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

Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up in a Northern city but spends her summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, the small town where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors were brought there enslaved. As Ailey moves through childhood, college, and graduate study in history, she is pulled toward the buried record of her own people. Interleaved with her story are the "songs," historical passages that trace the family back through generations of African, Creek, and Scottish ancestors, the Wind family plantation, and the violence and endurance that shaped the land. Jeffers braids present and past until the two illuminate each other, using Ailey's research into her lineage as the thread that ties centuries together. The result is a study of how a family carries and survives its history.