As Uncle Root tells Ailey, “The truth can be both horrible and lovely.” Even now, some want to push that part of our history back under the surface. Du Bois brings readers a clear sense of the lived experiences of people whose role in American history has long been discounted. She’s also sharply observant about academia, as in the scenes with Ailey’s grad school nemesis, a clueless white student named Rebecca who wants to write her research paper on mammies to show that “Slaves were family, too.” Family relationships, especially those between mothers and daughters, are an important theme and the source of some of the book’s funniest dialogue. Jeffers writes powerfully about terrible times, but she also writes warmly about good ones. But all of them are about power as well as sex - which race, which gender holds power over the other. There are the heart-wrenching rapes of slavery days, but also cringy-comic teenage sex and some flat-out erotic interludes. Jeffers writes about sex well, and from many perspectives. You can’t write about racism without writing about sex - the basis of racism is, after all, the lost cause of trying to prevent sex between people with different skin colors. In the near present that land, with the burned-out shell of its grand house still precariously standing, is the idyllic farm where Ailey’s grandmother, Miss Rose, lives. Many of the Song chapters focus on the decades before and after the Civil War at Wood Place, the plantation owned then by the “monster” Samuel Pinchard, who was, along with several of the people he enslaved, another ancestor. The earliest traces of Ailey’s family begin there, already a combination of tribes: Creek, Wolof, Scottish. The land that would become the town of Chicasetta was part of the territory of the Creek tribe, the site of an ancient and sacred mound built by their ancestors. Those stories begin in Georgia when it was still a British colony. To do that, she not only tells Ailey’s story but sweeps back into the past to tell stories of her ancestors in chapters called “Song.” Just as Du Bois did in the dozens of books he published in his very long and eventful life, Jeffers tackles the endlessly complex topic of race in America.

It’s just one of many connections to Du Bois in the novel. Du Bois called the “Talented Tenth” of Black Americans, shaped and educated to be leaders in their communities. A century ago, they would have been among what scholar and activist W.E.B. Geoff, Ailey’s father, is a doctor, mother Belle a schoolteacher, and she and her two older sisters, Lydia and Coco, are expected to be equally ambitious. The core of the novel is narrated by Ailey Pearl Garfield, born in 1973 and raised in a northern metropolis called only “the City” and in her mother’s hometown, the tiny fictional hamlet of Chicasetta, somewhere south of Atlanta.

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