The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This book is a wonder, the very best book I have read covering this historical and emotional territory. I am not sure what it is that makes poets wtie 800 page epics, but A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is another of my all time favorites, and this book may well sit beside it in my affections. The author contends that the original transgression of this land is not to be understood by looking at slavery, but rather by understanding the deep and ultimately evil nature of greed, and it could not be contained. The first European immigrants had been oppressed in their own land by their own king..."they resurrected this misery and passed it on.” Kidnapped Africans are hauled across the ocean, while the natives who live here are shoved off or murdered. Black slavery and Indian genocide may be regarded as distinct historical crimes, but Jeffers constructs her story to illustrate the integration of African and Indian pain in America. Almost immediately, the genealogies of her White European, Native American and enslaved African characters begin to mingle in a collage of expediency, love, rape, and the human need to survive despite all. The book goes from the twenty or so years before the Civil War all the way to right now, and if the convoluted racial composition of these characters is a challenge to track, that’s the point: Despite the strict demarcations of color that reside in the White imagination, the society that evolves in these pages is peopled by a spectrum of hues. Some claim their superiority, most suffer and a few pass. It is a book that is deeply emotional, brutal, without exageration, and offers a uniquely tied together view of our nation past and present.