In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. Jeffers’s book is an ambitious work set with the fine china of the oeuvre of Du Bois, a man whose life and work pulsated with questions about the inheritance of Black American history and what one does with that fraught and complex legacy. His writing, his ambitions, his failings and his accomplishments are the bass line of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping, masterly debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. He is, many would argue, the founding father of modern Black America. Great Barrington was the birthplace of Du Bois, and as I learned when I was named a Du Bois scholar, the great man was so many things: an elder statesman of African American life, a distinguished historian, a sociologist, a civil-rights leader and an early model of what it might mean to be a public intellectual. At 16, I moved to Great Barrington, Mass., to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember.
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