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

Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young woman in New York City, grapples with the weight of her heritage and the concept of 'double consciousness' articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois. Raised between the urban north and her ancestral home in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, Ailey is haunted by the trauma and expectations of her maternal line, which stretches back two centuries. Her journey to understand her identity leads her to uncover the complex, often shocking history of her ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—navigating the deep South from the era of the slave trade through the Civil War and into the present.

Description adapted from Open Library ↗.