The 2020 National Book Award-nominated poet makes her fiction
debut with this magisterial epic--an intimate yet sweeping novel with
all the luminescence and force of Homegoing;
Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The
Water Dancer--that chronicles the journey of one American
family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the
Civil War to our own tumultuous era.
The great scholar,
W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America,
and what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity
that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since
childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all
too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans--the
revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl,
the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers--Ailey
carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders.
Ailey is reared in
the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of
Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors
arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a
battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering
trauma, as well as the whispers of women--her mother, Belle, her
sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries--that
urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.
To come to terms
with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her
family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of
ancestors--Indigenous, Black, and white--in the deep South. In doing
so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of
oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and
resilience that is the story--and the song--of America itself.