The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

An intimate yet sweeping novel with all the dazzling force of Yaa Gyasis Homegoing and Jesmyn Wards Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Love Songs of W.E.B. In doing so she 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. 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. 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 her to succeed in their stead. Ailey grows up 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. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. 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.

A breathtaking and ambitious debut novel that chronicles the journey of multiple generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era, by prize-winning poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers