San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A history student finds own family
Ailey is avoiding her grandmother. During their last visit, Nana told her to be mindful of the male company she kept. “Women push the family forward, Ailey, not backward. You are very, very brown, so you must find someone much fairer than yourself. You must think of your children.”
It’s Ailey’s mom who urges her to show some compassion to the “cantankerous old lady” — because Nana, who is Creole and “passes for white” is, after all, her grandmother. So Ailey goes back to Nana’s. She’s entertaining more disparaging remarks when Nana excuses herself to greet an unexpected visitor in the other room. It’s Ailey’s runaway sister, Lydia, who has come to reveal to their Nana a secret that both girls unknowingly burdened alone: Their Gandee, Nana’s late husband, abused them. It’s a revelation to Ailey. She isn’t alone in her secret, but she also isn’t alone in shielding her family from it. “We both had kept Gandee’s secret, kept our pain inside to protect everyone else in the family.”
It’s a scene that in one deft swoop distills several conflicts central to the soaring, 800-page debut novel by decorated poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.”
The novel follows Ailey as she grows up in Chicasetta, a fictional town in Georgia, with her two older sisters, Coco, in the middle, and Lydia, the eldest. Where the others follow paths that carry them away from home — Coco to Yale, and Lydia, fatally, to crack — it’s Ailey who stays the longest in Georgia and reckons with the secrets nestled in the family tree. Ailey’s first-person narration anchors us in the present as
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois the story moves back and forth in time, from her life to the lives of long gone but not so distant relatives — enslaved Africans, Scottish slave owners and the Creek people from the Oconee River system.
Throughout, the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois punctuate sections, infusing the narrative with his theories, such as how a higher education for the naturally talented men of the Black community, 1 in every 10, would uplift the whole community (the Talented Tenth): “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth.”
Appearances from his realname fictional character serve as a lesson in how history repeats itself, and a warning not to fall prey to anyone’s canonized image. Once, Ailey’s sage Uncle Root met the fictional Du Bois character. He was an asshole, Uncle Root tells Ailey (and a lothario). Later, Uncle Root laughs at the idea of a female Black president. “‘Negro men can’t be feminists,’ the old man said.” Even Ailey’s sharp, benevolent mother, who couldn’t see Gandee as a threat, has her shortcomings: “She couldn’t understand that a man like him — a doctor dressed in suits and ties and who spoke with a perfect, bleached-to-whiteness accent — could have been capable of hurting little girls. Such a fact couldn’t even occupy a hidden place in Mama’s skull.”
In graduate school, where Ailey studies history, the threads of the story begin to come together as her research links the narratives we’ve been following back to her own immediate family: From Coromantee-Panther — named for the Gold Coast on which his mother was born and the Panther clan of Creeks who adopted him — to his part Scottish and Creek offspring, to his great-granddaughter, Eliza, whose tyrannical white husband, Samuel
Pinchard (who would displace the Creek people), is the greatgrandfather of Uncle Root. Ailey learns that while some of her relatives ran away from Pinchard, changed their names, and even founded the college she attends, one, Eliza Two, endured slavery until it was abolished “and all the other crimes against southern Black folks that would come afterward” in Chicasetta. Had she not endured, Ailey would not exist: “I covered my face and began to cry.”
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” is a moving portrait of an American family and its history. It’s beautifully told — it’s sexy, confrontational, tragic — and does exactly what good historical fiction should: holds you fast, brings you closer to history and humanity, and sticks with you for days.
Genevieve Walker is a nonfiction writer and editor in New York City. Her work has appeared in Hodinkee, Take Shape, GQ , Bon Appétit, Real Life, Guernica and others.
Jaime Cortez’s debut story collection, “Gordo,” opens with “The Jesus Donut,” where a group of kids living in a fictional but all-too-real Gyrich Farms Worker Camp get a visit from a mobile doughnut vendor. When one of the kids miraculously scrounges up enough money for two doughnuts, hilarity ensues, involving a re-creation of rituals to earn a bite of the coveted confection. The story is funny and incredibly charming, despite highlighting the acute poverty of the camp’s Latino migrant residents.
“The Jesus Donut” sets the tone for the collection’s waggish and tender look into this significantly ignored world of California migrant communities, here set around Watsonville in the 1970s — both documented and undocumented — mostly through young Gordo’s point of view and his local cast of characters. The camp kids duel for rights over a porn
magazine collection abandoned by beloved worker Primi after he is captured by La Migra in “The Nasty Book Wars.” In “Fandango,” one of my favorites, the worker men get drunk around a fire pit and two brothers stumble into a tongue-severing tussle. The stories are presented as mundane and familiar, yet convey portraits of remarkable poverty and longing.
Cortez masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while prioritizing in these stories the way people adapt to their circumstance — managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph, that which makes us delightfully human — amid its challenge. One of the most moving portraits in this collection occurs in “Chorizo,” where an entire family happens upon Gordo’s house while looking for work and shelter. Despite their meager means, Gordo and his family provide what they can, and the family counters with its own generosity. It reminds us that even when we have little, there is always someone who has less. Cortez never preaches this resolve, but rather reveals it with humor and warmth.
While Cortez explores many potent themes in this collection, his work involving socialized masculinity compelled me most. Young Gordo stumbles through scenarios where men are expected to be aggressive and dominating, in contrast to his own sensitive nature. When facing a moral conundrum with the porn stash in “Nasty Book Wars,” Gordo reasons, “I wanted to tell Sylvie where the books were, but that would show I wasn’t a real boy.”
The story “Alex” becomes a fascinating examination of masculinity, in a unique and complicated way that I won’t spoil in this review.
There is refreshing retribution for the sissy boy, however, in the character of Raymundo, introduced later in the collection. At first, you cringe as you follow his all-too-familiar struggles through middle school in “The
Gordo
Problem of Style,” gratefully dignified by Cortez’s sweet humor: Raymundo “imagined running away to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, or anyplace with cafes.” But then there is the wonderful “Raymundo the Fag,” a sort of anagnorisis for the book, suggesting life isn’t all victimization, that in fact there is a way to triumph over seemingly suffocating circumstances — in this case, machismo — and carve out a place in the community, belong to it, and even want to remain. Raymundo is a revelatory character in fiction, and one of the book’s beloved achievements.
After reading “Gordo,” I was left with this impression: How we adapt is the greatest signature of who we are. The book’s recurring presence of the ranchera “Volver, Volver” becomes an incantation. No matter “how much you want to go back, back, back … you can’t. It’s too late to go back.”
But you can make your way forward, and the way these characters achieve belonging is at once simple and miraculous.
Miah Jeffra is the author of four books, most recently the fiction collection “The Violence Almanac.” Jeffra is the co-founder of queer literary collaborative Foglifter Press and teaches writing and antiracist studies at Santa Clara University.