholarship, you know, it's, there's been a lot of bullying. I won't go into it, but there have. There have been like deeply hurtful things where, you know, people want to put me in a box as like the sassy, you know, fat, you know, artist that makes people feel good or whatever. Right.

And then I come up with my, you know, notes in Chicago. So it's a constant, you know, thing. But then there was gatekeeping with fiction when I started. I remember being...

If I say where I was, then people can look up the years, so I try not to be too messy. But I was someplace with a bunch of fiction writers years ago, and I said I wrote fiction, and they all started laughing at me.

I mean, like uproariously. And I told somebody, I said, you know, if they hadn't done that, I just would have still been publishing, you know, my stories and little journals and stuff. That's all I ever wanted to do. But once they did that, right?

And I tell people, I hope somebody don't ever say I can't be a physicist or something like that because I don't have enough time to, you know, do that. But they laughed at me and it was really hurtful, you know.

And then I won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which Toni Morrison won for The Song of Solomon. So when I'm, you know, I'm sort of rambling here, but when I talk about, you know, the tension, but I have claimed Scholar after all these years. I spent 15 years in the archives with the age of Phyllis. And so I have claimed Scholar.

And maybe in another 10 years, I'll claim historian. Okay. So speaking of history, speaking of archives, speaking of our own personal archives, even, there are poems in this collection that first appeared in your 2007 collection, Red Clay Suite. Right.

And talk about how they reappeared in this collection. And I'm also curious about whether or not they are the same poems. And what I mean by that is not just at the line, you know, did you revise them? But do they say the same things today, a couple of decades later, surrounded by different words than when you first published them?

Yeah, there's a poem that's in the book called Lexicon. And that poem is about the day that my parents separated permanently until daddy was diagnosed with heart failure and cancer.

terminal, you know, heart disease. And mama brought him back. We were living in Atlanta then. And then, you know, he died like a year later. But I wrote that poem when I was deeply wounded and really hurting. I was 40. And I

Try not to get chuffed up here. And so it was a point where I was not only wounded, I was angry. I was enraged. That was my third book. When I finished the next to last draft of Miss Behang at the Crossroads,

I started thinking about what did, you know, that poem mean? There's another poem called Driving Interstate West Through Georgia, right? What do those poems mean now in a place of peace, in a place of reconciliation, in a place of joy, in a place of forgiveness? Yes.

And so, you know, I'm always honest with my reader. You know, I don't tell it all. But if I talk about something, I'm going to talk about the entirety of what I put down. I feel like that's some that's a good faith contract with the reader.

And so when I was thinking about it, you know, and those last lines or something like, and we are driving off in the truck, Mama, leaving him turning the pages of his book. What is that word? Forget about it. We leave him there. We laugh.

I can't believe I still remember, you know, those laughs. But it was, it becomes something different, you know, knowing that this man was wounded, you know. That does not justify what he did, okay? But knowing that we're all wounded in some sort of way. So, you know, so the poems, but also,

I think, to me, there is no separation in genre. There is no separation. You know, Liz Steele Clifton used to say that. I'm always open to the poem, to the word.

There's no separation. Sometimes it takes the form of an essay. Sometimes it takes the form of a poem. There's a story. But once you have a vision, which it has taken me 30 years to find that, or I'd say 25, once you have a vision, there really is no separation. You just listen to what rhythm it's going to take. Yeah.

I think maybe one last question. And in the collection, there is a series of journal entries. And in one of the journal entries, you write about being sent a rebroadcast of a BBC radio program on Phyllis Wheatley Peters.

who, of course, as we've talked about multiple times now, the subject of your 2020 collection, The Age of Phyllis. And you write, Miss Phyllis always finds a way to remind me of her presence. And I always think, Mother, I haven't forgotten you. What do you imagine Miss Phyllis thinks of this collection of misbehaving at the crossroads?

I think she would thank me for my honesty. You know, people look at her poems and they think one thing about her. But if you read her letters, she's far more radical than people give her credit for. I always want people to know, whatever I write, that I'm laying it, you know, on the altar of my ancestors.

And this is an ancestral work. This is a gift to not only my distant ancestors, but my recent ancestors, my parents, my sisters. So I would hope that she would say, well done, well done, daughter. I would hope so.

The book is Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honoré Fanon Jeffers. You can find Professor Jeffers online at honoréjeffers.com.

on Instagram at honoree underscore Jeffers, and on Substack at honoree Jeffers. I have been your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online at sullivansummer.com, on Instagram at thesullivansummer, and also on Substack at sullivansummer. Thank you for tuning in to the New Books Network.