I walk through the peach trees and come out on the other side. I see my granny’s house, but instead of Miss Rose, there is a white man sitting on the porch with a book in his hand. He looks up and doesn’t see me, but I follow his gaze to the fields where my uncle works in the mornings, before he goes to his night shift at the factory. But there are plants with white puffs there, instead of the soybeans my uncle works. Cotton. And there’s no tractor, only Black folks picking the puffs. Somehow, they are careful, even as their fingers are quick.
I hear the voices of children, and I see the long-haired lady and Lydia walking toward me. There are children on either side of them, their high voices chirping. Questions in the non sequiturs typical of the very young. The long-haired lady speaks to me in her rare, unknown vowels, and I think, after all this time, I still don’t know who this woman is, even as something in the back of my mind urges me that I do.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She touches her chest and says something, but I don’t understand. I shake my head, and she talks to Lydia, who seems to comprehend her perfectly.
“She says you know her name already.”
“No. That’s not true.”
I know this is a dream. That I can’t be killed or wounded, but I’m careful not to raise my voice. To not offend the woman who has been with me for so long.
“Yes, you do, baby sister,” Lydia says. “You do. You just need to remember.”
I open my mouth to answer, but it’s as if I have glue in my mouth. My words are garbled, and I begin to choke, until Lydia pats my back. Breathe, she tells me, until I calm, and we begin to walk again.
We reach a cabin. It’s propped up on a series of bricks. In the little dirt yard is a man in a rocking chair whose skin is the darkest I ever have seen, and his teeth are white and strong and beautiful. The children sit down in front of him. They wiggle and laugh. When the man snaps his fingers, they quiet. When he speaks, I know this language is English, but it sounds like complex music. I only understand every fourth or fifth word, so I put aside my need for comprehension, and pay attention to the sounds.
I listen to the children’s response, their cries of appreciation. To the rise and fall of the man’s voice, the music dipping into sage chords. I know the story will be over soon. That I will wake up with a question. And then another, but the question is what I have wanted. The question is the point. The question is my breath.
Acknowledgments
First, as always, I give unashamed glory and praise to my mighty good God, and to my Ancestors who continue to guide my path.
There is one Ancestor in particular who made my intellectual journey possible: the great W. E. B. Du Bois. My novel isn’t based on his life, but rather on the lives of the inhabitants of one (fictitious) town in Georgia, a state he lived in for years. But I hope the spirit of the great scholar hovers over my book, and I hope that I have his blessing.
I was reared by a Georgian woman, who taught me southern home training, and how to listen to and revere old folks. I want to thank my mother, Dr. Trellie Lee James Jeffers (Spelman College, Class of 1955), for her sacrifices, her hard work, and her passing on her incredible intellect as well as her important cultural lessons to me. Thank you to Mama’s parents, Florence Napier Paschal James and Charlie James, and Mama’s siblings, Alvester James, Thedwron James, Edna James Hagan, Florence James Shields, Charles James, and Larry Paschal.
Thank you to my niece, wife-mother-caretaker extraordinaire Gabrielle Monique Morris, who holds it down for our family and keeps the Paschal-James matrilineal tradition thriving. Gabbie, I hope you know that you have made my work possible. I love you, baby girl.
My beloved “play brother,” James William Richardson Jr., and my dear blood sister, Sidonie Colette Jeffers, have passed on to the Ancestors, but they are not forgotten.
I am so grateful to Native American colleagues who have accepted me as kin and encouraged my writing about Afro-Indigenous people(s) and history: Brother-Elder Geary Hobson, Kimberly Weiser, and Rachel Jackson. In particular, Brother Geary spent patient hours explaining to me Afro-Indigenous history and giving me the titles of books I should read. Neither Kimberly nor Brother Geary shamed me as I asked what I know (now) were very elementary questions about southeastern Indigenous history. Thank you to Faron Bear and Rain C. Goméz, too, for their encouragement of my Indigenous journey.
Gratitude to the organizations that provided me with financial support during the writing of this book: Aspen Summer Words Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the University of Oklahoma.
As I always write on every acknowledgments page, I have been sustained by mentors through the years: Maggie Anderson, Lucille Clifton (rest in peace), Hank Lazer, David Lynn, Jerry Ward Jr., and Afaa M. Weaver. The elders guide me in a needful time.
Other various, wonderful human beings encouraged me while writing this book, in particular Barbara Soloski Albin, Huda Al-Murashi, Herman Beavers, Remica Bingham-Risher, Joan Brannon, Angela Brooks, Joanna Brooks, Kimberly Burns, Heidi Durrow, Julia Eagleton, Oscar Enriquez, Paul Erickson, Brigitte Fielder, John Freeman, Ernesto Fuentes, Helena de Groot, Logan Garrison, Shannon Gibney, Bailey Hoffner, Lynette Bloomberg, Wilhelmina Jenkins, Andrew Jeon, Tayari Jones, Randall Keenan, Keegan Long-Wheeler, Tanya Mears, Valerie Moore, Jim Moran, Fred Moten, Meredith Neuman, Emily Pawley, Laura Pegram, Michael Perry, Cherise Pollard, Riché Richardson, Bala Saho, Mungu Sanchez, Jonathan Senchyne, John Stewart, Jeanie Thompson, Natasha Trethewey, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Margaret Porter Troupe, Quincy Troupe, Liz Van Hoose, Anthony Walton, Stephanie Powell Watts, and Crystal Wilkinson.
