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

Ailey’s gradual development into a historian exemplifies Jeffers’s theme of the centrality of narrative to an individual’s or family’s sense of identity. In fact, history and its preservation are foundational to many of the African cultures from which Ailey and other Black Americans are partially descended, as Jeffers’s discussion of griots makes explicit: “Midas knew from his mother’s stories that her father had been a man whose job it was to remember the history of a single family in their village, going back for hundreds of years” (196). For the descendants of enslaved people, however, historical family narratives are often irretrievable because slave owners did not always keep detailed records about their enslaved workers. Pieces of data as basic as names can be difficult to research, as slave owners sometimes changed slaves’ first or last names, failed to call slaves any name at all, or gave slaves no last name. Furthermore, slavery often disrupted the oral histories that enslaved people might have relied on, impeding the transmission of information from one generation to the next with repeated dislocations and separations.

Anyone trying to research a family genealogy that involves enslaved people, therefore, commonly runs into gaps in the archive. Even if they manage the daunting task of tracing the genealogy back to the first enslaved ancestor in the US, there is often no way to discover that person’s home before they were kidnapped. In an interview with Rachel Barenbaum, Jeffers explains that she employs scholar Sadiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” to fill in the gaps (Barenbaum, Rachel. “Ep 72 Honoree Fanonne Jeffers: Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois.” YouTube, 2 Sept. 2021). This is a method by which a writer combines historical research with creative fiction in order to craft a story that fills in the gaps left incomplete in archival materials alone. Jeffers used critical fabulation directly in a book of poetry she wrote about Phillis Wheatley called The Age of Phillis. Since The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is a fictional story, it does not blend documented and imagined history in this way. However, Jeffers does demonstrate the spirit of critical fabulation by juxtaposing the information Ailey can glean from the historical archive with a much richer, deeper narrative about the same people in the “Song” sections.

Rather than thinking of her maternal family history as something that controls her, Ailey thinks of it as something that informs and inspires her, giving her a greater appreciation of the family around her and their remarkable triumphs in the face of adversities. Ultimately, Jeffers frames the act of digging deeply into histories once deemed unworthy of recording as an act of reclamation. By continuously searching for her family’s story, Ailey reclaims the humanity of her family and community from those who once denied them the dignity of narrative.

What’s more, uncovering these stories and internalizing them expands one’s community in a way that parallels the novel’s depiction of time and history themselves. The first “Song” section suggests that linear, narrative time is in some sense artificial; the narrator(s) “keep to the guidance of time” for convenience’s sake (3), but in reality each person’s story extends in multiple directions, not just forwards and backwards. The idea that time is not linear but (for example) cyclical is one that many African and Indigenous American cultures hold, and its influence permeates the structure of the book itself, which skips freely through time. Ailey’s ancestors are therefore not simply the founders of her community but continuous members of it, as the dreams in which they offer comfort and guidance imply. Ailey’s research is work worthy of doing even when the answers cannot be found because it is an act of community-building both in the moment and across generations.