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

Part 9’s following “Song” section includes less plot movement than many of the others, but it illuminates the role poor white Southerners like the Franklin clan often played in upholding slavery and later Jim Crow. All of the Franklins’ misfortunes stem from their own (or Samuel Pinchard’s) decisions. They chose to accept land stolen from Indigenous American tribes and attempt to farm on it despite its poor soil. Samuel Pinchard chose to replace the Franklins as overseers, reducing their station. Yet the people the Franklins go out of their way to mistreat are Wood Place’s slaves or, in later generations, Chicasetta’s Black residents.

The Franklins thus consistently choose to stand with their racial peers rather than their economic peers. Poverty eventually forces them to become sharecroppers, just like Chicasetta’s formerly enslaved population. Yet rather than making common cause with Chicasetta’s Black sharecroppers and working together for economic justice, the Franklins terrorize them to make themselves feel better about being poor. Through the Franklins, Jeffers suggests that racial identity often trumps class identity for poor white people because it provides a feeling of superiority. The Franklins still treat Black people with hostility and occasional violence in Ailey’s timeline, never realizing that the two clans are actually distant relations, as Grace Franklin married Victor Pinchard, who was Ailey’s great-great-great-grandfather. The union of the Pinchard and Franklin families also showcases the way in which wealthy white landowners sometimes stoked racist sentiment to prevent any alliance from forming between Black Southerners and poor white Southerners; the marriage into an elite family keeps the Franklins invested in their sense of superiority, offering them false hope that they might one day be as well-off as the Pinchards if they remain loyal to their race.

In the contemporary timeline, Ailey’s adjustment to graduate school marks her most serious encounter with the phenomenon of double consciousness yet. In “the City,” in Chicasetta, and at Routledge, she is mostly surrounded by other Black people. While her time at Braithwaite Friends School gave her experience at being in the minority, her time at graduate school is a much more intense version of this experience. In graduate school, she needs to make connections and relationships that will help her build a career one day; failing to make a good impression could threaten her very livelihood. Therefore, she cannot use the same brash demeanor that worked for her in high school. She learns the hard way that while achieving a milestone like being the first Black PhD candidate in a university program may bring excitement and pride, it also brings loneliness.