“When the phone rang and said, ‘No caller ID,’ I just ignored it,” says Jeffers. Barack Obama included it in his best books of 2021 and Oprah Winfrey selected it for her eponymous book club, but when the media mogul tried to call Jeffers with the good news, the OU professor was having none of it. The novel has earned spots on the Top 10 lists of The New York Times and The Washington Post and was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award. In March, “Love Songs” received the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
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.“The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois” represents years of archival research and comes in at a whopping 800 pages. 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. 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. 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.Īiley 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.
Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. 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. The 2020 National Book Award–nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic-an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Water Dancer-that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.
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