The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Uncle Root is Ailey’s mentor and best friend. The two not only love each other as family but genuinely enjoy each other’s company. One of Uncle Root’s chief roles in both Ailey’s life and the book is storyteller; though he reaches his centennial birthday by the end of the novel, his mind stays sharp, and he can interject a relevant anecdote or reference into almost any conversation. Because The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is so invested in the idea of history, this ability marks Uncle Root as a wise and important elder. 

Although Uncle Root’s advanced age means that he lived through frighteningly dangerous times in the South, he often hides the extent of his pain. He is much more verbose in describing Du Bois’s contributions to Black intellectual life than he is in describing his strained relationship with his white half-brother, for instance. Even the story of the time the Franklins almost lynched him is one he tells as if narrating an action movie, masking the trauma the event must have given him for the rest of his life. It is only as Ailey herself ages that she begins to realize he has hidden or glossed over many of his darkest experiences.

Uncle Root also stands out as virtually the only man in the novel with an unblemished record in treating women respectfully. He was happily married until his wife passed away; he provides financial and emotional support to the women in his family pursuing higher education; he even tells his Routledge students that Black women are “the best our race has to offer,” exhorting them to “always cherish and love [them]” (269). In his respect for women, his insatiable curiosity about history, and his gentle leadership by example, Uncle Root is the mentor who most shapes Ailey’s coming-of-age journey.

Like her daughter Ailey, Belle has great intelligence and great bravery. She manages to get a college degree at a time when it was difficult for women of any race, let alone Black women, to attend or complete college. She also refuses to either give up on her marriage or accept her husband’s infidelity quietly. Unlike Ailey, however, she has to grow up quickly because she becomes pregnant as a young woman; she has less time for leisurely self-discovery than Ailey does, which sometimes creates distance between her and Ailey—a mutual feeling that they do not understand each other.

All of the women in Ailey’s maternal line have dreams that they take as portents, but few mention such dreams as often as Belle. Whenever one of the Garfield daughters has a prospective partner, they can be sure that Belle will have a dream showing whether that person is a worthy match or not. While Lydia, Coco, and Ailey may tire of these dreams and their mother’s interference in their romantic lives, Belle just wants to protect her daughters from dangerous, predatory men—a type with whom she has had experience.

As the member of Ailey’s family with the darkest skin tone, Belle often feels self-conscious about her appearance. While her daughters vary in skin tone, they are all lighter than Belle because of Geoff’s very light complexion. For this reason, Belle often feels that she looks as if she does not belong with them. She had to deal with colorism both at Routledge, where most of the men chased girls who had lighter skin, and in Geoff’s family, where Nana Claire treated her coldly in comparison to her white sister-in-law, Diane. While she tries to contain this self-consciousness, some of it rubs off on Ailey, who thinks she isn’t as pretty as her lighter-skinned sister, Lydia.

Before her death, Lydia is not only Ailey’s sister but her closest confidante. The two love each other in an uncomplicated, adoring way, not noticing or caring about each other’s flaws. Lydia is gentle, kind, and effortlessly liked wherever she goes, creating a template Ailey wants to follow as she grows up.

However, almost no one in Lydia’s life knows that she carries the traumatic burden of years of Gandee’s sexual abuse. She endures this the longest of all three sisters, telling no one except Coco, Ailey, Dante, and the therapist she sees in rehab. None of the adults who should have helped her escape the abuse are aware of it. As a result, she spends many years approaching relationships with men as opportunities to exert agency and power via sex rather than as real attempts at deep connections. The patterns of behavior she learned from Gandee’s abuse continue during her cocaine addiction: Rather than asking for help, she feels she must deal with the problem alone, isolating herself from her family until she can get sober.

After Lydia dies, Ailey still talks to her, sometimes feeling that she can hear Lydia’s voice speaking back to her. While it is possible to see this as a coping mechanism or even unhealthy delusion, it could also be an extension of the novel’s assertion that Ailey’s ancestors are a part of her. Lydia’s appearances in Ailey’s dreams alongside figures from the family’s past hint at an afterlife where Lydia has found the peace that eluded her in life.

Samuel Pinchard is the novel’s foremost villain—its embodiment of evil. While the most horrifying of his crimes is his rape of dozens of young enslaved girls, he exercises viciousness in other ways, too. He tricks Micco into trusting him over a period of many months just to steal his land; what’s more, he does so unnecessarily, knowing that the law would back his claim regardless, apparently just to indulge his cruelty. As evil as Samuel is, however, Jeffers makes a point of showing that he is not an anomaly. He makes no attempt to hide his practice of raping young enslaved girls, even casually admitting the practice to the man he considers his only friend, Matthew Thatcher. Obviously, he realizes he is not doing anything that will reap serious consequences; legally, he is well within his rights, and socially he merely suffers from some neighboring plantation owners finding him distasteful.

Furthermore, everything Samuel believes about Black people being a separate, inferior species reflects the views of the respected institutions of his day. Immanuel Kant’s and David Hume’s philosophical works, Samuel Morton’s and Petrus Camper’s scientific treatises, certain interpretations of the Bible—all of these sources lend the necessary “evidence” to support his self-justifications (414-15). In fact, Samuel probably considers himself an unusually kind slave owner. His son, Victor, certainly does—Eliza Two notices that he expects “many displays of gratitude for his protection” of Black sharecroppers on his property (786), and he likely learned this pattern of thinking from Samuel, who refrains from beating his slaves and feeds them regularly, differentiating himself from many slave owners. Through Samuel, Jeffers highlights the constant threat of sexual assault that enslaved women (and, less often, men) had to live with every day and underscores the extent to which this behavior was normalized.