The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois is a tale of inheritance and reckoning with history that follows young African-American woman Ailey as she traces her family roots in the Deep South across two centuries. This debut novel chronicles the journey of multiple generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to the present day, by poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

The scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the problem of race in America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words. Ailey grows up in the north in the city but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge her to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.