66 pages • 2 hours read
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
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BetaSong 3 and Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Song 3 Summary
Part 3’s preceding “Song” section begins in an unidentified African land. Mother-daughter pair Assatou and Kiné live with Kiné’s father’s other wives and children. One day, a group of men kidnaps them; an enemy has accused Kiné’s father of violating Islamic law. Therefore, Assatou and Kiné are being sold into slavery. The men drag Kiné away, while Assatou becomes an enslaved woman in her homeland.
Kiné endures a harrowing 10 days trapped in a dark, crowded room with other enslaved women, only to then endure the torturous Middle Passage before finally arriving in Savannah, Georgia. A man named Baron McCain, who has both European and Indigenous American blood, buys her. At his household, Kiné grows up with the McCain son, Paul, and when the two are grown they fall in love. The McCains allow the union; Kiné and Paul marry and have a daughter, Beauty, whom Kiné constantly regales with memories of Africa.
When Kiné dies, Paul remarries but dies himself shortly afterward. Beauty’s white stepmother sells her to a trader, who forces her on a long march with other enslaved people. When Beauty loses consciousness, a little man named Joe appears to her, showing her a cotton field and telling her that her name will change. Shortly thereafter, she is sold to Samuel Pinchard and renamed Ahgayuh, or Aggie to her fellow enslaved people on Samuel’s growing cotton plantation, Wood Place. Aggie immediately befriends Pop George, but she resents that Lady, who has African blood in her lineage, gets to live on the property as a white woman because of her marriage to Samuel.
Part 3, Sections 1-5 Summary
This summary covers “Deep Country,” “Creatures in the Garden,” “Happy Birthday,” “Pecan Trees and Various Miscellanea,” and “An Altered Story.”
Ailey’s father has a heart attack the night before she and her mother are supposed to leave for Chicasetta, so Ailey travels there by herself while Belle stays with Geoff. When Uncle Root picks her up, he tells her the story of the time he met “the great scholar” W.E.B. Du Bois (151)—a tale he repeats often. As a young college man, he journeyed to Du Bois’s lodgings just to introduce himself, only for Du Bois to dismiss him with a sentence and shut the door in his face. This did not sour Uncle Root on Du Bois, though; the great scholar remains his foremost intellectual model and hero.
The summer passes slowly in Chicasetta until Ailey reunites with her two childhood friends, Boukie and David. On her 16th birthday, Boukie takes her to the mall and tries to initiate something sexual with her afterward, but she turns him down; days later, however, she agrees to be David’s girlfriend. During one outing, Boukie, David, and Ailey illegally obtain a bottle of wine; when Ailey is drunk in the backseat of the car, Boukie tries to convince David to let him have sex with her, saying, “You want to go first? That’s cool. Save some for me, though” (181). The boys argue and Boukie leaves.
One day Uncle Root takes Ailey to visit his niece, Cordelia, and Ailey is surprised to find she is a white woman. Uncle Root’s father, a white man named Big Thom and the owner of Wood Place, once had a white wife, but she died. He subsequently started a relationship with Uncle Root’s mother but could not legally marry her. Therefore, he set her up in a comfortable house and supported her and their children financially so they did not have to endure the same hard life of sharecropping that their neighbors did. Because of this, their neighbors resented and ostracized them.
Soon after the visit to Cordelia, Uncle Root takes Ailey and David to a field with an old pecan tree and tells them the story behind its significance. When Uncle Root’s wife, Olivia, was still alive, the two drove to Uncle Root’s white half-brother’s general store, where there were two segregated lines for customers. Uncle Root’s light complexion allowed him to pass in the white line, and Tommy, his half-brother, habitually let him do so. While walking back to his car, however, men from the local Franklin family who knew Uncle Root’s race came outside and began to harass him. They outnumbered and overpowered him before beginning to string him up to the nearby pecan tree. Tommy emerged from the store and told them that if they proceeded, he would no longer rent them land to farm. They left but held a grudge. A Franklin man is currently Chicasetta sheriff, Uncle Root warns David and Ailey, and therefore they must avoid trouble.
One night, David and Ailey argue, and Ailey breaks up with him. When Uncle Root intercedes on David’s behalf, she begrudgingly agrees to give him another chance, realizing that Uncle Root’s opinion holds great significance to her because he has become her best friend.
Song 3 and Part 3 Analysis
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois’s length partly reflects Jeffers’s interest in exploring areas of US and world history that are frequently overlooked in classrooms. School curriculums often treat African and Indigenous American history as two separate topics, but Jeffers shows the complex ways that these communities interacted, sometimes helping one another or blending families, sometimes using one another as leverage with white neighbors. Jeffers’s novel notes the Seminoles’ reputation for embracing formerly enslaved people like Coromantee but also features Micco and Mahala’s decision to purchase enslaved people.
Jeffers also uses Part 3 to explore another little-discussed topic in most US history classes: the societies from which enslaved Africans came. Jeffers portrays Assatou and Kiné’s homeland as a complex Afro-Islamic society. Her novel continuously insists on highlighting the diversity of cultures that often go unexplored in popular Western media.
The same insistence on variety that animates the “Song” sections of the novel also informs Ailey’s. For instance, in Part 3, Uncle Root explains his youth as the son of a woman whom society considered the mistress of a white man. Since she could not legally marry him, she and her children lived in an uncomfortable liminal space; they reaped the financial benefits of proximity to a white landowner, but their Black neighbors mostly resented and disliked them because of that proximity. Their poor white neighbors also resented them, eventually endangering Uncle Root’s life. Uncle Root himself feels torn regarding his white half-brother, who mostly treated him and his family well but did nothing to ease the crushing poverty of the Black sharecroppers who worked his land. These relationships are full of complex, irreconcilable feelings that resist tidy resolution.
While Uncle Root’s feelings about his past may be complex, his relationship to Ailey is not: Though separated in age by almost 70 years, the two are best friends and share an intellectual curiosity that endears them to one another. Uncle Root frequently guides and advises Ailey without judging her, offering counsel through his many anecdotes rather than through reprimands or decrees. In a novel so deeply invested in history, Uncle Root’s status as a professional historian—and the name that hints at his connection to the past—marks him as a character of special wisdom.
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