crossroads, vol. 1: lucky hand [episode one: where did it go wrong?]

Walled off, protected by a trick laid by Aunt Memory endem, the Cairo, IL of the Crossroads serial promises us the queer black heauxtopia we deserve.

“Thrillingly written... highly erotic... you won't want to skip this compelling work of art, which happens to include a splendiferous orgy that will redefine hoe is life.”

—Suede Coochie Newsletter

"Crossroads is a remarkable feat, a challenge to everything from integration to gender roles, to mainstream feminism and sexuality. If you haven't read this book, you're missing out." —Womanist Whore Weekly

“All of Cairo story. Whole town masking, shrouded in trickery. Known as an impoverished almost-ghost town to the wider American populace. All they see is crumbling buildings, a closed hospital, a town abandoned by anyone who could abandon it, especially the government. But we took it, see, and we made it our own, and now only nobody can touch us.”

Crossroads is a dark urban metafictional alt-history hedonistic hoodoo fantasy set in an alternate version of Cairo Illinois and the United States of America. Cairo is the historical black province you have been missing. Walled off and protected by a trick laid by Aunt Memory endem, Cairo promises us the queer black heauxtopia we deserve. Set in a mysterious tropical zone located both in and out of southern Illinois, we encounter an alternate version of black culture centered around Hoodoo as they interpret it in this new world populated by ginger-haired brown-skinned Zin, magical serpents, blue-haired bonobos, pygmy elephants, Miss’ssippi hippos, paradise fruit trees, loogaroo, and shapeshifters. They co-opt old gods and remake them into new ones based on Freedmen who came before them and gave “a new significancy to white flight.” But even though secluded Cairo seems close to paradise, there are threats both within and without their borders. Aesthetically recalling Radiance and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and using oral tradition, poetry, hoodoo literature, eye dialect, revision, and black metanarrative techniques, Crossroads explores race, love, romance, sex, gender, childhood, pleasure, and what real liberation must look like.