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

The novel covers multiple generations of an African-American family. The novel's protagonist is Ailey Pearl Garfield. While her grandmother wants her to follow the family tradition and become a medical doctor, she wants to be a historian. One of the novel's narrative strands follows her youth and education, and that development is interspersed with her research into her family's history, a story centered in the fictional town of Chicasetta, Georgia, where her family had been enslaved by Samuel Pinchard, a brutal white man who, in the run-up to the American Civil War, also raped the enslaved people.

Throughout the novel, poetic passages ("love songs") chronicle the lives of Ailey's ancestors, who are of African, Creek, and Scottish descent. There is a connection also with Washington, D.C., where Ailey was born, and where her parents moved after getting married; their love and marriage during the Civil rights movement is another narrative strand. In D.C., her father attended Mecca University, a fictionalized version of Howard University. Ailey continues to spend summers in Chicasetta, the geographical heart of the novel, even after leaving for "the City". Ailey attended an HBCU, and becomes close with her great-uncle "Uncle Root", a retired professor there. Also narrated is the story of Ailey's troubled sister, Lydia, whose promise was thwarted by sexual abuse and addiction.

• Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff and Belle
• Geoff Garfield, a medical doctor
• Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher
• Lydia, Ailey's sister, victim of sexual abuse which drove her to a crack addiction
• Uncle Root, retired HBCU professor and Ailey's mentor
• Samuel Pinchard, or "White Man with Strange Eyes", a Southern plantation owner who brutalizes and mistreats the people he enslaved

Black intellectual, sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), according to Jeffers, is present everywhere in the novel, as he was omnipresent for "Black folks who grew up in all-Black spaces and went to HBCUs." According to Lauren LeBlanc, "his belief that Black people are capable of far more than white society expects is a running thread in the novel." Epigrams from the novel come from Du Bois, and he appears in a story told by Uncle Root.^[1] Du Bois's concept of "The Talented Tenth" is reflected in Ailey's family and their potential and achievements, even as their lives are always weighed down and threatened by trauma. For Jeffers, it was personal also, she explained: "W. E. B. Du Bois is the most important Black intellectual of the late 19th and most of the 20th century ... the thing about him is that he really loved Black Southerners. They had a special place in his heart. As a Black Southerner, I'm also part of a community that he imagined and that he tried to save. That's why they're the love songs—because these are the people whom he loved."^[1]