Fanonne Jeffers' Love Songs - Best of 2021

I’ve found my number one book of the year! What a relief to realize that every fabulous review of Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel “The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois” was completely deserved. This glorious epic tale, which weighs in at just under eight hundred pages, is one of those books you dream about, one where you can sit for hours lost in another world, a world of horror, heartbreak, loss, and injustice tempered with an abundance of love.

This remarkable feat encompasses four centuries of history brought to fruition by Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black doctoral student whose dissertation, based upon the lives of her own ancestors, commences with Georgia’s native Creek people who lived on the land long before the arrival of the white Europeans whose ships’ holds carried enslaved men, women, and children from Africa’s Gold Coast.

How these three cultures, the Native, African, and European mingled as they built an agricultural behemoth, and produced, through intermarriage or more often rape, family lines of every hue, is the story of America in its best and worst iteration. Jeffers provides four pages of genealogy trees for readers to reference but you’ll be so wrapped up in the story that I doubt you’ll even need them. Apt quotations from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois preface each section of the novel adding to the solemnity and depth of the historical picture that Jeffers paints.

Ailey’s relationship with her own family is complex. She and her two older sisters, Lydia, and medical student Coco, share a devastating secret of abuse that each keeps from the other and which affects each woman in vastly different ways. A through line and salvation for Ailey is the deep abiding love she holds for her uncle Root, a retired professor, whose home in the tiny town of Chicasetta, Georgia, becomes Ailey’s respite from the pressures of being a strong, vocal Black woman in a world before “me too” or Black Lives Matter.

There’s a strong feminist bent to this book as Jeffers celebrates the strength and smarts of the women who have shepherded their families through the scourge of slavery, the false sense of freedom before Jim Crow took over, and the way the movements led by Dr. King and Malcolm X kept women in subservient roles that they resisted. The theme of colorism is also front and center as Ailey’s family is a mashup of its forbears, deep midnight black, chocolate, and white enough to pass.

But I think it’s the love of the land, the way Jeffers creates a sense of the earth as a place of blessing and peace, that most moved me. Though so many Black Americans moved north during the great migration seeking opportunity, the pull of the south represents a direct connection to the first peoples. Perhaps this is why Jeffers refers to herself during interviews as Afro-Indigenous.

This National Book Award nominee is truly a masterwork that’s difficult to adequately describe. You simply must just dive in and savor the language, the story, and the history of our nation in all its shame and glory.