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

“We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line. Her people and her dirt, her trees,”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Even in a place of sorrow, time passes. Even in a place of joy. Do not assume that either keeps life from continuing,”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“You should not expect a monster to change, even at the end of a fairy tale. For in a children’s story, the monster must be killed. If he remains alive, his nature will be limned. There is no gentling of an abomination.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Born in the City, her husband wasn’t familiar with the taste of healthy, green food you had picked only hours before. The sight of earth not taken over by concrete. That in darkness, if there was no trouble, the only sounds came from small beings. He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“The year before, I’d been so anxious to do research in the Old South Collections. The archives had fascinated me. Made me happy for the first time in my socially awkward life. But there was a catch when you did research on slavery: you couldn’t only focus on the parts you wanted. You had to wade through everything, in order to get to the documents you needed. You had to look at the slave auctions and whippings. The casual cruelty that indicated the white men who’d owned Black folks didn’t consider them human beings. When I began doing research in the Pinchard family papers, I wasn’t reading about strangers anymore. These were my own ancestors, Black and white. Samuel Pinchard was the great-grandfather of Uncle Root and Dear Pearl.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“But first you got to get out of the library sometimes and meet somebody, 'cause it ain't legal to marry books.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“No matter how low, everyone wants somebody to look down upon. Jeremiah didn’t own one acre to his name, and land was what white men throughout the history of this nation had killed and employed deceit to get. Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“And then think about how angry it would make you that the people who stole your house forgot it had ever belonged to you.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“if a man such as Samuel could evolve from a common, working man into a wealthy landowner, there was hope for anyone, provided he was white, for Negroes didn’t count, and Indians were dead men walking.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“There isn’t a true innocence for children whose parents are shackled.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”; Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith; bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens are all like scripture to me. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was my first introduction (on the page) to a Black feminist heroine as well as to the African American southern vernacular that my mother’s family spoke.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn’t even southern? That a Black child didn’t have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they’d never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“thought of what Mama liked to say: to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“At that meal in the small kitchen, Diane hadn’t identified the girl’s race. And when Belle had asked, had the girl with Lawrence been Negro or white? her sister-in-law had blushed and said she couldn’t remember. Belle knew then, even if Diane didn’t suffer from a medical condition, she truly didn’t care what race somebody was. Instead of pleasing Belle, this discovery made her furious, and she walked to the stove, though the burners were off and had cooled. Belle stirred a pot of lukewarm greens to cover the noise of her loud breathing. Her outraged exhalations, as she considered that Diane was a white woman who could walk through the world and stay blessedly unaware of the color line.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“When I read her two books, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, I experienced something like a “happy” shout in church. Before I read these books, the Afro-Euro-Creek characters of Wood Place were still rolling around in my head. I was sure my novel was possible, but I didn’t yet have the nerve to write it. Reading Tiya Miles’s”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Four wonderful books on early Creek and Cherokee histories are Michael Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis; Claudio Saunt’s A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816; Theda Purdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866; and Angela Pulley Hudson’s Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Miss Rose sitting on a porch. Beside her, a bushel basket of ripe peaches or tomatoes. The drunkards buzzing, but easily smashed with a swat. Early mornings, she starts singing, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and that's your cue to rise. To eat the heavy breakfast that will keep you full all day. Once you've helped her with peeling those tomatoes or peaches, there are weeds to be plucked from the garden, from around the vegetables that will show up fresh on the supper table. Fish need cleaning if Uncle Norman comes through with a prize. After dinner, the piecing together of quilt tops from remnants until the light completely fades. The next morning, it starts again. A woman singing off-key praises to the Lord. The sweet fruit dripping with juice. The sound of bugs.

I thought of what Mama liked to say: to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“the truth can be both horrible and lovely at the same time.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Christian missionaries who intruded at odd times to advocate baptism and the romantic practice of the man on top instead of on the bottom or from behind. They insisted that anyone civilized knew the latter two were unholy and, moreover, encouraged the rheumatism.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Henry Louis Gates’s edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs’s as well as Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“And give up the white man’s god—his ugly god, his lying god, his torturous god, his thieving god, his tricking god, and rebuke his missionaries who had one set of rules for white Christians and another for Christians among the people, and who, when asked, talked crossways, so that one word followed the next down a line leading to a place where buzzards roosted and called out beaked noise.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“all this time, I been asking myself, why couldn’t them crackers just leave us colored folks alone? Let”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Unofficially—for not even white men would write such rules down—if Matthew wanted to take Rabbit by force, no one would challenge him. It was not even against the law in Georgia for a white man to ravish a slave woman. If the woman was a white man’s own slave, it was his right. If he ravished another white man’s slave, it was only a crime against property, such as hurting a horse or dog that belonged to another. Yet”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free and strong. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois