![]() ![]() Oludara, but she pursues her work through to a dramatic culmination. Drawing comfort from her uncle Root, who studied with DuBois, and her graduate school mentor, Dr. She is sometimes daunted by the trauma of her legacy. Ailey uncovers her own lineage through family stories, historical documents, oral histories, and slave archives from rural Georgia, which reveal Indigenous, Black and white roots. Ailey (named for Alvin) Garfield’s story alternates between Atlanta, where she was born and educated, to rural Chicasetta, where her mother’s people first arrived from Africa. DuBois’ sorrow songs by weaving several centuries’ worth of “songs” from the ancestors into her narrative of the coming of age and young adulthood of a brilliant Atlanta scholar. In a daring structure, Jeffers echoes the legendary W.E.B. ![]() ![]() Her people and her dirt, her trees, her water.” The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line. The opening lines signal the lyrical language that permeates this first novel, whose author has published five books of poetry (she was longlisted for the National Book Award for The Age of Phillis): “We are the earth, the land. Du Bois is a voluminous ancestral story, vast in scope, ranging from the first decades of the Afro-Indigenous interactions with Europeans on this continent to the contemporary U.S. ![]() Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper) ![]()
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