Reckoning with History and Memory

In the ambit of contemporary American literature, poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a titan. American literature has had a long tradition of producing topnotch poets such as T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and the recently departed Nobel Laureate in Literature Louise Glück. Born in 1967 and raised in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, Jeffers made her breakthrough with her first book The Gospel of Barbecue which was published in 2000. It was an immediate literary sensation, earning Jeffers the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. She backed up her initial success by publishing four more poetry collections. Her latest collection, The Age of Phillis (2020), was also longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.

Jeffers has, over the years, created a literary resume that is the envy of many. For her works, she received several accolades and recognitions. However, Jeffers’ oeuvre is not limited to poetry. She is an essayist and has also written prose, with her fiction appearing in publications such as Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Story Quarterly. Writing a work of full-length prose, however, was not something she fancied until 2016 when she submitted the manuscript of what would be her debut novel after receiving encouragement from her literary agent, Sarah Burnes. Five years later, in 2021, her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published.

Spanning two centuries, Jeffers’ debut novel followed two major storylines: one was set in the past and the other is set in modern times. The story opens in the past, in a Native American settlement called Creek in modern-day Georgia. It was at the settlement that Micco Cornell was born to a Scottish man and a tribeswoman who also has African ancestry. It was the 18th century and Micco, still a young boy, found himself in a quandary. To save his Creek uncle – the twin brother of his mother – Micco was forced to kill his father. While his father was an abusive husband, Micco yearned for his father’s affection. The story then followed him into adulthood. He married Mahala, a Native woman who wanted to live a “white” lifestyle.

“The archives had fascinated me. Made me happy for the first time in my socially awkward life. But there was a catch when you did research on slavery: you couldn’t only focus on the parts you wanted. You had to wade through everything, in order to get to the documents you needed. You had to look at the slave auctions and whippings. The casual cruelty that indicated the white men who’d owned Black folks didn’t consider them human beings.”

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

Micco and Mahala then separated from their tribe and ran their own farm which became successful. Then entered another white man, Samuel Pinchard. Samuel worked on the farm and lived with Micco. Samuel managed to convince Micco to transfer his farm’s deed to him. This is to ensure that Micco will not be stripped of the land’s title because he is not white. Micco, however, has no voice in the operations of his farm. As part of the arrangement, Samuel also married Micco and Mahala’s daughter, Lady. Samuel took over the farm which he named Wood Place. Samuel, however, was not the friendly white man that he originally presented to Micco. He was abusive as he was cunning and manipulative.

As the story moved forward, the plantation grew, and so did the population of slaves; the perspectives of these slaves were woven into the novel’s lush tapestry. The dive into history captured how the lives of the Creek Native Americans intersected with the lives of enslaved Africans. Both had the misfortune of being brutalized and exploited by European traders and colonizers. Throughout history, the Native American village started losing its historical identity as it slowly transformed into a plantation overrun with enslaved Africans. In time, the plantation grew and eventually became Chicasetta, a fictitious rural town in Georgia that plays a seminal role in the modern-day setting of the story.

In the contemporary, the novel charted the fortunes of Ailey Pearl Garfield; she was the heart of the novel’s second major storyline. By extension, Ailey was the backbone of the entire novel. the youngest of three daughters of Mrs. Maybelle Lee Garfield and Dr. Geoffrey Louis Garfield; the eldest was Lydia while Carol Rose or Coco was the middle child. The family is currently residing in an urban area simply referred to as “the City.” However, Ailey’s earliest memories included annual trips to Chicasetta. Mrs. Garfield was born and raised in Chicasetta where most of her family still resides, among them Ailey’s Uncle Root and maternal grandmother, Miss Rose. The opening sequences of the novel laid out the landscape of Ailey’s childhood.

The story toggles between the past and the present. In the present, the book follows Ailey as she navigates a complicated world. She entered Braithwaite High School, a predominately white, upper-class school. Ailey experiences the typical teenager experience: falling in love, infatuation, and even sex. She would also brush up on drug addiction. But she was also plagued by memories of her childhood, of certain events that seemed unusual; she pushed these memories at the back of her mind but they occasionally manifest at the most inopportune of times. We also read about Ailey’s struggles for acceptance and her devotion to her sister Lydia whom she looked up to.

“For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.”

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

As the two major storylines slowly converge, what manifests is a multilayered novel. On the surface, it is a historical novel that vividly captures the Black African slavery experience and how it intersected with the Native American colonial experience. Both were exploited by colonizers who masqueraded as their liberators and friends. This is a dark section of American history and its heritage reverberates in the contemporary. As the storyline set in the past chronicles the plight of African Americans, it also captures their long and arduous journey toward liberty and desegregation. The subject of race and colorism, among the novel’s main drivers, was prevalent. The present-day storyline mirrors how African Americans, past the era of slavery, remain an anomaly in contemporary American society.

Despite the changing cultural landscape, African Americans still have to endure blatant and subtle forms of racism and discrimination. Internalized racism is also prevalent as those with lighter shades of black look down on those with darker shades. The Garfields are light-skinned but they have also been subjected to discrimination. Still, there were African Americans who refused to be dragged by these atrocities. Take the case of Uncle Root, one of the novel’s outstanding characters. When he was young, he experienced several instances of discrimination which eventually led to a lifetime of defiance against all of its forms. For one, he was a pioneering schoolteacher. He also moved to the segregated “silk stocking district” where he lived among white families. His presence was visibly unwelcome but he was nonplussed.

Some of the characters experienced sexual abuse as children; rape was prevalent in the story. Worse, the adults who were supposed to look after the children’s welfare turned a blind eye. This creates trauma that has different impacts on the lives of the characters; the story of the characters is brimming with different forms of trauma they must learn to overcome. One character, for instance, grew up to be abusive, routinely raping young enslaved girls. He even purchased enslaved girls for this sole purpose. Another character grew up waylaid as a result of the abuse. She grew addicted to drugs and married a man selling cocaine. This has dire consequences. Some characters, unfortunately, were not able to come to terms with their trauma: “She didn’t remember when it started, only that when she emerged into memory, the hurting already was a fact of her life.”

There was also a campus novel dimension to the story. Jeffers provided vivid details of African Americans’ college and university experiences. We read about initiation to fraternities and sororities which entailed hazing and pledging. The campus is also a place where racism is blatant, as was the experience of  Ailey’s mother Maybelle at Routledge College, a fictional Black university not far from Chicasetta, in the 1960s. There existed a stigma around darker-shaded skin. It was also at the college that Belle met Geoff. The early years of their marriage involved a growing interest in activism. The intellectual pursuits of the story were, in a way, a homage to WEB Du Bois, a prominent socialist, historian, and civil rights activist. But there is also another dimension to the story that makes it very compelling. Philosophies that shaped the Civil Rights movement were subtly and astutely woven into the novel’s lush tapestry.

“How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn’t even southern? That a Black child didn’t have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they’d never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.”

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

Feminism, particularly Black feminism, was a leitmotif. Gender expectations at Routledge College were restrictive for women, as Ailey would realize. It would be one of the many obstacles that she would have to overcome for beyond its historical context, the novel was also Ailey’s coming-of-age story. It charted her growth and captured how she navigated the labyrinth of adolescence, before working her way to be a historian. The path was rarely straightforward as she had to contend with self-doubt and the hypocrisy of White people who purport to be experts on the African American experience. Loss, suffering, failures, and growth pains shaped her in varying lengths but Ailey’s determination to stand up for herself was unchanged. She was passionate in her convictions and refused to submit to rude, racist, or misogynistic individuals. These are qualities she inherited from her ancestor Aggie, one of Samuel’s slaves.

Ailey is flanked by an eclectic cast of characters, some of which are seminal in shaping her character and attitudes toward timely subjects. Jeffers provided each character’s backstory. This facet of the story provides glimpses into the interiors of the characters and what propels them. They had their own struggles which made them relatable characters; they were very human. Many of them are drawn to mistakes. They, including the novel’s heroine, continually mess things up and make terrible choices even though they want to do something good. All of the novel’s wonderful elements were woven together into a lush tapestry by Jeffers’ writing. Her extensive background in poetry is shown in the quality of her prose. The novel was lyrical, resulting in a beautifully written story even though at times it can be brutal.

Without a doubt, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is an ambitious literary masterpiece. It has a lush ecosystem where the past continuously collides with the present. In looking back to the past and capturing the interior lives of African Americans, Jeffers was able to vividly capture their resilience in light of the changing cultural landscape and historical moments. It is, first and foremost, a novel about the Black African experience but it also captures the intersection of the indigenous American and African American lives and the thorny legacy of colonialism and slavery. While it is steeped in history, it was also an evocative coming-of-age story that tackled trauma, abuse, racism, discrimination, and academia. Beyond its historical and bildungsroman overtones, the novel is a vivid portrait of modern America. It is a story about love, healing, activism, and inconvenient truths buried by history and memory. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is as ambitious as it is grand, a triumph of literature from a gifted writer.

“I listen to the children’s response, their cries of appreciation. To the rise and fall of the man’s voice, the music dippinginto sage chords. I know the story will be over soon. That I will wake up with a question. And then another, but the question is what I have wanted. The question is the point. The question is my breath.”

~ Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Book Specs

Author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 797
Genre: Literary, Historical

Synopsis

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 to survive.

Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s world 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 Africans and tenant farmers – Ailey carries Du Bois’s problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the North but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has fought a battle for belonging that is made even more difficult by a hovering trauma and the whispers of women – her mother, Belle; her sister, Lydia; and a maternal line reaching back two centuries – who 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. Along the way, 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.

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 in Kokomo, Indiana but grew up in Catholic in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Talladega College in 1996 and received her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Alabama.

Jeffers published her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue, a collection of poems, in 2000. It was a critical success and was selected by Lucille Clifton for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2001 Paterson Poetry Prize. Building on her early success, she published four more collections of poetry: Outlandish Blues (2003), Red Clay Suite (2007), The Glory Gets (2015), and The Age of Phillis (2020). The Age of Phillis was a runaway sensation that earned Jeffers the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Poetry. It was also long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Jeffers’s works were also anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002).

In 2021, Jeffers published her first novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her debut novel won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in fiction. Jeffers’ fiction also appeared in publications such as the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Story Quarterly. In 2011, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, she won the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year. She was also the recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women. She was also a 2021 USA Mellon Fellow. In 2020, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. In 2023, she received the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature.

Jeffers is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.