THE LAST WORD
MIRIAM R. KRAMER
“The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” — W.E.B. Du Bois
A Journey Through Black History Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author a combination of decency and of five poetry collections and prejudice. Both family lines are recipient of the NAACP Image descended from a slave owner named Award for Outstanding Literary Pinchard, representing fully their Work for Poetry, transitioned to painful, inextricably intertwined past. writing fiction in releasing The Love Growing up in an educated Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a National household, the daughters do not Book Critics Circle Book of the escape the problems inherent in a Year winner. This absorbing and modern society’s, and sometimes in compulsively readable story sprawls particular a modern Black world’s, across the painful, mixed history of structure. Coco is brilliant, gay, native American, African-American, and closeted, and beautiful Lydia Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and white settlement in Georgia. suffers from drug abuse. Despite a Jeffers mixes in the musings of the loving, solid upbringing, they suffer twentieth-century African-American intellectual from sexual abuse and one snobbish grandmother’s W.E.B. DuBois and the personal and intellectual internalized racism, as she most highly prizes the growth of her main character, Ailey Pearl Garfield, lightest-skinned members of the family. a young, educated Black woman navigating the As Jeffers sets up her story of Ailey’s growth juxtaposition of white and Black worlds. Ailey grows into Black womanhood, she intersperses chapters into her destiny in the late twentieth century and about the tortuous intermingling of Native beyond, as she uncovers the tangled worlds of her Americans, African-Americans, and white settlers past. in the area of Georgia where Ailey’s family farm is Born in the Seventies, independent, youngest eventually located. In recounting the history of the sister Ailey; middle sister Coco; and older sister aforementioned slave owner named Pinchard, Jeffers Lydia grow up the daughters and granddaughters reveals the cruelty, rape, and indiscriminate violence of doctors. They transition between an unnamed exhibited against slaves, along with plantation urban area simply called “the City,” and vacations to owners’ snobbish treatment of poor whites, who her mother’s ancestral home of Chicasetta, Georgia, take out their resultant anger on slaves. In addition, where her grandmother, great-grandmother, and Jeffers shows the folk wisdom and courage that gets great-uncle Root live on a farm. They coexist handed down primarily through women over the distantly and uneasily with the white branch of centuries. Each chapter, modern or historical, is her family, which intermittently shows them juxtaposed beautifully with the others, as we hear 12 May 2022
these aforementioned songs of Ailey’s ancestors, then a chapter devoted to her song of herself, and additional interspersed “song” excerpts from the writings of W.E.B. Dubois. One wonderful character is Ailey’s Great-Uncle Root, a wise, intellectual man who debates the merits of DuBois’s ideas with her former boyfriend, who defends another hero of the race, Booker T. Washington, and his differing ideas for moving Black folk forward. There are tensions in the novel when it comes to education and ideas of progress: the quality of majority public high schools versus majority-white private high schools, the benefits to an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) education versus one from the Ivy League, and the Black experience attending a mostly white graduate school. Ailey does find her voice however, and does not suffer ignorant, privileged fools gladly. Ailey, a naturally bright and gifted scholar, tears herself away from her family’s prescribed path for her to become a doctor, and decides to become an historian focusing on American history. As she inhabits the double identity of representing the Black world while walking through her white world, she studies historical figures from her undergraduate HBCU, connecting them with her very own family farm in Chicasetta. In finding out more about and accepting her fascinating yet painful background, she becomes less and less inclined to code-switch, being less inclined to make white people more comfortable with the uncomfortable facts of history. If I had any quibbles, they would be the author’s, or at least Ailey’s, antipathy towards biracial relationships and rather strong, stereotyped characters she meets at her schools. These include a handsome Black man going out with a white woman who represents the worst of blonde hairflipping white privilege. I realize that I am reacting a bit personally to the latter stereotype, who has no LAST WORD > PAGE 15
Old Town Crier
