The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The great scholar, W. E. B. 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. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. 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.

Ailey 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. 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.

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. 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.
([source](https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780062942968/the-love-songs-of-w-e-b-du-bois/))

4.5 stars
I will definitely re-read this novel.

Incredibly immersive and well-researched with a broad scope and broad appeal. I listened to the (unabridged) audio version and it flew by; I was surprised to see the regular book was over eight hundred pages long!

This is an extremely ambitious debut novel that, for the most part, lands. It follows the life of Ailey Garfield from a preteen to a grown woman studying for her doctorate. We see her family life, school life, love life, her successes, failures, struggles and everything between. Interspersed are long sections from the perspectives of different people from different parts of Ailey's mixed heritage: black, white, indigenous, from the 1700s to Ailey's own childhood. It's an intense generational saga that showcases ripples across the family line. Jeffers is absolutely unapologetic and unwavering in her commitment to making this a black feminist novel (and rightly so!). Triumphs and tragedies past and present can all be found here. Ailey's connection to her maternal line is the showcase, and ultimately provides the catharsis, of this theme.

Due to the length of the novel, it can sometimes feel a bit repetitive. While this repetitiveness is a way in which the generational trauma is highlighted, I do think certain segments could have done with tighter editing.

Nevertheless this is a compelling read, but also one that doesn't pull punches. True horror and heartbreak in spades, but more than enough love too.