Jeffers paints a nuanced and compelling portrait of H.B.C.U. She then studies at Routledge, a historically Black college, where her family history runs deeper than she can imagine. Ailey attends a predominantly Black high school, then a predominantly white one. The novel switches between the past and the present, with “Song” sections that tell the tales of Ailey’s ancestors and chapters that tell a present-day story through the eyes of Ailey and the women in her life.īefitting a novel with Du Bois in the title, education is a theme of the book. Ailey divides her time between an urban place known only as “the City” and Chicasetta, a rural town where she is known and loved and free. As a young Black woman in the late 20th century, Ailey feels that sense of double consciousness, not only as Du Bois imagined it in regard to race but also in terms of how one navigates gender in a Black body. The historic ground of Georgia is where we meet the hero of “Love Songs,” Ailey Pearl Garfield. Alfred Prufrock.” Jeffers is an award-winning poet, and she is never doing just one thing with her text by pluralizing “song” in this play on Eliot - not just a love song, but love songs - she tips her hat to the double consciousness of Black Americans that Du Bois so famously wrote about and that Jeffers’s characters also see the world through. Du Bois” brings to mind, of course, the T. Ancestry looms large in “Love Songs,” and Jeffers has deftly crafted a tale of a family whose heritage includes free Blacks, enslaved peoples and Scottish and other white colonialists.
In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. Jeffers’s book is an ambitious work set with the fine china of the oeuvre of Du Bois, a man whose life and work pulsated with questions about the inheritance of Black American history and what one does with that fraught and complex legacy. His writing, his ambitions, his failings and his accomplishments are the bass line of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping, masterly debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. He is, many would argue, the founding father of modern Black America. Great Barrington was the birthplace of Du Bois, and as I learned when I was named a Du Bois scholar, the great man was so many things: an elder statesman of African American life, a distinguished historian, a sociologist, a civil-rights leader and an early model of what it might mean to be a public intellectual. At 16, I moved to Great Barrington, Mass., to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember.
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