The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois: A Novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Harper Collins 790, pp.
By Dr. Brenda M. Greene
Poet, fiction writer, and essayist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (Harper Collins, 2021) is a multigenerational epic novel beginning in the early 18th century in a place called the Gold Coast in Africa, and continuing to the present.
In this debut novel, Jeffers uses the literature and scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois, sociologist, historian, and essayist, as a framework for the coming of age story of the protagonist Ailey Pearl Garfield whose roots are in Chicasetta, Georgia.
Jeffers intersperses passages from DuBois and “songs” which provide readers with origin stories that represent the complicated relationships of Ailey’s African and Cherokee ancestors.
W.E.B. DuBois spent more than seven decades advocating for improved race relations, civil rights, and peace, and researching the history of America and its relationship to Black people.
Jeffers’ use of W.E.B. DuBois’ work as a framework to tell the story of Ailey’s family and ancestors provides an historical, sociological, and political context for understanding the journey of Ailey’s family in America.
Readers encounter two narratives in this novel which is primarily set in central Georgia and represents the journey of Ailey’s family over three centuries. One narrative details the history of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people in the 18th and 19th century, and the second details the family dynamics of a middle class African American family from the mid through late 20th century.
The narratives are not contiguous, and readers move from back and forth through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries as they read the novel. These parallel narratives provide readers with an understanding of the intricate relationships between Blacks and Native Americans and the ways in which these past relationships shape the future of Ailey’s family.
As Ailey matures into a young woman, she is guided by dreams, family members, and teachers. The themes that emanate from her research include cultural memories and sorrow songs reflecting the loss of Africa, enslaved Black and Indigenous people, the sin of the intrusion of whites on the land, broken treaties, sexual abuse and the mistreatment of women.
In a song titled “Loss of Africa,” Jeffers writes, “We know of those taken from the place called Africa, captured by men who had transgressed against flesh for a long time. . . We know about the dark-dark folks who would never see home again.”
Jeffers’s portrayal of an enslaved girl named Beauty underscores the importance of memory. Beauty is given a new name after being taken from her parents. She decides that “she would take out her memories and wrap herself tightly in them. She was owned but her memories were not.”
Ailey is motivated to investigate her family origins after working with her mentor, the Scholar Dr. Oludara, who wants to compile a family history on her ancestor, the slave woman that her father had named her for. Dr. Oludara and Ailey’s Uncle Root, a well-regarded professor at a southern university, become her guides as she unravels the stories of her family.
Readers encounter scholars, writers, and activists such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Malcolm X as Ailey uncovers the history and roots of her family and fully embraces DuBois’s concept of “double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. . . his two-ness, an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings . . .”
Jeffers’s introduction of issues such as class, colorism, drug abuse, child molestation, sexual abuse and family trauma in this multilayered novel reminds readers that these are experiences encountered by all families regardless of class.
The middleclass status of Ailey does not protect her from the reality of these social issues and she struggles with them throughout the novel. In describing the death of sister for example, Ailey reflects on her mother’s response: “My mother didn’t feel it when her child died. There was no dream, no prescience in her spirit . . .”
The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois is reminiscence of Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy, which brings together Anglo Dutch peoples, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans in a town in rural New York.
Jeffers, like Morrison, recounts their struggle to survive, the abuse of Africans and Native Americans, and the ways they resist and persist despite years of maltreatment and exploitation. Both Jeffers and Morrison have truly penned stories that have been distorted or omitted from American literature and history.
In a time when books are being banned, and there are increased efforts to erase the history and stories of Blacks and Indigenous people in America, Jeffers’ novel is an important literary text that expands the narratives of American literature from the perspective of a Black woman.
Toni Morrison tells us that the writer should create stories that are both political and irrevocably beautiful. The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois embodies these qualities.
Dr. Brenda M. Greene is Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. To watch an interview with Dr. Greene and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers on The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Dtv45t0RA