As always, gratitude to my African brothers—my “trois frères”—Chris Abani, Kwame Dawes, and Matthew Shenoda.
This is undoubtedly a woman’s novel, and there are two women in particular who kept me going through the writing of this book. My literary agent, Sarah Burnes, and my Harper editor, Erin Wicks, two fiercely feminist, brilliant souls. They gave me courage when my confidence lagged and were honest but nurturing. Both Sarah and Erin perform so much emotional labor and I want to acknowledge that, for the work of women is not always noticed or rewarded.
And finally, I am here on this earth to tend Ancestral altars. I am here to speak of many tribes: the Cherokee, the Creek, the Wolof, the Akan, the Yoruba. And the many gatherings that I cannot name.
I am here to give gratitude to those who came before. They live within me: The people. The folks. Their songs.
Archival Coda
This is not an academic history book. This is a work of historical fiction, and so I’m not going to provide a ten-page bibliography of all the texts I read over a ten-year period. That would take too long.
Instead, I begin with the man whose name (hopefully) blesses me in this creative enterprise: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. I read David Levering Lewis’s hefty, utterly necessary biographies of the great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 at least five times while writing this novel.
Du Bois wrote too many books for me to mention here, but the most beloved (for me) are The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In addition, I read the digitized correspondence of Du Bois on the Special Collections and University Archives website of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, paying close attention to his correspondence with Jessie Fauset. And webdubois.org is an excellent resource for the many out-of-print essays by Du Bois. Two excellent works on the woefully understudied Jessie Fauset are Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer by Carolyn Wedin Sylvander and Women of the Harlem Renaissance by Cheryl A. Wall.
This is a Black feminist novel. I’m unapologetic about that. Several works not only helped me with Ailey’s intellectual progress as a young Black feminist/womanist, but also with character interactions. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectiona
lity, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”; Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith; bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens are all like scripture to me. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was my first introduction (on the page) to a Black feminist heroine as well as to the African American southern vernacular that my mother’s family spoke.
As painful as it was, reading about sexual violence toward Black women and girls helped me with necessary creative depictions. My book could not have been written without Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as well as Beloved, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—this last book is so special to me because Ms. Walker is a native of Eatonton, Georgia, the home of my maternal ancestors. (My mother was one of Ms. Walker’s teachers.)
My mother—Trellie James Jeffers—published an early germinal essay about colorism in the Black community, “The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class,” which allowed me to witness (vicariously) intra-racist sexism in African American communities. Another essay by her, “From the Old Slave Shack: Memoirs of a Teacher,” offers historical background about Mama’s experiences attending segregated schools in Eatonton, Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s, before attending Spelman College in 1951.
The history of slavery provides the spine of this novel. Some texts that offered “deep background” were Boubacar Barry’s Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, which excavates eighteenth-century slave trading history in Wolof-speaking areas of West Africa, and Walter Rucker’s Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power, about Asante peoples of West Africa, those who would come to be called “Coromantee.” Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas is a must-read for anyone interested in Muslim history on the American side of the Atlantic. And Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History gives background information about the brutal transatlantic slave trade. In addition, the digitized Georgia Archives provided information about eighteenth-century slave and Native American codes, as well as Land Lottery records. Henry Louis Gates’s edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs’s as well as Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.
Ailey’s family lives on land that was stolen from Native Americans; this is why this book begins with the original inhabitants of central Georgia. Four wonderful books on early Creek and Cherokee histories are Michael Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis; Claudio Saunt’s A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816; Theda Purdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866; and Angela Pulley Hudson’s Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South.
And I must give a final shout-out to Tiya Miles, who does work in what is called Afro-Indigenous studies—or more colloquially Red-Black studies. When I read her two books, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, I experienced something like a “happy” shout in church. Before I read these books, the Afro-Euro-Creek characters of Wood Place were still rolling around in my head. I was sure my novel was possible, but I didn’t yet have the nerve to write it. Reading Tiya Miles’s two books gave me that nerve. I remain so grateful for her important scholarship.
About the Author
HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry volumes, the latest of which, The Age of Phillis, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and has published writing in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and more. For her research on the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters—which inspired The Age of Phillis—Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history, to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected. Jeffers is critic at large for Kenyon Review and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
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Also by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
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The Age of Phillis
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE LOVE SONGS OF W. E. B. DU BOIS. Copyright © 2021 by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston copyright © 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. Renewed ©1965 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Cover design by Sara Wood
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-294296-8
Version 06022021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-294293-7
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 79