The Books Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Read While WritingThe Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Thebookshewrote

Thebookssheread

The first book Jeffers mentioned was the canonical “slave narrative,”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,which she first encountered in undergraduate school at Talladega College. “There was something about the tenderness and pain that he experienced along with the way he identified with Black women that really touched me and stayed with me as I was writing,” says Jeffers. The book follows Douglass from childhood to his escape from chattel slavery. Jeffers pointed to the opening of the book when we spoke, saying, “What’s noteworthy about Douglass is that he starts his narrative with Black women. It opens with the first memory of his mother.” This was significant to Jeffers becauseLove Songscenters Black women — their stories and legacy.

The next book she mentioned was W.E.B. Du Bois’sThe Souls of Black Folk, whichThe Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Boisclearly draws inspiration from. In addition to the title, the book is also quoted in the novel’s epigraph, which reads: “They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.”Souls of Black Folkis arguably Du Bois’s best-known work and what many consider to be the most approachable of his texts. It’s where Du Bois first introduced the concept of double consciousness and the color line, concepts that have long made their way from the ivory tower to dinner tables and Twitter feeds. Jeffers said she returned to the book many times while writingLove Songs.“Du Bois was a youngish man when he wroteSouls of Black Folk. He was still hopeful and full of fire. That spirit hovered over me as I was writingLove Songs.”

“These are traditional African American folktales crossed with Cherokee and Creek folktales,” says Jeffers ofThe Complete Tales of Uncle Remus— a compilation of children’s stories that detail the adventures of characters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Wolf. The author, Joel Chandler Harris, preserved the traditional folkloric tales and characters but also added characters of his own. “Even though he has his issues, I’m grateful for him because he collected these folk tales and wrote them down,” she says. I was initially surprised to find this book on Jeffers’s list because it calls up memories of childhood, but upon closer examination, it makes sense.Love Songshas its own folklore running throughout the narrative and captures some of the same magical realism.

Love Songsis set in both an unnamed big city and a fictional town in Georgia called Chicasetta, which Jeffers says is “basically a fictionalized Eatonton.” Its past chapters that are set in Chicasetta focus heavily on stolen land and the politics of property ownership. This book helped Jeffers ensure that despite the fictionalization of the Georgia town, the people it originally belonged to were factually correct. “It gives you essential history about how Georgia came to be,” she says. “It teaches you who was there at the time of the Georgia land lottery and about the federal road that was forced through Creek and Cherokee land.”

Jeffers callsIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl“a quintessential Black feminist book,” though it was written long before the terminology came about. The autobiography, penned by Harriet Jacobs, details her life in captivity and also addresses Northern white women and their indifference to slavery. Jeffers also notes that it’s the first narrative to deal with the sexual violence and abuse many Black women and children experienced at the time. “In many instances, these were not young women, they were children,” she says.Love Songsdeals heavily with sexual assault — and gives an often heart-wrenching look into the effects of that abuse over time. Jeffers said the book was also helpful when it came to writing. “The tone ofIncidentsand the way the language is framed, I tried to mimic that high language they use in the songs inLove Songs.”

As the title suggests,House on Diamond Hilltells the story of Native American plantation slavery and how it functioned in the years leading up to the Cherokee removal. It focuses on James Vann, a Cherokee chief who had the most well-known plantation in the southeastern Cherokee nation. She used Vann as the inspiration for Samuel Pinchard, a very cruel slave master in the book. “It’s full of great details,” Jeffers says.

Jeffers also name-checked this book by NYU professor Jennifer L. Morgan, which discusses how gender was formed differently for Black women and examines it through the lens of labor and reproduction. The book also deals with the legal framing of womanhood in the 17th and 18th centuries, noting that Black women were considered property and thus couldn’t bring lawsuits against the people who assaulted or harmed them. This awareness is present inLove Songsalmost implicitly, informing the way we understand the Black women in the past narrative and the helplessness of their circumstances.

Toni Morrison has been mentioned in nearly every installment of In Context, and for good reason. Her impact on Black female writers — and writers more generally — has been immense. “I don’t think that any writer after 1987 can write about African American chattel slavery and not be informed byBeloved,” says Jeffers. “There’s a tradition, and she altered the tradition in a monumental fashion.”Belovedtells the fictionalized story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who kills her child after realizing she’s going to be dragged back to the plantation. The story deals with the imagined aftermath of that trauma and focuses on Sethe and Denver — a mother and daughter living in a house called 124. Then there’s Beloved, who is perhaps the ghost of the baby Sethe killed. The book masterfully depicts the ways trauma can haunt a person, particularly a trauma as immense and totalizing as chattel slavery. “I didn’t know you could write about ancestry in that sort of personal, non-reverent way until I readBeloved. It’s still loving and respectful, but she’s looking at the ancestors as real people.” InLove Songs, all of the characters are haunted in some way, though not always by the same ghosts. Similar toBeloved, you can feel the fingerprints of trauma all overLove Songs, and the book spends much of its time trying to deal with its effect.

Finally, Jeffers mentionedThe Color Purple— which she considers an essential part of this book’s ecosystem. It’s also personal. Her mother taught Alice Walker, and they’re from the same place — Eatonton, Georgia. “When I read the book, there was a familiarity to everything that I saw,” says Jeffers. “It touched me in a place that I hadn’t known existed. This book andBelovedformed me.The Color Purpletaught me that Black women were real people and not superheroes.”