Acclaimed poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ soaring 800-page debut (!) novel (Kirkus prize for fiction finalist) The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois can also be read as a history of the United States in Georgia. Over the span of 200 years, she unearths the history of a fictional family beginning with the native American tribe originally living in Chicasetta (The Place-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Tall-Trees at the time). From there we see the intersections, overlaps and violent collisions with the Europeans–later Americans–all bringing with them African slaves who lived in a constant state of tension, terror, and longing.The people who lived in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees knew much about the Seminoles, because the Seminoles had once been a part of the Creek people before they had broken off to form their own nation. And the Seminoles gave sanctuary to Negroes, taking them into their villages. They mated with Negroes, too.
It's to Jeffers’ credit that she peels back the layers of this family’s history to its origins in both Africa and to the indigenous people living in North America. She lays bare the roots of America’s founding:
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.
In graphic, painful detail the reader sees the “sowing” of successive generations in Chicasetta. The culture of rape, assault, and abuse turns one stomach–I had to put down the book many times in disgust and horror. While this is fiction, it’s clear that Jeffers is drawing on the 15 years she spent researching original source archival documents for her 2020 Age of Phillis (longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry). Using the modern day descendent of these collisions in the person of Ailey Garfield, the author records her life from birth through her pursuit of a doctorate in history. In the Age of Phillis, Jeffers examined and corrected the record of the life of Phillis Wheatley–an 18th century poet–the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. Previous to Jeffers’ book, all that was known of Wheatley’s life came from what a white woman (purported to be a relative of the woman who owned Wheatley) wrote 50 years after her death.
Much as Jeffers labored in researching Phillis Wheatley’s life, so Ailey labors in uncovering her own family’s history. Along the way, addiction, sexual abuse, and racism threaten to unmoor her but it is her parents and family that keep her tethered as she holds on to sacrament that is family. The novel’s strengths rests in the masterful way that Jeffers tells a story not just about one family but also about a piece of land, and also about Africa, and also about America, and also about the African American struggle for freedom, and also about the civil rights movement, and also about what it means to be a black woman in America.
Ever since 1868 when novelist John William DeForest coined the term the “Great American Novel”--there has been much debate over which novel should bear the moniker. Critics and scholars argue about esteemed titles from To Kill a Mockingbird to American Psycho to The Great Gatsby to Moby Dick to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Invisible Man to Blood Meridian. There will always be debate about this because even the term “The Great American Novel” is impossible to define because it must not only capture the scope of America on the micro and macro level, it must also be personal but also removed, it must encompass both the greatest things about this country but also its cancers. One would be hard pressed to deny that The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois does all of these things–it is a novel of but also’s–it refuses to tell only one story–it strives instead to tell every story. And who better to have written the “The Great American Novel” than a poet?***
Because what is America but poetry?
Something sometimes metered
in perfect rhyming syllables,
leaping
other times and
Frac
TURED
In tortured mispalld guttural gasps
But always sharp as a steeled knife
As able to slip into our ribs
Sink into our hearts
As it is to shave aways the callouses of
Of our differences.
Jeffer’s Ailey endures. She persists–full of self doubt and accumulated blows–imperfect but buoyant–she strives to triumph.
Ailey rises on the backs
No–the wings of her ancestors who fought
across gritted striped generations
The matriarch arriving in chains from Africa for whom Jeffers writes:
She was owned, but her memories were not.
***I wrote this last paragraph on Love Songs as The Great American Novel BEFORE reading the Kirkus review on it
Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!
Related Reading:
My review of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
My review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
My review of The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.
My review of Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
My review of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Ahktar
My review of Seasons of the Shadow by Leonara Miano. This novel explores slavery’s collision with a village in Cameroon.
My Kindle Highlights for Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
“Violence and the Social Compact” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Atlantic article)
The Lynching of Claude Neal. PBS article is here.
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to Present
Key quotes:
Location: 150
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.
Location: 172
The people who lived in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees knew much about the Seminoles, because the Seminoles had once been a part of the Creek people before they had broken off to form their own nation. And the Seminoles gave sanctuary to Negroes, taking them into their villages. They mated with Negroes, too.
Location: 383
And then the treaties, the agreements between these intruders and the people, all of which would be broken, and the land that would be taken—and taken again. There was the Treaty of Savannah in 1733. The Treaty of Coweta in 1739. The Treaty of Augusta in 1763. Ten years later, a second treaty in that same place. The Treaty of New York in 1790, and the realization that our land would
Location: 396
The Treaty of Washington in 1805, and our land was no longer what the people called it. Now the white men called us “Georgia.”
Location: 987
Yet battle was different when it occurred on paper and in assaults on the mind. The white men—the Americans—wanted everything and did not respect the ways of the people.
Location: 1,987
The light-skinned woman was a signare, a woman of English and African blood who’d been given by her family as a wife to an Englishman for as long as he stayed in Africa. In this small district, this woman was the only one of her kind, but closer to the coast, there was an entire community of signares and their families. In-between women who were neither true wives nor concubines. They spoke two languages, Wolof and English, or sometimes, Mandinka and English, but were infidels who had left aside Allah and clung to the skinny Jesus that hung on a cross. Like their white fathers and husbands, the signares traded in slaves.
Location: 2,136
She was owned, but her memories were not.
Location: 3,523
To paraphrase the great poet Sterling A. Brown: ‘More Negroes have been ruined by Harvard than by bad gin.’ Only he didn’t say ‘Negroes,’ if you catch my drift.”
Location: 4,255
Before he allowed Geoff to take his great-niece on their northbound journey, Uncle Root gave him a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book, so they could find diners, hotels, and boardinghouses that would serve them, once they traveled out of family territory.
Location: 4,577
Born in the City, her husband wasn’t familiar with the taste of healthy, green food you had picked only hours before. The sight of earth not taken over by concrete. That in darkness, if there was no trouble, the only sounds came from small beings. He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.
Location: 4,699
“Are the folks down home calling themselves something besides Negro?” “Like what, baby?” “Like, Black?” “Why they want to do something like that? That ain’t a nice thing to call nobody.”
Location: 7,336
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.
Location: 8,737
Then there came warriors, such as Tecumseh of the Shawnee, a tribe in the north of the continent. And there were prophets, such as Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa. Together these men were the Shooting Star and the Open Door, and they rode down to our land to unite our people of the south with our people of the north. Tecumseh held a weapon and Tenskwatawa held a dream, and the dreaming brother’s sights led him to tell the Creek, unite against the white man.
And our people kept fighting each other, and an American murderer was able to win the Red Stick War. His name was Andrew Jackson and he and his soldiers murdered many hundreds of Creeks, so that his name would become a curse among our people. Indian Killer, he would be called, but somehow he would become a hero among white men. In a new century, statues of him would be built, and his face would be printed upon money.
Location: 8,751
And in time, Andrew Jackson the Indian Killer became the president of his white man’s nation. And in 1830, this murderer signed the Indian Removal Act, after which the Creek people’s hope turned to the mud after a heavy rain, for this law decreed that all Creek people were ordered to leave their homes permanently.
Location: 11,631 On post-reconstruction reality for “freed” slaves
They were frightened of being lynched, now that Black bodies no longer were worth valuable currency on the slave market.
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