Wandering in Strange Lands

Morgan Jerkins traces her own family's history across the United States in this work of narrative non-fiction. Her subject is the Great Migration, the movement between 1916 and 1970 in which six million black Americans left rural Southern homes for jobs in cities of the North, West and Midwest.

Jerkins argues that the move opened new economic opportunities and changed the makeup of America, yet it also cut people off from their roots, their land and their sense of identity. She sets out to understand what that loss meant for her ancestors and for the wider group of people who have been displaced and disenfranchised.

To do it, she retraces the routes her ancestors took, from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma and California. Along the way she gathers interviews and photographs, and works from hundreds of pages of transcribed conversation. The family's oral histories, which she is able to follow back 300 years, are set beside the memories and insights of black people she meets on the road.

The book is part memoir, part history and part travel account, written in the first person by a young black woman with a cultural critic's eye. It reads as personal and investigative, and it is useful for anyone curious about how one family's story connects to the larger history of black life in America.