66 pages • 2 hours read
Honorée Fanonne JeffersThe Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 8 and Song 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 8, Sections 1-5 Summary
This summary covers “Keeping the Tune,” “Whatever Gets You Over,” “I Need My Own Car,” “Shower and Pray,” and “You Can Be Proud.”
One of Lydia’s regular dress customers finds her dead at the bottom of the apartment building stairway; the cause of death is an overdose. Ailey, overcome with grief, tells her mother that she is resuming volunteering but really just goes to Lydia’s apartment, sometimes speaking to her as if she were still there. Coco accuses Ailey of selfishness, saying that Ailey does nothing to help the family while she, Coco, had to pay for Geoff and Lydia’s funeral expenses as well as Nana Claire’s care. She also reveals that Gandee molested her as well; therefore Ailey cannot use that as an excuse for Lydia or for herself.
After weeks of Ailey spending time in Lydia’s apartment, Zulu tells her that she must box up Lydia’s belongings and return the keys—not for financial reasons but because Ailey needs to move on. She goes to Lydia’s apartment, gets in the tub, and considers dying by suicide. However, as she drifts into sleep, she has a dream of Lydia and a long-haired woman cleaning catfish by a creek next to a plantation. Lydia beckons her to get out of the tub, wake up, and come home.
During her annual trip to Chicasetta, Ailey decides to live with Uncle Root rather than the rest of the family. Months into their cohabitation, he takes her to Founder’s Day at Routledge. The pair run into Dr. Oludara, Ailey’s former professor. When Dr. Oludara reveals she desperately needs a research assistant, Uncle Root volunteers Ailey for the job.
After Ailey organizes Dr. Oludara’s office, Dr. Oludara asks for her help with the research itself. The book project she is working on investigates “the weeping time”: the largest slave auction in recorded US history. Ailey quickly becomes engrossed in the research, but Dr. Oludara cautions her that after every day spent investigating this difficult material she must shower and pray when she gets home. Ailey disregards this advice on her first day and wakes up in the middle of the night violently ill. She calls Dr. Oludara, who reiterates her advice to shower and pray. Ailey does not make the same mistake again. Her interest in the history of slavery and in the history of her own family grows and grows as she and Dr. Oludara continue to devour historical documents and visit sites like former plantations.
Song 6 Summary
Mamie, the young slave girl Samuel regularly rapes, eventually births his son. She dies in childbirth, and none of the enslaved people of Wood Place except Aggie are willing to care for the boy, named Nick. Nick is the only person in the world Samuel loves, though he still does not treat him as a member of the family.
Around the time that Nick is born, Aggie and Midas have a child named Tess; Aggie is relieved to see that Tess has a large birthmark covering a portion of her face because it repulses Samuel and he does not prey on her. Meanwhile, Samuel grows resentful of Aggie’s protectiveness towards Nick and therefore sells her husband, Midas, to a trader.
Lady, Micco’s daughter and Samuel’s wife, desperately wants a baby, but Samuel never has sex with adult women. Acting on Aggie’s advice, Lady makes him ill by secretly putting some of her menstrual blood into his food. As he lays in bed sick and barely conscious, she rapes him and impregnates herself. Samuel has no memory of the event and thinks she must have had sex with some nearby farmer, but he makes no objection as he wants an heir anyway. Lady births twins, Gloria and Victor. As the twins grow, Victor, desperately lonely, forces an enslaved boy to be his friend; after Victor goes through puberty Samuel witnesses him with this boy in the peach orchard, forcing the boy to perform sex acts on him.
When the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is passed, forcing Indigenous Americans to surrender their land and move west, Samuel takes Lady and heads to Micco and Mahala’s modest cabin on the edge of his property. He tells them they must leave and threatens to expose Micco’s Black ancestry if he does not comply. This shocks and upsets Mahala and Lady, who never knew that Micco—and therefore Lady—had African ancestry. Micco and Mahala leave, and although they reunite with their adult sons in Oklahoma, Mahala dies shortly after.
As Nick and Tess grow up, they fall in love. Aggie initially finds this off-putting because she raised them as siblings, but she grows to accept the idea. They marry and have twin girls, whom Samuel takes charge of naming: He names the light-skinned one he considers beautiful Eliza Two (because Eliza is Lady’s actual name) and the other one Rabbit because of the way she twitches her limbs. Aggie does not fear for their safety around Samuel because she knows Samuel loves Nick and assumes he would not hurt Nick’s children.
Aggie’s assumption proves incorrect. Samuel summons Eliza Two and Rabbit to work in the house when they lose their baby teeth, and he gradually starts plying Eliza Two with candy to make her trust him. Eventually he drugs her and rapes her. When she wakes, she remembers nothing but feels pain and sees bleeding in her genital area. Rabbit tells Aggie, who immediately starts making a plan for Nick’s family to run away. When the time comes to implement the plan, however, Tess and Eliza Two are unwilling to try it, and Rabbit will not leave without her sister, so only Nick manages to escape.
Part 8 and Song 6 Analysis
The birth of two sets of twins in Part 8—Gloria and Victor, as well as Eliza Two and Rabbit—reinforces one of the novel’s most prevalent motifs: doubling. This motif emerges even before Part 1 begins: Jeffers includes a detailed genealogy of Ailey’s ancestors at the beginning of the book, and it includes, strikingly, eight sets of twins. The high prevalence of twins serves multiple purposes. First, it reinforces Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness—the idea that every Black person in the US is in a sense two people. Second, it alerts the reader to look for other kinds of doubling across generations, such as the similarities between Gandee and Samuel or Mahala and Nana Claire. Third, it evokes the idea of generational inheritance—of family traditions, genetic and otherwise, passed down across centuries.
Ailey’s physical reaction to her research for Dr. Oludara also underscores the idea of generational inheritance. When Ailey gets sick the night after delving into historical records of the weeping time, she embodies the physical and mental toll that profound, extended, shared suffering takes on the population that experiences it. Reading about the terrors visited on not only strangers but her very family is not something she can compartmentalize as a merely intellectual activity. It has a spiritual dimension, demanding that she cleanse her body and soul, as Dr. Oludara advises, before she can rest. While Ailey previously struggled with physical responses to her personal, individual trauma (e.g. vomiting at the sight of Pat’s father), here she has a physical response to the communal trauma of her family and race.
By this point in the novel, readers may begin to notice that Jeffers excludes some of Ailey’s life milestones that most people would think of as major. For instance, at some point before Part 8, Ailey graduates Routledge—a major accomplishment and the end of a period of intellectual and emotional maturation. Yet the reader does not witness or hear about her graduation ceremony. Choices like this emphasize that the book is not just about Ailey’s development in general, but about a particular kind of development: development into a person who finds her talents and passions and uses them in service of her community. Therefore, Jeffers sometimes omits moments that might seem significant while including moments that seem inconsequential, like several versions of Uncle Root’s recollections of meeting Du Bois.
