THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DU BOIS by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A book this long—too long, really—is bound to be immersive. It chronicles the lives of multiple generations of multiple ethnicities, as depicted in the multi-page family tree shown at the beginning of the novel.  I confess that I could not follow all the relationships, but I don’t think my bewilderment detracted from my understanding of most of the plot.  We are primarily invested in the life of Ailey Garfield, a Black woman, who weathers sexual abuse at the hands of her paternal grandfather.  Her sisters are also subjected to this abuse, and one of them ultimately succumbs to the trauma.  For me, this trauma that all three girls suffer is the seminal element of the book.  The fact that their grandmother is potentially complicit is unimaginable.  Plus, the girls’ physician father never suspects that his well-to-do father is a pedophile, nor does their mother, who disapproves of her daughters’ boyfriends who do not meet her patrician standards.  The author very effectively conveys the irony that the grandfather is so much more evil than the young men who exhibit their underprivileged upbringing by using bad grammar. And if the grandfather is not a despicable enough character, we also have a slave owner, Samuel Pinchard, one of Ailey’s white ancestors, who purchases young girls to serve as sex slaves.  One mother slices the face of her beautiful daughter so that Pinchard will not select her for his harem of children.  This stuff is difficult to read, not only because it is so horrific, but also because such ghastly behavior is not limited to fiction.  On a more positive note, I loved Ailey’s family’s discussion of whether Senator Obama might run for President, and their comment about the impossibility of a Black President in their lifetime.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, in a good way.