A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of the Year.In Jeffers' deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel.” -Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn “This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. Agent: Sarah Burns, the Gernert Company.Performed by Adenrele Ojo, Karen Chilton, Prentice Onayemi Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. The multigenerational story bursts open when Ailey unearths some unknown family history during her graduate studies, as well as secrets of the Black female founder of her family’s alma mater. Du Bois’s theories emerge in epigraphs throughout and are sagaciously reflected in the plot, as the accounts of Ailey’s college life correspond to the “talented tenth.” Later, tragedy unfolds as Lydia, Ailey’s oldest sister who is haunted by childhood sexual abuse, succumbs to crack addiction.
Ailey follows in the footsteps of her parents, attending the southern HBCU where they met and married as undergraduates before moving north to the “City,” where Geoff attended medical school at Mecca University (a thinly veiled Howard).
Throughout, historical sketches (or “songs”) link Ailey to her ancestors: Creeks, enslaved Africans, and early Scot slave owners. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light-skinned Washington, D.C., physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher, reckons with ancestral trauma while growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. Poet Jeffers ( The Age of Phyllis) debuts with a staggering and ambitious saga exploring African American history.
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