For generations, migration stories moved in one direction: toward the American Dream. Now, a seismic reversal is underway. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the United States than moving in. Jamie D. Brooks and her family are among the many who have fled.
Blending cultural reporting with memoir, The Fleeing Season shares one mother’s story as she considers how and where to raise her family. Brooks recounts her decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom, while reckoning with issues that so many American families face: school shootings, systemic racism, a broken health care system, rising rates of homelessness, and the lack of a social safety net. Intimate and honest, Brooks’s story is not a political polemic. Rather, it maps a path toward reproductive justice.
“The Fleeing Season is a clear-eyed, unflinching account of a Black mother’s decision to keep her children safe amid the multiple system failures that constitute modern American life. With tremendous heart, deep analysis, and moving prose, Jamie D. Brooks powerfully recounts her family’s move abroad, away from gun violence, inadequate healthcare, and racial injustice and toward a more just and sustainable future.”—Ashley Howard, author, Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement
“Brooks understands that Black people have always moved in search of freedom and safety. Her book insists on a truth I hold deeply: Love is essential, but love without supportive structures leaves families exposed. It left me pondering what I owe, as both a parent and a person, to building a world where families can truly be safe.”—Zach Norris, author, Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment, and coexecutive director, the Black Organizing Project
“The Fleeing Season is for all of us who have wondered in recent years: How will I know when it’s time to go? Jamie D. Brooks skillfully blends anecdotes from family life with reflections on contemporary U.S. politics and public health data to explain how she decided to move her family overseas and toward the possibility of a safer and less chaotic future. Brooks offers us the gift of her insights as a Black mother, the descendant of those whose participation in the Great Migration took them on a similar journey, from the authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South to new lands where their children might taste freedom and thrive. Brooks’s writing is engaging and urgent, and this book is a necessary guide in these uncertain times.”—Dani McClain, author, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood
