![]() At the opening, set deep in the mists of history, we’re met with. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. ![]() Sweeping back and forth across the years, her narration shifts nimbly to reflect the tenor of the times - from the shared legends of tribal people to the candid realism of the modern era. 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. Du Bois” is the protean quality of Jeffers’s voice. One of the many marvels of “The Love Songs of W.E.B. As any honest record of several centuries must, Jeffers’s story traverses a geography of unspeakable horror, but it eventually arrives at a place of hard-won peace. In 2018, Jeffers received the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction. Du Bois, an epic novel that focuses on protagonist Ailey Pearl Garfield’s coming of age while also narrating the story of her African, European, and Creek ancestors. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America.Ī poet whose most recent collection, “The Age of Phillis,” was longlisted for a National Book Award, Jeffers has poured a lifetime of experience and research into this epic about the travails of a Black family. This is especially true in The Love Songs of W.E.B. ![]() Du Bois” is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I’ll say, because “The Love Songs of W.E.B. ![]()
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