Wandering in Strange Lands Quotes

“Despite the increasing rigor with which scholars are approaching slavery and erotics, the pervasiveness of intellectual skepticism reflects how deeply entrenched narratives of violation, violence, and trauma are to our understanding of black female sexuality. Emphasizing subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization, however, cannot preclude fuller incorporation of pleasure and erotic possibility in the lives of enslaved black women. Sex acts happened often during slavery. Political goals of the moment do not rewrite the sexual lives, desires, and choices of enslaved and free women of color, but they can obscure those lives to our detriment. . . . To search for this in chattel slavery by interrogating these possibilities . . . does not lessen the traumatic, terrorizing, and horrific nature of slavery. Such inquiries allow for the interior lives and erotic subjectivities of enslaved blacks to matter.6”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“The Lowcountry is a two-hundred-mile stretch of land that spans the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, along with the Sea Islands.9 It is believed that over half of the 388,000 Africans brought to the lands that became the United States first arrived in the Lowcountry.10 According to the International African American Museum, 80 percent of African Americans can trace an ancestor who set foot onto a Charleston dock first.11 Despite this rich history, I had heard of Gullah people only twice in my life—on Nickelodeon’s 1990s children’s television show Gullah Gullah Island and from a close friend whose late grandmother was Gullah. The Gullah Geechee people are the oldest sub-ethnic group of African Americans.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“I thought gangs were filled with members who were often unemployed and shunned from society. I never asked the heavier questions, like how did this unemployment begin and why has society shunned them in the first place? I thought gang members killed recklessly and that anyone who joined them was bloodthirsty. But”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“And then in 1830, when Jackson was president, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced these tribes to move west of the Mississippi into what is now known as Oklahoma. The brutal journey they took is known as the Trail of Tears. A little-known fact about the Trail of Tears—one I never learned in grade school—was that both free blacks and enslaved blacks accompanied the Five Civilized Tribes on this journey.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“The United States government encouraged the Five Civilized Tribes to participate in chattel slavery for two reasons: (1) to interbreed the native population with their white fellow slave owners, diluting Indians’ undesirable “primitive” traits, and (2) more important, to dissuade the Native Americans from protecting runaway slaves.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“In grade school, I was never taught about the different social milieus that black people occupied in nineteenth-century America and earlier, and I was definitely never taught that free black people existed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“black people could not provide documentation that they were legally free, as in the famous case of Solomon Northup recounted in Northup’s book 12 Years a Slave, and if they were captured, they were denied rights to a trial.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“courts then made this fate hereditary, beginning with the Virginia colony in 1662. Because of the courts, if you were black and brought to the colonies by force, you were a slave. If you had children, they would be slaves, too. From then on, the terms black and slave were interchangeable.3 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is a prime example of how the judicial system made the two synonymous.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“with respect to everyone else. In 1654 a black indentured servant, John Casor, was bound to his master for life in a civil suit, Johnson v. Parker. This decision solved two problems: (1) It ensured that black people could not become wealthy property owners, like their white counterparts. (2) It maintained the control by wealthy whites of their black, non-English constituents. The”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“The best example of the rapid marginalization of Gullah Geechee people is on Hilton Head Island, one of the most lucrative places in the South.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“So white hunters used slave babies as bait to trap alligators, a legend much disputed until it was unfortunately confirmed to be true.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“John Couper and Thomas Spalding, two slave merchants, purchased captured Nigerians for $100 apiece and put them on a slave ship called the Wanderer in 1803. From it, the captives were unloaded and then loaded onto another ship, called the York, to take them to Saint Simons, where several sprawling plantations awaited them. The story goes that seventy-five slaves rebelled and drowned their captors. Once the ship reached Dunbar Creek, the Africans were singing as they marched ashore and, following their chief’s command, entered the marshy waters and drowned themselves. Some say that the Africans’ souls flew back to Africa. The Igbo Landing has been so”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

“This intergenerational fear is one that could be explained through epigenetics, the study of how we inherit certain mechanisms without there being a change in our DNA sequences. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, conducted a study to gauge how trauma is passed down from Holocaust survivors and found that, years later, their children inherited this PTSD because of how overactive their amygdala was.”
― Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots