The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“The intruders on the land weren’t Englishmen or Scotsmen anymore, because a revolution had been fought. Now they were ‘Americans,’ ‘white’ men […] And now the Coromantee or Igbo or Wolof or Fula were ‘Negroes’ or ‘slaves.’ And now the Creek were ‘Indians.’ And there was the Treaty of Colerain in 1796. The Treaty of Fort Wilkinson in 1802. The Treaty of Washington in 1805, and our land was no longer what the people called it. Now the white men called us ‘Georgia.’”

The American Revolution created a sense of national unity for European-descended Americans, leading them to trade in their former national identifications for the label “American.” This transition is generally considered a positive period in American history. However, in this passage Jeffers highlights that this collapsing of identities was only advantageous for some. While white people got to trade in their disparate nationalities for the labels “American” and “white,” which signified power, Indigenous Americans and enslaved people saw their identifiers erased through carelessness and malice. They lost pieces of their identity for labels that only served to point out their subordination in the nation’s hierarchy.

“I go because there are Negroes like me there, people with whom I feel comfortable. We are accomplished, we are quiet, and we never make trouble. If you adhere to those rules, you will have peace with others.”

Nana Claire’s explanation of the Black people she chooses to associate with echoes the sentiment that Uncle Root later describes as Booker T. Washington’s position: Black people and white people can coexist peacefully when Black people are constantly on their best behavior and constantly working to prove themselves worthy. Uncle Root cites his scholarly hero, W.E.B. Du Bois, as a counterpoint to this ideology, pointing out that Black people should not have to constantly demonstrate humility and gratitude as if they have no reason to complain or fight for justice. Given that Du Bois’s writings serve as interludes between each of the novel’s 11 parts, the reader can assume the novel aligns with his side in this argument.

“These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.”

Ailey’s entire career as a historian consists of holding pieces up to the light to try to supplement the incongruities of memory. Much of the history that the reader sees in the “Song” sections will never be accessible to her, as her enslaved ancestors could not record their thoughts. The entire book is an exercise in creating full, rich lives for people who could not preserve their lives for posterity. Even families in which many written records exist still do not have complete access to their ancestors’ lives; the distant past retains a degree of inscrutability no matter how many records exist about it.

“In time, Beauty’s new name was shortened to ‘Aggie,’ and she decided that she would answer to this, to keep pure the name her parents had given her. For she had been made by two people who had loved each other, and each night under the tattered quilt that she had been given she would take out her memories and wrap herself tightly in them. She was owned, but her memories were not.”

Aggie feels that answering to the name “Aggie” in her new enslaved life is a way to keep her birth name, Beauty, her own; if she does not have to hear it come out of the master’s and overseer’s mouths, then she can still feel that it belongs to her. This attitude is characteristic of Aggie. She expertly figures out ways to retain her personhood in dehumanizing circumstances, and the reader can see traces of this indomitable strength in her descendants, including Belle and Ailey. The passage also highlights the relationship between history (or “memory”) and community. Although Aggie’s family is no longer physically with her, her memories of them are almost physical themselves—something she can “wrap herself” within.

“I had trusted the adults around me: my parents, the elders down in Chicasetta, Nana, even Gandee. Because I was a child, I’d believed what they told me, no matter how kind or cruelly they behaved. I lived surrounded by a fence made up of trust, one I’d assumed couldn’t be knocked down. But the day I heard Lydia yelling in my grandmother’s foyer, I walked up to that fence. The barest of touches and it fell so easily. This was the barrier separating my childhood from some other place. I wasn’t yet an adult, but my childhood was gone forever.”

An essential piece of any coming-of-age story is the realization that adults are not a special class of people who always have answers and always offer protection. Children who suffer abuse, like Ailey and her sisters, learn this lesson more cruelly and shatteringly than other children. One of the things that strikes Ailey about Lydia’s confrontation with Nana Claire is Lydia’s insistence that Nana Claire should have protected her. Ailey has often felt she should have spoken up about her abuse, but this moment allows her to see that the adults in her life should have protected her from being in such a position in the first place.

“I thought of what Mama liked to say: to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country.”

Throughout the novel, Jeffers portrays Chicasetta as a place of unique beauty. Ailey’s family feels connected to the land. They know it intimately, having lived on it and worked it for generations. Their relationship to it is not uncomplicated, as it was also the place of their ancestors’ enslavement, but ultimately it is the only home they have ever known. While Black people who chose to stay in the rural South after the Civil War often endured violence and poverty, they also created communities full of joyous traditions, from farming expertise to culinary specialties to religious ceremonies.

“‘Tell me the truth, and whatever you say, your granny won’t be mad.’ Miss Rose looked at me, her eyes moving back and forth. ‘Are you still a good girl?’ ‘Do you mean am I a virgin?’ ‘Ailey Pearl, don’t you play with me.’ ‘Yes, ma’am. I am still a good girl.’ I hoped I was telling the truth.”

Ailey may be questioning the wisdom of her voluntary sexual activity in this passage, but she is also unsure of how to answer Miss Rose’s question because of her history of abuse. Even if she knows intellectually that the abuse was not her fault, she still feels fundamentally unclean. Both she and Lydia have immense difficulty establishing healthy sexual and romantic lives as a result of Gandee’s abuse.

“That short note was enough to keep Uncle Root in Georgia. Whenever he needed encouragement, whenever he required a reminder of why he worked for very little pay and even less appreciation at this small college out in the Georgia countryside, he would return to the archives to examine that brief collection of sentences.”

In the middle of a tumultuous period in Uncle Root’s professorial life, he comes across a note written by Du Bois in Routledge’s archives. Because the note praises Mrs. Routledge’s work in founding the school, Uncle Root puts his ego to the side to dedicate his life to the place Du Bois has sanctioned and blessed. This note is instrumental in turning Uncle Root into the model of unselfishness he later is for Ailey.

“I want every one of you to meditate on the importance of the Negro woman. Without her struggles, who would our people be? We’d be heathens, that’s what we would be! We’d be stumbling around in the dark! The Negro woman is the best our race has to offer. My children, we must always cherish and love this woman. We must never leave her behind.”

Though he maintains that he does not consider himself a feminist, Uncle Root spends much of his time acting and talking like one. His exaltation of Black women in this passage is a good distillation of the book’s own position; its female characters have their faults but show enormous strength, intelligence, and sacrificial love. Though Uncle Root is over 100 years old by the novel’s end, he shows a much more progressive, modern attitude about women’s place in the world than many of the male students Ailey attends college with in the 1990s.

“Belle […] considered that Diane was a white woman who could walk through the world and stay blessedly unaware of the color line.”

Belle’s sister-in-law Diane tries to be a good friend and ally to her Black relatives, and in general she seems to succeed. However, at times her attitude veers into “color blindness”—the idea that simply ignoring race will secure racial harmony and equality. Belle knows, however, that this attitude is impossible for people of color to practice. When she goes to the grocery store and a white woman mistakes her for her lighter-skinned children’s nanny, Belle is forced into awareness of “the color line.” Diane rarely, if ever, has comparable experiences.

“Until her husband died, Jolene would remain with her husband, whether or not J.W. decided to stop cheating on her. That’s what Negro women did; they remained.”

The inclusion of an anecdote about a local Chicasetta woman who stays with her husband despite his infidelity seems unrelated to Ailey’s family until Belle finds herself in a similar predicament. While many in the town might think Jolene a fool or a pushover, Belle realizes when Geoff cheats on her that a married woman with children has many factors to consider when her husband wrongs her. Ultimately, her choices cannot merely reflect her own feelings, but must take into account her financial security and her children’s well-being. Belle and Geoff love each other, but their relationship often involves passionless practicality more than starry-eyed romance. However, where the above passage implies that Jolene’s decision is a capitulation, Belle ultimately stays on her own terms, refusing to look the other way as her husband cheats.

“Samuel had taken a Negress and he was a white man. He was the surveyor of a kingdom that God had given him, and he was a white man. In fact, Samuel had honored the little girl with his seed: he was a white man. And Samuel was certain that the little girl felt honored—after all, he was a white man.”

By including Samuel’s self-justifications for his dozens of sexual assaults, Jeffers shows that he thinks of enslaved people just like the average white Westerner at the time thought of animals: part of the natural world that God gave white men dominion over. The refrain, “[H]e was a white man” reveals that his thinking is no more complicated or interesting than that. Jeffers makes Samuel a man rather plain in his monstrosity—a man who subscribes to the same philosophies that dominated his era and therefore is a natural product of his era.

“And while Mama loved all her daughters dearly—God knows she did—she wished […] that when the women in her family had talked about the evils of men, they hadn’t been so specific, naming this man or that man. Pointing at random, troublemaking men in the community as exceptions and not the rule. They should have told her every man has got some serious faults.”

Belle’s condemnation of men as universally possessing “some serious faults” does not indicate that women are inherently better than men. Rather, it expresses the idea that men’s socialization includes many implicit and explicit lessons that influence their treatment of women in harmful ways. For instance, Belle, Lydia, and Ailey all encounter men who were raised to believe that their sex drive is uncontrollable and that forcing sex on a woman is not really assault if the woman agreed to go on a date. These women must learn heightened awareness in order to deal with the constant threat of male violence.

“They [Belle and Diane] were each other’s true life mates, not like the husbands to whom they’d once pledged themselves, one dead and the other exiled.”

While Belle initially distrusts Diane’s eagerness to jump into the Black community, Diane eventually earns her trust and the two develop as close a bond as any in the novel. Though there are several examples of deep male-female relationships throughout the book, many of the longest-lasting, most selfless bonds form between women. Belle and Diane; Rabbit, Leena, and Eliza Two; Ailey and Lydia; Ailey and Dr. Oludara—all of these pairings or groups involve female bonds of love and protection. Even though Belle realizes there are many things about her life that Diane, as a white woman, will never understand, she also realizes there are many things about her life that Diane will intimately understand while her husband will not.

“They [white men] came with the rights they had given themselves and the rights they had taken away from others. They sent word from mouth to mouth that our earth was free. Come and split down the pine, the cedar, the pecan. Come and shoot the deer. Come and bring your pigs and cattle that trample the earth. Here is a place where a white man can make himself a king.”

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is preoccupied with the power of declarations. In this passage, the narrator of the “Song” sections describes the way that European settlers declared the land free and available despite the fact that people already lived there. Elsewhere, the novel describes the way that declarations about various people’s racial categories carry weight in the absence of any reasonable biological basis.

“Samuel only loved Nick. He only craved his return of affection. He did not know why, but it was so. And since he made his own rules and own shining moral circle to shield himself, he decided that Eliza Two was a random negro child.”

Aggie thinks that Samuel will surely not attempt to rape Eliza Two: She is not only his granddaughter, but the girl born to the only person in the world that he loves. However, Samuel is so accustomed to designing his own rules that he hardly struggles to rationalize the decision to prey upon Eliza Two. Though he constantly absolves himself of wrongdoing by ascribing enslaved people a subhuman quality, his actions prove that it is he himself who lacks humanity.

“And the Word was changed. And the Word was knowledge. And the knowledge was a sound within the flesh, which may have been the Good Lord, or may have been dead ones in Africa talking across an ocean, or our people here on this side. Yet we know that in one of those tales, a man did rise tall in the field. And that man was renamed Mr. Frederick Douglass.”

In this passage, Jeffers uses biblical language to elevate the importance of her topic. Describing Nick’s escape from Wood Place, she evokes the biblical Gospel of John, which begins with a mystical description of “the Word.” By establishing this link, Jeffers implies that Black figures who have fought for justice and freedom are akin to the grandest of mythical heroes—perhaps even divinities—and possess a spiritual significance that transcends time and place.

“Scooter placed his hand on the edge of the car door. He told me he was sorry about my father. His face was open, so full of emotion, like Denzel Washington’s in the whipping scene in Glory, when that single tear had traveled down his cheek.”

Here, Jeffers uses humor to poke fun at common media representations of Black American life. The man Ailey is attracted to reminds her of Denzel Washington during a scene in which his character is being whipped. While the scene is a grimly serious one, Ailey does not feel the need to treat it as sacred; as a descendant of enslaved people, she has spent ample time reflecting on the effects of slavery and does not need every film about it to be a reverent experience. She feels no compunction about using one such film to ogle a handsome actor. The moment also highlights the novel’s feminist sensibility, reversing the “male gaze” of most media with a moment of female desire.

“This was what I’d taken for granted in Chicasetta and at Routledge: other Black people. Their warmth, the greetings they gave each other, peacocking their bonds. Even as awkward as I was, I’d been so comfortable with my natural self. I hadn’t realized how lucky I’d been, not having to look over my shoulder for white approval.”

Ailey’s feeling of “having to look over my shoulder for white approval” is an apt description of Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” As Du Bois explains, Black people in the US must constantly grapple with the sense that their actions are being observed by white onlookers, many of whom will use those observations to make judgments about all Black people. This feeling makes Ailey’s time in a predominantly white university an anxious one.

“And this superiority would combine with the hopelessness of poverty to breed a distinct ruthlessness.”

The Franklins, the white family that this passage describes, serve as emblems of embittered white poverty. Because many European-descended families were able to thrive and build wealth in the US, many who were not able to do so felt that they were cheated of something. They became entrenched in profound racist hate because clinging to their whiteness provided a form of superiority that their economic status did not.

“This is the tragedy of slavery. These are the grains of power. There isn’t a true innocence for children whose parents are shackled.”

As the novel shows, the constant threat of dissolution hung over enslaved families heads at all times; even generally mild-mannered slave owners split up families if they found themselves in financial trouble. Moreover, exposure to violence, sexual assault, and poor living conditions eroded the experience of childhood even for those allowed to stay with their families. Aggie thinks Eliza Two and Rabbit might escape the worst of these degradations by virtue of being Nick’s daughters, but Samuel manages to prove her wrong by choosing to ignore the girls’ relationship to his beloved son.

“In North Carolina, a territory far from our land, there lived a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She was the daughter of two mulattoes whose parents had been mulattoes in turn. Such proximity to the blood of her masters had been considered a gift and would be touted as such in the next century, by male thinkers and writers who did not understand the plight of women. Who considered themselves experts on the rivalry between ‘the house’ and ‘the field.’ The ability to place brown paper next to a hand or face and remark on the skin’s light victory. The pulling of a fine-tooth comb through hair with ease, instead of an encountering of resistance.”

In this passage, Jeffers refers to the historical writings of white men who declared that enslaved people, especially women, who worked the fields of a plantation were uniformly envious of their peers who did the physically easier labor inside the house. However, Jeffers indicates that such declarations are ridiculous given that many enslaved women who worked in their owner’s house endured regular sexual assault. Moreover, enslaved women with lighter complexions due to multiracial ancestry were not automatically happier or prouder of their appearance; again, many did not enjoy their appearance as it invited an increased risk of sexual assault or reminded them of the assault their ancestors had endured.

“And I pass my torch as the tender of the history of this college to my niece who stands beside me on this stage, Ailey Pearl Garfield, Routledge College, class of 1995.”

Ailey’s parents encourage her to become a doctor, but she ultimately discovers an insatiable love of history. Although Uncle Root never pressures her into his profession, he takes great pride in her decision. She did not always appreciate the power of history during her teenage years, but his patient and diligent demonstration of its importance eventually bears fruit as Ailey continues in his footsteps.