In a storyline that shifts from the past and present, Ailey Pearl Garfield goes in search of her family, a sense of belonging and her identity, an all encompassing history of incredible resilience and survival in the face of unbearable repression, grief, loss, abuse and other life challenges. This is not just a purely intellectual exercise but is underpinned with an understanding this knowledge impacts not just the mind but the entire body, how the real lived repercussions of that history is experienced by actual people, the pain, horror, trauma, joy and heartbreak. Interspersed with the work of scholar WEB Dubois in the narrative, this is a richly detailed story of the complicated multigenerational heritage of a Black American family through the centuries of a troubling, turbulent, and all too real American history that includes slavery. I found this to be an intense and profoundly moving family history. To say that I am astounded by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers ambitious and epic novel, a family drama, would be an understatement, it is demanding, challenging and requires commitment from the reader for this is a long, well researched book that proves to be extraordinarily rewarding. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story-and the song-of America itself.
To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors-Indigenous, Black, and white-in the deep South.
From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women-her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries-that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans-the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers-Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.Īiley is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. A magisterial epic-an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Water Dancer-that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.
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