Sweeping, compulsive and deeply moving, The Love Songs of W.E.B.
In doing so she 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. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well.įrom an early age, Ailey fights a battle to feel like she belongs, made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women – her mother, her sister and a maternal line reaching back two centuries – that urge her to succeed in their stead.Īiley decides to embark on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors – Indigenous, Black, and white – in the deep South. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called ‘Double Consciousness,’ a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. And even the poorest of white men was better than the Indian and the slave.A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade to our own tumultuous era And why not? On our land, which the English had stolen from our people, Gideon was a white man. His optimism grew, as well as his belief that God had blessed him with special grace. And as the years passed, and enslaved Negroes were brought into the colony, though Gideon remained poor, he had pride in his freedom. As a landowner, Gideon was no longer close to power, he possessed it, and even more so when Oglethorpe’s wish of a colony without slavery was violated. Finally, Gideon Franklin could look down on someone else, instead of being the most despised himself. And the people-our people-whom the English called Indians were now beneath Gideon. Du Bois is her first novel and was a New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and. “by the end of his indenture, Gideon had gained weight, and had forgotten his outrage at men in power, for he was now a white Georgian with property of his own, instead of a hungry lad gaping at the well-fed rich.
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