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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

 


Description


The 2020 National Book Award–nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.

Review

At 800 pages this book has kept me busy for some time and I enjoyed it so much.

I only heard of this book because Barack Obama had it on his reading list and I was intrigued. I read the first pages as a preview online and was hooked from thereon in. 

The book begins in the 1700s  in America and the honesty of the writing and descriptions just kept me reading. As with any "saga" I did get a little confused at times with who was who in the family tree, and what era we had leapt from and to. 

Ailey is the 20th century woman we follow through her life up to and after college. She has a sister Lydia and we hear about her and the other siblings lives through Ailey's eyes. What I wasn't expecting was that later in the book Lydia is revisited in her own right. It seemed strange at the time but once her story was told in full I began to see why it was done. I did get concerned that the 800 pages were going to taken up in this way with the story repeating, but in the main the story was sequential, if in a flip flop fashion. 

If you are looking for a read to be all encompassing then this is the one for you. Some American references, especially sororities were lost on me at times, but it didn't detract from the overall story.

My thanks to my library and Bolinda digital for the ebook loan.

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