The Love Songs Of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Novel
The NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epicāan intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancerāthat 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 āDouble Consciousness,ā a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Boisās words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americansāthe revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmersāAiley carries Du Boisās 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 motherās family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging thatās made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of womenāher mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuriesāthat urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.
To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her familyās past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestorsāIndigenous, Black, and whiteāin 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 storyāand the songāof America itself.