The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Description
"The great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, once wrote about what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans--the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers--Ailey carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in Bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by hovering trauma, 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 own 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"--Jacket
Available Editions
hardcover
Harper
Published May 4, 2021
464 pages
ISBN: 9780062942937
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Details
First Published
2021
Language
eng
Featured in a Challenge
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.