The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois ~ Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Ailey Garfield is a young American woman of African, Scottish, and Native American descent, growing up in a highly educated family with high expectations. Her parents are Belle and Geoff Garfield, a teacher (professor? I don’t remember) and a medical doctor. Ailey and her sisters, Lydia and Coco, all suffer sexual abuse at the hands of their grandfather, ‘Gandy’. None of them know that the other two have suffered, they all thought that their silence, demanded under threat of the murder of their family, has protected the others. This abuse haunts them all, but leads them in different directions with their relationships and their lives.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois is primarily Ailey’s story, but it is also a sweeping saga of her family history in the small (fictional) town of Chicasetta, Georgia. From the native Creek people of the area, to the Scottish slave owner, to the enslaved blacks stolen from Africa, then forward in time generation to generation, Jeffers tells the stories of generation after generation, of abuse and the struggle for freedom, of joyous love and poisonous hatred, of determination and victory, of torture and addiction. At the end it is a story of hope and finding joy in a complicated life, with a very complex family.

The themes of colonialism, slavery, colorism, and sexism are pervasive as we come forward from the 1700s to present day. Jeffers is a poet, and the story is told in a very poetic way, with main chapters telling Ailey’s story, interspersed with quotes from scholar W.E.B. Dubois, and poetic stories of her ancestors. The audiobook was 30 hours long, the physical book just shy of 800 pages. It was not too long. There was some confusion for me, as themes reoccurred, and I wasn’t sure if events were happening again to a different person, or if this was a retelling of something I had heard in an earlier chapter.

Highly recommended, though there are some scenes of addiction and pedophilia that are hard to get through. The parts of the book that stick with me are of the strength and resilience and overall goodness of some characters, more than the cruelty and heartbreak of others.