I was 10 maybe 11 when I first came across a write up on Slave Breeding. It was a magazine that is definitely for adults but I read it anyway. I didn't understand the whole context except that the babies are taken away from their mothers as soon as they are born. Some of them even went to the extent of mixing up babies so they won't know who is who to avoid complications when they are sold in the future. Needless to say, that impacted me a lot and to this date, I have not done any fact-checking in the fear of finding something that will make me cry. Of course, no one deserves enslavement but that had been the norm for centuries.



The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Love Songs hereafter) is a book that makes you laugh, cry, rage, frustrate, make you go all mushy and rage again with all of its 800 pages. It is not only a black feminist novel but also a history lesson of the antebellum USA that extends to the near past. As for a book that intimidates with its size, Love Songs is surprisingly intimate. At the crux of this story is the women. Let it be the first-ever woman Nila or the latest of the Ailey, every single woman in this book stands out whether they've given voice or not. And I especially loved Belle who is a badass.



Centuries may be different, scenarios may be different but the struggles faced by these women were similar. Their experiences as a woman of colour in a predominantly white setting and their experiences as an enslaved woman in the pre-civil war era, made me think a lot about my privilege as a woman who hasn't faced anything as near as those horrors. It also made me think about how casually we throw around the words slaves and slaving when we don't even know an ounce of those experiences.



The story is mostly told by Ailey Garfield and occasionally by Belle and Lydia. I loved the parts of their summer drives to Chicasetta which unlocked the new level of memories in my mind to the point I started smelling Jack Fruits out of nowhere. They were tender, fun but full of traces of the past. Chicasetta is also the place where Ailey's ancestors were brutally enslaved. It is also the land that previously belonged to the Creek people that was stolen from them by various laws and treaties.



And then we have Uncle Root, Ailey's great-granduncle, a historian also a professor who dedicated 3/4th of his life to the Routledge University, a great admirer of Du Bois and his principles just stole my heart. True to his profession, Uncle Root is a great source of knowledge and experiences that we can glimpse throughout the book. I am more of Ailey when it comes to him. Can't help but love and adore the old man.



Another thing that I loved about the book is the amount of work and research put in by Jeffers. All those 11 years of archival research with equal importance to black feminism makes this a book that blows our mind. And I particularly enjoyed the last portion where Ailey was deep in similar archival research tracing her family line and when the connection was made (which I guessed all along), it was exhilarating. Uncle Root's tips for studying journals is a lifesaver for academics of any field. I can feel the internalized racism through the pages.



Lydia, Ailey's sister, has been on an interesting tangent. Throughout her life, Jeffers exploited the effects of the addiction and I am immediately reminded of Gifty from Transcendent Kingdom. All 3 Garfield sisters have been molested by their grandfather (a paedophile) which went undetected and caused serious psychological trauma to them. And it is yet another example of how we don't see things or refuse to see things (as in the case of their grandmother) we don't want to see. The interesting thing is each sister had a different reaction to the trauma that didn't end fruitful for Lydia. I have read a Goodreads review where a woman of colour has written, 'every one of us knows at least one Lydia in our circle' and it made me so sad.



If I want to talk about something that made my blood boil, it has to be about the sexual exploitation of enslaved people. Men, women, boys and girls were treated as a commodity for their master to use. When I read about the Weeping Time Slave Auction, I can't control my anger but spewing some expletives. And the fact that African Americans and indigenous people are treated as 'others' is pure hypocrisy. But who am I kidding here when I am from a country that prioritizes caste over everything and treats lower caste people as vermin and equally hypocritical?



I would like to say that there is a lot of sexual violence, paedophiles preying on kids and physical violence that cannot be separated when we are talking about the history of afro-indigenous people. I also have to read it soon to grasp the full political details because I was too reluctant to drop this book to search. This review still feels incomplete as there are a lot of topics Jeffers has touched, but I am forcing myself to stop writing more. And it's a shocker that Love Songs is not on the NBA shortlist. I will visit this book soon and write a more fitting impression. Jeffers, it's been an absolute pleasure to be in the company of your writing.