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    Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
    Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
    Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
    Audiobook8 hours

    Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

    Written by Morgan Jerkins

    Narrated by Morgan Jerkins

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    About this audiobook

    One of Buzzfeed's 24 New Books We Couldn’t Put Down

    “One of the smartest young writers of her generation.”—Book Riot

    From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing—a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with”—comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

    Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. 

    Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history. 

    Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America’s past and present, one family’s legacy, and a young black woman’s life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.


    Editor's Note

    A stirring journey…

    Roxane Gay calls author Morgan Jerkins (“This Will Be My Undoing”) “a force to be reckoned with,” and we can think of no higher praise. In “Wandering In Strange Lands,” Jenkins takes readers along on her stirring journey to unearth her roots as she retraces her family’s path north during the Great Migration. At once an intimate memoir and a powerful history of the displacement of Black people in America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 4, 2020
    ISBN9780062958914
    Author

    Morgan Jerkins

    Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem. 

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    • 4/5
      Thank you to the ancestors for the gift of Morgan Jerkins.
    • 5/5
      Morgan Jenkins' second book is a riveting exploration of her family roots. Her journey takes her first to the Low Country of S. Carolina and Georgia, the Gullah Geechee islands where the first enslaved people landed, now stolen acres dominated by wealthy white landowners. There, Jenkins learns about the medicinal roots and herbs that saved lives when no medical professionals served Black people. Next, to Louisiana and her Creole ancestors, the gens de couleur libre, free people of color, who ended up travelling with exiled Native Americans and becoming freedmen in Oklahoma. The law called the Dawes Rolls determined which of the Native tribespeople received land allotments, and if you were judged as more Black than Native and listed as such on the Rolls, you were denied tribal membership and the benefits of its privileges. Her last stop is LA, as some of her family had moved West for opportunities that again eluded Black people due to the virulent racism that was pervasive through the Rodney King area and has resulted in Blacks recently leaving California in large numbers. Jenkins' writing is scholarly yet folksy as she shares the delight and pain of her family members and the incredible knowledge gained from helpful strangers in each locale. It's a fruitful combination of travelogue and history lesson.Quotes: "Black jazz artists infused their music with Black church styles from the rural South to make their music something the whites couldn't imitate.""In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery.""Creoles did not want to carry the weight of being Black in America. Perhaps they defined themselves as just Creole in order to not feel erased, even though the Louisiana French Creole they speak is a mixture of French and several West African languages, including Mande, Ewe, and Yoruba.""He said, "You're Creole, you're Black. There is no white Creole. We're mixed people.""We had to move to save our families, move to get better jobs and earn money, or move because we had this unwavering belief, despite endless oppression, that there was a different type of beauty to be found in another zip code.""White people just could not leave Black people alone, and their constant meddling in our lives is one of the biggest reasons why we continue to be displaced, disrespected, disenfranchised, and murdered."