The great 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 Boiss words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americansthe revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmersAiley carries Du Boiss Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mothers family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging thats made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of womenher mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuriesthat urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her familys past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestorsIndigenous, Black, and whitein the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the storyand the songof America itself.

The 2020 National Book Awardnominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epican intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancerthat chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.