66 pages • 2 hours read
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
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BetaSong 1 and Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Song 1 Summary
The novel opens with a section called “Song” (a section with this title appears in all except three of the novel’s 11 parts, signaling that the section will focus on Ailey Garfield’s ancestors). The narrator(s) of the “Song” sections identify themselves in the novel’s opening lines: “We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line” (1). Although the reader eventually learns that the land on which the “Song” sections take place is home to a rural town in present-day Georgia, the Creek people who live there in the early 18th century call it The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees.
One day, a young, formerly enslaved man named Coromantee arrives at the Creek village. (Slavery is not yet legal in this area, but many people illegally own slaves anyway.) He says that a very small man led him by the hand to this location. Since the Creek tribe believes in supernatural beings that appear as small people, they decide they ought to welcome Coromantee. He stays with them for several years and eventually marries a young Creek woman, Woman-of-the-Wind. They have children together, but after several years Coromantee leaves to seek a more secure freedom with the Seminoles in Florida.
One of Coromantee and Woman-of-the-Wind’s children is Nila, whose beauty catches the eye of Scottish trader Dylan Cornell. The two marry, but Cornell often embarrasses her by acting contrary to Creek customs. They have a son named Micco, and one day Cornell takes Micco on a trip with him. Disturbed by dreams that offer premonitions about this trip, Nila insists that her brother, Bushy Hair, accompany them. When Cornell attacks Bushy Hair one night, Micco must decide whether to side with his father or his uncle. He acts decisively, cutting Cornell’s throat.
The “Song” section closes by alluding to the legalization of slavery and a series of broken treaties between Europeans and the Creek people in the years before the Revolutionary War.
Part 1, Sections 1-2 Summary
This summary covers “Dream and Fracture” and “The Definitions of Siddity.”
Ailey’s earliest memories include her family’s annual summer trips to rural Chicasetta, Georgia to visit her mother’s family. Only the female Garfields go; Ailey’s father, Geoff, must stay in “the City” and work. In Chicasetta, Ailey and her sisters spend time with their grandmother (Miss Rose), their great-grandmother (Dear Pearl), and their great-grandmother’s brother (Uncle Root), along with other relatives who appear periodically.
During one of these summer trips, Ailey (then nine) and her older sister Coco go on a walk and come across their oldest sister, Lydia, lying naked in a grassy field with a local man named Tony Crawford. When Coco tries to explain the scene to Ailey, Ailey reveals that she already knows what a penis is because “Gandee” (the girls’ name for their paternal grandfather) showed his to her. Coco warns her to never repeat this to anyone. Ailey’s mother, Belle, grows fearful when Lydia does not return home that night, and Ailey confesses what she saw. Lydia comes home in Tony’s truck the next day, and Belle beats her with a switch.
During the summer that Ailey turns 14, Dear Pearl dies. Despite her sadness, Ailey soon becomes preoccupied with the difficulties that await her at Toomer High. She becomes part of a popular girl clique that regularly mocks a girl named Antoinette behind her back. She also begins spending a lot of time with her paternal grandmother, Nana Claire, who believes that her light skin makes her superior to darker-skinned Black people and tries to instill the same values in Ailey. One day at school, Antoinette confronts Ailey, calling her a “siddity bitch” and then attacking her (52). The fight is broken up, but not before Ailey clearly begins losing; afterward, she rats Antoinette out to the principal. For these reasons, most of the school, including her popular friend group, ostracizes her.
That Thanksgiving, Lydia and Coco come home from college; Lydia brings a man named Dante with her. To the family’s shock, she reveals during dinner that she and Dante are married and that she plans to transfer schools to be close to him. However, when the family later tries to contact her, they find that the contact information she gave them was fake, and they have no way of knowing her whereabouts.
Song 1 and Part 1 Analysis
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois has an occasional fairy tale-like quality; while its characters must deal with brutal material realities, supernatural elements also appear in their lives. This touch of magical realism emerges in the novel’s opening lines, where the narrator of the “Song” section identifies itself not as a person or a group of people, but a personified version of “the earth, the land” (1). The supernatural also appears in Coromantee’s claim that a mysterious small man led him to the Creek people. This man recurs again and again in Ailey’s ancestors’ history, acting as an apparently ageless guide who intervenes in moments of crisis or importance.
In Ailey’s section, Part 1 introduces several thematic elements that remain important throughout the novel. Firstly, Part 1 displays the novel’s fascination with iconic Black artists and thinkers. Unsurprisingly, W.E.B. Du Bois is the figure whose work most influences the story; quotes from his works appear before each part, enriching the reader’s understanding of the content that follows. Other Black artists and thinkers feature in subtler ways. Ailey’s high school, for instance, is named “Toomer High,” undoubtedly for Jean Toomer, a Black writer who (temporarily) lived in and wrote about Georgia.
Second, displays of colorism permeate not only Part 1 but the entire novel. Colorism refers to the preferential treatment of people with lighter skin tones. Unlike racism, colorism occurs not only across different racial groups but inside them. For example, Antoinette suspects that Ailey’s arrogance is really colorism—that she thinks herself better than Antoinette because her skin is lighter. Similarly, Nana Claire makes no attempt to hide her feelings of superiority at being so light-skinned that she can pass as white.
Third, Part 1 establishes the primacy of Chicasetta in the novel’s geographical world. Although Ailey only goes there in the summer, her family’s full-time home is not named; Jeffers refers to it merely as “the City.” This lack of specificity makes the unnamed urban environment feel less real than the warm, resonant, loving environment of Dear Pearl’s house in Chicasetta, even as Chicasetta poses its own dangers and problems. The fact that Ailey’s earliest memories revolve around her summer trips to Chicasetta further establish it as her spiritual birthplace and home.
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