Award-wining poet and academic Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s debut novel is a work of profound beauty, insight and intellectual rigour. The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois ambitiously chronicles black America, spanning years, generations and histories.
The novel is centred around the Garfields, a middle-class black family living in a place simply called “the City”, but who spend the summers with their family in the South, in a town called Chicasetta – a place of Jeffers’s invention – in Georgia.
The lives of the Garfields are recounted in first-person through the youngest daughter, Ailey, writing in the 1980s; we later get another insight to how the family came to be through a section about her mother’s life as a young adult in the 1960s. Those sections are intercut with others called “Songs” as Jeffers chronicles Ailey’s ancestors, opening with the story of a boy named Micco, and moving slowly through the centuries and family members, until these sections close on the cruel and abusive slave-owner Samuel Pinchard.
Jeffers balances these complicated strands and multiple narratives through the guiding force of Ailey, a spirited and intelligent girl who learns to negotiate growing up in both the city and the country, and to forge her own life. To keep track of this wide cast of characters the book is furnished with a family tree at its opening, as both a way of reminding the reader of the family itself, but also to give the novel a sense of its important history: though this is fiction, the historical reality of Jeffers’s writing cannot be denied.
The title is a riff on the famous TS Eliot poem The Love Songs of J Alfred Prufrock, but incorporates the name of one of the most important black thinkers and intellectuals, WEB Du Bois. Du Bois features in the text through his own words – epigraphs taken from across his oeuvre open each Song – through stories told about him, and through his ideas, particularly around the idea of the formation of black identity in the face of America’s racism, most famously his idea of “double consciousness”, a sense of, as he puts it, “twoness”, of always being split.
Racial identity
Jeffers examines not only the implications of this, but further complicates the idea of racial identity in the UK through her linkage of Native American and black histories, showing just how much these intertwined, not only through marriage and communities, but also shared treatment by white settlers, enslavers and “explorers”. In her Songs section we see names, places and lives forcibly altered with callous cruelty time and time again.
Because of this complicated and often brutal history, many of the characters have black, indigenous and white ancestors. Jeffers wrestles with this throughout the novel, showing that racial identity is far more complicated than simple designations of “black” or “white”.
When Ailey’s mother, Belle, marries Geoff, who is much lighter-skinned, she is subsequently subjected to cruel comments from his mother, who sometimes passes as white. Later, when Ailey attends Routledge, a prestigious black college, she and her colleagues find themselves questioning the apparent whiteness of some of the earliest students, leading their dean to chide them for taking part in “discussion [that] creates discord within our African American ranks”.
As Jeffers engages with important ideas, theories and literature, she also gives ample space to the family who are the anchor of the novel; scenes of cooking, family get-togethers, and storytelling and joking abound, allowing the reader to see the strength of her character-writing and dialogue. The depiction of the Garfield family through Ailey’s narration is particularly memorable, and much care and attention has been taken to create the loving family.
Also notable is the depiction of Ailey’s charming great-uncle Root, a scholar and a sage. Through whom she hears stories of famous 20th-century black intellectuals, including Du Bois.
At some 800 pages, The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois is by no means light reading. In producing such a tome, Jeffers falls in with those authors who have written their own versions of America, including Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997). But the writing here feels like a corrective to the overwhelming whiteness of those novels that have come before.
This novel – a family drama, a historical epic and intellectual inquiry all at once – complicates and, more importantly, enriches the story that America wants to tell itself.
