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

This summary covers “Who Remembers This?,” “Any More White Folks,” “Mama's Bible,” and “Like Agatha Christie.”

Ailey, now 33 and hard at work on her doctoral dissertation, returns to Chicasetta to attend Founder’s Day at Routledge, where Uncle Root is being honored for his decades as a professor. David picks her up from the airport. Realizing that she can enhance her research by speaking with the elderly people in her life who know the most about Wood Place’s history, she interviews Uncle Root, Miss Rose, and Cordelia. Uncle Root explains that Victor and Nick, his paternal grandfather and his great-grandmother’s father, respectively, were half-brothers. He is shocked when she tells him that he is distantly related to the Franklins.

Miss Rose can remember her great-great-grandmother, Eliza Two, avoiding discussions about the days of slavery; she only did so (reluctantly) to a Works Progress Administration employee who was recording her for posterity. She also remembers Eliza Two speaking of Aggie, her own grandmother, who had very long, dark hair, which catches Ailey’s attention as it sounds exactly like the woman who has appeared to her in dreams.

Cordelia can remember living in the Wood Place plantation house as a very young girl before it burned down. She remembers a day when one of the Franklins, Jinx, came to the front door but was sent around to the back by the Black maid, which visibly angered him. She refers to herself as the end of the Pinchard line, seemingly unaware of or unwilling to recognize that Ailey herself is part of the line. Before Ailey leaves, Cordelia offers an apology to her: “About…you know…all the things that happened…you know…slavery and that” (767).

This summary covers “Not Hasty,” “Every Strength,” and “The Voices of Children.”

When Uncle Root, nearing 100 years old, has a health scare, Ailey returns to Chicasetta once more. David, by now a close family friend, is again nearby, helping the family with Uncle Root’s return from the hospital. Now that he is divorced, he and Ailey revive their teenage romance. Ailey decides to stay in Chicasetta indefinitely to work on her research.

During her time there, Ailey attends a ceremony at Red Mound Church and agrees to speak about the church’s history in place of Uncle Root, who is still recovering. The speech details the fate of Wood Place’s enslaved people after the Civil War. Most stayed to work as sharecroppers, living in poverty for the rest of their lives. Several men banded together and asked Pop George to approach Victor, the owner of Wood Place since Samuel’s death in 1868, about selling them a parcel of land to build a church. Victor agreed, and the church’s aspiring congregants pooled their small savings for two years to afford the land and lumber. It took them another year to build the church, as they could only work on Sundays.

The church construction angered the Franklins, who wanted the same parcel of land because it contained the burial mound that supposedly cursed Aidan Franklin; they wanted to destroy this. When Victor sold the land to the Black sharecroppers, the Franklins took revenge by burning down the church. Although several men tried to help him, Pop George could not get out in time and died in the fire. The former slaves banded together to rebuild. Victor intimidated the Franklins, telling them that he would bar them from his property, where they also worked as sharecroppers, if they struck again. By taking actions like this, Victor felt satisfied that he was a good, kind white person, not like some of his neighbors.

The novel ends with a dream Ailey has: She sees Miss Rose’s house, but a white man sits on the porch, fanning himself and looking out over a vast field where Black men and women work picking cotton. The long-haired woman she has seen in dreams approaches her, along with Lydia and a crowd of children. Ailey asks the woman her name, but Lydia tells her she already knows it. They reach a cabin where an old man rocks back and forth, telling stories to the children as they crowd around him to listen. The vision gives Ailey more questions than answers, but these questions excite her, and she is ready to devote her life to answering them.