The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, a powerful novel by acclaimed poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, tells the story of African American history and the Black family experience through the lens of the novel's main protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield, as she comes to terms with her identity and the themes of what Du Bois called "double consciousness." This novel will resonate with anyone who has a family, who is a daughter or a sister or a mother, and anyone interested in the American origin story.


Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up between the City in the north and summers spent in her mother's small hometown of Chicasetta, Georgia. From an early age, she finds herself in a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hurt in her past, as well as the whispers of women--her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries--that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors--Indigenous, Black, and white--in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story--and the song--of America itself.