The Love Songs Of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Novel - Paperback
SKU
9760062942953
ISBN
9780062942951

The Love Songs Of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Novel

$20.00
Author
Jeffers, Honoree Fanonne

The NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epicā€”an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancerā€”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 ā€œDouble Consciousness,ā€ a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Boisā€™s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americansā€”the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmersā€”Ailey carries Du Boisā€™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 motherā€™s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging thatā€™s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of womenā€”her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuriesā€”that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her familyā€™s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestorsā€”Indigenous, Black, and whiteā€”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 storyā€”and the songā€”of America itself.

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