Chapters hop back and forth in time between Ailey’s first person narratives and third person histories of her various ancestors, including Beauty, a mixed-race Indigenous Creek, white, and West African girl sold into slavery by her stepmother and renamed Ahgaya, “Uncle Root,” a mixed race Black man who could have passed as white and chose not to, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher.

As the story unfolds, we see the tapestry of American history as it is woven together: white European settlers, enslaved Black people kidnapped from Africa, Indigenous people whose land was forcibly taken from them and the interrelationships between them all. Du Bois is a true epic, tracking the fictional family history of African-American protagonist Ailey Pearl Garfield back 8 generations in a fashion similar to Yaa Ngasi’s Homegoing. The hefty debut novel from award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is over 800 pages, spans over 2 centuries, and only weighs 1.4 pounds in paperback format. Jeffers teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.Good news for those of us who travel with books: The Love Songs of W. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, and the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. 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. 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 Ailey to succeed in their stead. 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.Īiley 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. 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.

Audiobook Length: 29 hours and 49 minutes

The love songs of web dubois