The historical archives of Black Americans are too often filled with broad outlines of what happened - accounts of injustice, enslavement and oppression - and not the details of how Black people lived and breathed, thought, wondered, wandered, dreamed and prayed. But every time I wondered if Jeffers had taken on too much, I would be introduced to a new character or a new moment, and the writing would be so good that I would be drawn back in. The novel includes a story line about addiction that I found both compelling and so heartbreaking that I physically had to put the book down a number of times. The book clocks in at around 800 pages, and there were moments when I worried it was simply too big.
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Ailey’s quest is this: How does a young Black woman craft a life that is joyful and whole against the backdrop of the American South, where the land is a minefield of treasures and tragedy? I will avoid the cliché of calling it “a great American novel.” Maybe the truest thing I could say is that this is an epic tale of adventure that brings to mind characters you never forget: Meg Murry in “A Wrinkle in Time,” Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Huckleberry Finn. Du Bois” is quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time. One of Ailey’s guides and champions is her beloved great-uncle, Uncle Root, and he is one of the ways in which Ailey comes to connect with her rich ancestry. Jeffers paints a nuanced and compelling portrait of H.B.C.U.
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She then studies at Routledge, a historically Black college, where her family history runs deeper than she can imagine. Ailey attends a predominantly Black high school, then a predominantly white one. The novel switches between the past and the present, with “Song” sections that tell the tales of Ailey’s ancestors and chapters that tell a present-day story through the eyes of Ailey and the women in her life.īefitting a novel with Du Bois in the title, education is a theme of the book. Ailey divides her time between an urban place known only as “the City” and Chicasetta, a rural town where she is known and loved and free. As a young Black woman in the late 20th century, Ailey feels that sense of double consciousness, not only as Du Bois imagined it in regard to race but also in terms of how one navigates gender in a Black body. The historic ground of Georgia is where we meet the hero of “Love Songs,” Ailey Pearl Garfield. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene for this is historic ground.” Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots then again came the stretch of pines and clay. “Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left.
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Ancestry looms large in “Love Songs,” and Jeffers has deftly crafted a tale of a family whose heritage includes free Blacks, enslaved peoples and Scottish and other white colonialists.ĭu Bois’s reflections on Black American life in the South are a through line in his work, and Jeffers uses passages of his writing as interludes, including this from “The Souls of Black Folk”: In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. Jeffers’s book is an ambitious work set with the fine china of the oeuvre of Du Bois, a man whose life and work pulsated with questions about the inheritance of Black American history and what one does with that fraught and complex legacy. His writing, his ambitions, his failings and his accomplishments are the bass line of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping, masterly debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B.
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He is, many would argue, the founding father of modern Black America.
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Great Barrington was the birthplace of Du Bois, and as I learned when I was named a Du Bois scholar, the great man was so many things: an elder statesman of African American life, a distinguished historian, a sociologist, a civil-rights leader and an early model of what it might mean to be a public intellectual. At 16, I moved to Great Barrington, Mass., to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember.