66 pages • 2 hours read
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
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BetaPart 10 and Song 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 10, Sections 1-5 Summary
This summary covers “The Peculiar Institution,” “Plural First Person,” “The Thrilla in Manila,” “Witness My Hand,” and “My Black Female Time.”
In graduate school, Ailey decides to research the history of Wood Place plantation because of her familial connection to it. As she reads about the atrocities of slavery, she finds herself losing weight and constantly feeling angry at the white people surrounding her. She does, however, have the strong support of her professor, Dr. Whitcomb, the only Black faculty member in the department. As her research intensifies, Ailey decides to stop her affair with Scooter, no longer rationalizing it—as they both do—in terms of her hatred of Rebecca. She is a woman now and can blame no one for her actions but herself.
The historical documents Ailey is examining reference a man named Matthew Thatcher visiting Wood Place every month and note the deaths of Gloria, Rabbit, and a girl named Leena in 1859. Ailey knows Matthew Thatcher as the benefactor of Routledge University but cannot discern Thatcher’s connection to the Pinchards. She also finds a letter Nick wrote to Samuel 17 years after he ran away, relaying that he is free and well and has forgiven Samuel, even though Samuel is sure to be “sentenced to Satan’s fiery depths” (665).
One night when Ailey is ready to leave the library, a librarian familiar with her research digs out some photos in the Pinchard archives that she thinks will interest her. Ailey examines a photo of three girls identified in the records as Eliza Two, Rabbit, and Leena; she has the nagging feeling that she has seen two of their faces before. When she places them, she immediately drives to Routledge to confirm her suspicion. She finds some photographic records from the school’s history and compares them to the picture of Eliza Two, Rabbit, and Leena. Her suspicions are correct: “Rabbit” and “Leena” are Adeline and Judith Hutchinson, sisters and cofounders of Routledge University. She realizes there must be some error in the Pinchard records; Rabbit and Leena did not die in a fire but rather escaped to the North.
The next chapter is composed entirely of letters between Matthew Thatcher, someone named Deborah, Judith Hutchinson, and Adeline Hutchinson. The letters show that Deborah, Matthew’s sister, taught Judith and Adeline (Rabbit and Leena) to read; they also reveal that Judith and Matthew were in love. When the Civil War ended and Samuel Pinchard died, Matthew pleaded with Judith to return (presumably, although the letter does not specify, to Wood Place). Judith died of a fever, however, before she could return. Matthew then pleaded with Adeline, now married, to come home and bring her daughter. Adeline agreed. Matthew’s will shows that he left money and land to all of his servants and gave the bulk of his estate to Adeline.
Song 8 Summary
The night that Nick escapes, Aggie, feeling she must do something to help young Eliza Two escape from Samuel’s predation, cuts long streaks into Eliza Two’s face with a knife. The tactic works: Samuel is sufficiently repulsed by the scars that he no longer pursues her. Instead, he buys an enslaved girl named Leena.
As Rabbit grows into a young woman, she never stops missing her father. Her mother, Tess, has become a shell of her former self, developing some form of mental illness. Rabbit begins to contemplate running away from Wood Place like Nick. One day, Samuel’s cook falls ill, leaving Rabbit to bring Leena her food in the left cabin. The two girls strike up a friendship.
Meanwhile, Samuel hires Holcomb Byrd as his new overseer, removing the Franklin clan from the position after three generations and demoting them to low-quality cabins on the edge of his property. Insulted and angered, the Franklin clan begin a campaign of terrorizing the enslaved people of Wood Place under the cover of night, beating the men and raping the women. When they become brazen enough to act during the daytime, Holcomb sees them and scares them off with a gun.
Samuel decides that he needs a friend in his own peer group. He looks down on the local yeoman farmers, and the local plantation owners do not accept him because of the rumors that he rapes children. He therefore befriends a Yankee who has just moved to the area, Matthew Thatcher. Though Matthew’s sister Deborah is an abolitionist, he purchases a few slaves when he moves to Georgia.
After multiple visits from Samuel, Matthew accepts Samuel’s invitation to spend the Christmas season at Wood Place. During his stay, he is struck by Rabbit’s beauty. He engages her in conversation and asks her to eat breakfast with him; the two grow closer and closer each day as this pattern continues. Samuel, ignorant of this budding courtship, wants Matthew to court his daughter, Gloria. Though not interested in Gloria, Matthew agrees purely to give himself a reason to return to Wood Place regularly. Matthew and Rabbit eventually develop a sexual relationship, though she continuously feels conflicted about having fallen in love with a slave owner.
On one of Matthew and Rabbit’s escapades in the woods, she mentions her plan to run away, expecting Matthew to offer his assistance. Instead, he tells her it would be too dangerous for him to help her and suggests that she live as his mistress; though they cannot legally marry, he can buy her from Samuel and then buy her a house where she can live comfortably. In disbelief, Rabbit asks what he proposes to do about Eliza Two and Leena, and he responds that surely Samuel will be kind to them. Rabbit realizes her folly in falling in love with such a man and stops all contact with him.
Shortly after this conversation, Samuel asks Matthew to accompany him to a slave auction in Savannah (“the weeping time” featured in Dr. Oludara’s book). After seeing the ravages of the auction block—its horrible dehumanization and its destruction of families—Matthew feels repulsed by slavery and understands his sister’s abolitionist sentiments. This feeling only grows when Samuel drunkenly tells him about the left cabin’s purpose. Matthew is disappointed in himself for becoming part of the “rotting carcass of the south” (726). When the men return to Wood Place, Gloria has died of a sudden illness, freeing Matthew of his fake courtship.
Rabbit continues making plans to flee. With Aggie and Tess’s blessing—both women have seen her departure in their dreams—she lays a plan to set fire to the left cabin at night and run in the melee that follows; when she and her sisters are found missing, everyone will assume they died in the blaze. Leena agrees to the plan, but Eliza Two insists that Wood Place is her home and that the people there are her family.
This distresses Rabbit, but she and Leena implement their plan successfully, setting fire to the left cabin and running under cover of night. Matthew has plans to move back to Boston and happens to be departing by wagon as the girls run. A very small man, who introduces himself as Joe, greets Matthew and obtains his permission to steer the wagon. He steers it directly to Wood Place, where Matthew sees Rabbit and Leena escaping. Deciding to seize this second chance to do the right thing, he ushers them into his wagon and helps them escape.
Part 10 and Song 8 Analysis
In Part 10, the two strands of the novel finally start coming together: not only are the people we have been reading about in the “Song” sections Ailey’s ancestors, but two of these characters went on to be completely different people. Leena, a character we technically do not meet until Part 11, is the mother in the mother-daughter pair that founded Routledge University.
In the field of history, the information that the founders of an HBCU were in fact not free, Northern-born Black Americans but formerly enslaved women would be big news. Making such a discovery would all but guarantee Ailey a published book and probably a tenure-track professorship. Therefore, this news both casts the novel’s “Song” sections in a new light and opens exciting possibilities for Ailey in her chosen profession.
Part 10’s following “Song” section begins with a tonal shift for Samuel; while he spends most of the novel raping enslaved girls or plotting how to acquire more, Part 10 finds him simply searching for a friend. Because he usually seems so monstrous—the slaves’ use of the phrase “the left cabin” ties him to the devil himself—it is difficult to imagine him as a man who would crave something as ordinary and wholesome as friendship. Yet this is Jeffers’s point about Samuel: Antebellum rhetoric about slavery and enslaved people allows him to think of himself as extremely normal—not a monstrous person at all. This rhetoric decried Black women as temptresses, allowing Samuel to foist all responsibility for his actions onto the young girls he harms. In his mind, he is a skilled businessman who deserves a friend, not an unconscionable abuser who ruins lives, and slavery’s norms sanction this self-perception.
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