The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois (4*)

 

Reading this book on the heels of The Prophets, a fantastical account of the horrors of slavery by a gay man, I was struck by how religion informs one and history the other. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's much, much longer novel is rooted in a family tree whose limbs are at times hard to distinguish but you put it down with the same wonder for the strength of black women and the stomach-churning inhumanity of clueless white folks.  

It's easy to see why Jeffers's book made the bigger impact.  Her family saga, peppered liberally with Black vernacular ("poor as a church mouse at a Devil worship convention") covers multiple generations and tells stories more informed by superstition and oral tradition than the Bible.  It occasionally veers into Terry McMillan territory, too (not that there's anything wrong with that!):

His face was so open, so full of emotion, like Denzel Washington’s in the whipping scene in Glory, when that single tear had traveled down his cheek.  It was the drop of water that soaked every pair of Black woman’s panties in the United States of  America.

Jeffers draws her characters so vividly that I sympathized with a young woman who turns to crack and experiences her first orgasm as a result.  But even her addiction results from a family laboratory of sexual molestation, initiated by a handsome Southern gentlemen who uses slavery to indulge his pedophiliac tastes.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois can definitely serve as a primer on Black, mostly female life in America, from the mixing of oppressed races, the significance of the skin tone passing in a community just as "color struck"--if not more, than Caucasians, and the different strategic approaches employed by W.E.B. DuBois (education) and Booker T. Washington (capitalism) for surviving post-Reconstruction American society.  For Jeffers, Ailey's achievement is not only the doctorate she earns, but her insistence on acknowledging and enjoying a truly Black life while paying as little attention as possible to the white gaze.  Because she still has to navigate airport security, after all.