Geneaology of Healing
How could one book break and heal a person? Forcing its reader to a distinctive brink of rebirth using a singular, yet commemorative, examination of what has transpired in America over the past 500 years. [This is a book revelation of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.]
I’ve had my fair share of interviewing therapists and in turn, a majority of them always ask me to go to the very beginning, probing me with questions like, “What is your earliest memory?”, “Tell me about your childhood”, “What was your relationship like with your parents and how does that look now?”, and so on. The questions that I know the answer to but require me to assess my experiences in my 27 years of life that I’ve folded away in drawers, buried in the dirt, or intentionally scribbled in a journal to make it illegible — “just in case”. On top of those holistic practices, I’ve chosen to marvel at my glory, cry in secrecy, and surround myself with archival bliss. What does this have to do with The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois? Everything.
I often rub shoulders with an agonizingly reoccurring, and quite demanding, dream of “why”. You could remove the specific need to inquire, I’ll still find a reason to be curious. Why do Black Americans suffer? Why is the world so fucked up? Why are middle children often forgotten (I see you, Coco)? Why can’t everything be fair and just? Why are Black Women often emotional martyrs? Again - curiosity. This explains my inquisitive obsession with historical fiction novels and the historical accuracy that authors, like Honorée, build upon to bind written stories in the same manner ancestors (like Pop George) would recount aloud to the next generation. There’s a necessity to answer these questions of “why”, no matter how far anyone attempts to distinguish themselves as an exception or erase such historical prominence, it is the root. You cannot extinguish the root of anything, especially not the root of people — I mean you could try... but history loves to repeat itself when you do that. So with that knowledge, Honorée begins The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois from the beginning to understand the Garfield family’s “now”. The foundation that is Womankind.
Through multi-generational research, Ailey reveals festering trauma linked to the “successes” and “failures” of her bloodline, beginning with the Creek people (not Native Americans). Reading Ailey’s genealogical healing caused an intense heartbreak inside me, broadly for Black people and personally as a Black Woman. Reflecting on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, it’s imperative to speak further on the poetic devices used to detail disturbing events impaling Ailey, her sisters, and everyone (that we know of) before her. I cannot tell you the first time I heard about the difficulties of tracing the bloodline of Black Americans, “where we come from”, and the lack of evidence to prove our ancestors’ existence. Do you realize how painful and complex this truly is? How many stories have been lost due to the voices stripped (literally and figuratively) and beaten to silence? Where livelihoods vanished once their next of kin took their final breath because they either couldn’t write, couldn’t read or couldn’t document out of “safety” precautions? It’s all disheartening.
Now here I am kicked into the inquisitive throes of my roots and the “why”s, even the “how”s and the “what”s, because healing is found in genealogy. I may not have an Uncle Root, but I do have literature that stimulates my mind and a desire to know more about myself and its intersection with Blackness.