“As brilliant as it is necessary, as intimate as it is expansive.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Just finished The Love Songs of W.E.B.DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Audio version.
This brilliant epic story of a black family all the way from its roots in early Georgia up to the present time, centers on Ailey Pearl Garfield, from her life as a young lady to her early thirties. She has mastered in History in college and is becoming an historian, researching her families roots in a small town called Chicasetta. It is her research in the second half of the book that leads to the in depth knowledge of her family beginning with blacks and native Americans working together and in some cases marrying, and then the brutal slave trade where the owners can take the black women if it pleases them, causing many interracial children. Ailey had all that in her family.
Aileys family is very prevalent in this story. Her two older sisters, her father who is a doctor, and other family members who are teachers, are all well educated and successful and Ailey may be the brightest of them all.
She is brilliant, sarcastic, nasty, independent and everything else she needs to get to what she is looking for. Her story, and that of her sisters show the black experience in modern day Georgia, and the stories of her descendants give a big picture of what it was like for these families to survive.
The book is long but is so interesting that the length of the book is not a concern. The writing is brilliant, the characters so real and engaging, and the love in this family so strong and fulfilling that it is a joy to read, even though there are parts in the book that show the terrible realities of life even in good families.
Highly recommended.
Reviewed by:
Richard Franco
Added 30th November 2021
