Despite a loving, solid upbringing, they suffer from sexual abuse and one snobbish grandmother’s internalized racism, as she most highly prizes the lightest-skinned members of the family.Īs Jeffers sets up her story of Ailey’s growth into Black womanhood, she intersperses chapters about the tortuous intermingling of Native Americans, African-Americans, and white settlers in the area of Georgia where Ailey’s family farm is eventually located. Coco is brilliant, gay, and closeted, and beautiful Lydia suffers from drug abuse. Growing up in an educated household, the daughters do not escape the problems inherent in a modern society’s, and sometimes in particular a modern Black world’s, structure.

Both family lines are descended from a slave owner named Pinchard, representing fully their painful, inextricably intertwined past. They coexist distantly and uneasily with the white branch of her family, which intermittently shows them a combination of decency and prejudice. They transition between an unnamed urban area simply called “the City,” and vacations to her mother’s ancestral home of Chicasetta, Georgia, where her grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-uncle Root live on a farm. Ailey grows into her destiny in the late twentieth century and beyond, as she uncovers the tangled worlds of her past.īorn in the Seventies, independent, youngest sister Ailey middle sister Coco and older sister Lydia grow up the daughters and granddaughters of doctors. DuBois and the personal and intellectual growth of her main character, Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young, educated Black woman navigating the juxtaposition of white and Black worlds.

Jeffers mixes in the musings of the twentieth-century African-American intellectual W.E.B. This absorbing and compulsively readable story sprawls across the painful, mixed history of native American, African-American, and white settlement in Georgia. DuBois, a National Book Critics Circle Book of the Year winner. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of five poetry collections and recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Poetry, transitioned to writing fiction in releasing The Love Songs of W.E.B.

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