Ailey Pearl Garfield, named for choreographer Alvin Ailey and for a great-grandmother descended from enslaved Georgians, grows up in a northern city and spends summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her mother's family has lived for generations. As a young historian she begins to reconstruct that family's past, and the novel opens outward into the stories — the "songs" — of her ancestors: African, Creek and Scottish forebears, enslavement and land, violence and endurance in the Deep South, through the Civil War and the civil rights era to the present. Interleaved with Ailey's own coming of age, including family trauma and her struggle for belonging, these histories test W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of double consciousness against lived experience. Jeffers, a poet writing her first novel, builds an epic about how identity is inherited through women's lines, and how knowing the whole, painful lineage can become a form of freedom.
Author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers · Original publisher: Harper (New York, NY), 2021
