The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

The poetry, power, and grace of this novel, which is ostensibly about a contemporary Black woman and her family’s history in Georgia, in my opinion, manages to explain American history more effectively (and affectively) than any history book.

I grew up in Florida but spent many summers with my mom’s white family in Georgia. Those visits were among the reasons I turned to scholarship to try to understand our nation’s founding in slavery and freedom and its ever-present legacies.

While Jeffers’ protagonist, in fact, becomes a scholar, and the book continuously references one of our nation’s greatest historians/sociologists, W. E.… show more.

A complex, deeply researched epic, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois spans multiple generations of a Southern Black family, from slavery to the present.

The story takes place in several different worlds: an African village, the experience of Southern sharecroppers, sorority life at a Black college. Author Honoree Fanonne Jeffers creates a huge cast of sympathetic characters, especially the protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield.

I loved how Ailey’s character evolves through the years and settings until we understand that she has taken the many stories passed down to her and is using them in her PhD thesis, and that we… show more.