The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

This summary covers “Who Remembers This?,” “Any More White Folks,” “Mama's Bible,” and “Like Agatha Christie.”

Ailey, now 33 and hard at work on her doctoral dissertation, returns to Chicasetta to attend Founder’s Day at Routledge, where Uncle Root is being honored for his decades as a professor. David picks her up from the airport. Realizing that she can enhance her research by speaking with the elderly people in her life who know the most about Wood Place’s history, she interviews Uncle Root, Miss Rose, and Cordelia. Uncle Root explains that Victor and Nick, his paternal grandfather and his great-grandmother’s father, respectively, were half-brothers. He is shocked when she tells him that he is distantly related to the Franklins.

Miss Rose can remember her great-great-grandmother, Eliza Two, avoiding discussions about the days of slavery; she only did so (reluctantly) to a Works Progress Administration employee who was recording her for posterity. She also remembers Eliza Two speaking of Aggie, her own grandmother, who had very long, dark hair, which catches Ailey’s attention as it sounds exactly like the woman who has appeared to her in dreams.

Cordelia can remember living in the Wood Place plantation house as a very young girl before it burned down.