So what do I mean when I speak of a missed opportunity? I mean the opportunity to grasp the full meaning of what W. The occasion deserved something better than a journalistic stunt, which mangled key elements in the history of North American slavery in order to serve a political agenda-reparations-that descends into absurdity, as is now happening in California, the moment it begins to be contemplated as a practical measure. The year 2019, which was the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, could have been a signal moment for the entire nation to reflect on the long trajectory of Africans’ rich and multifarious influence on American life. One of the most important things to be said about the New York Times’ loud but intellectually threadbare effort to recast the year 1619 as the date of the American nation’s “true founding” is that it was a missed opportunity. Agent: Sarah Burns, the Gernert Company.How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. The multigenerational story bursts open when Ailey unearths some unknown family history during her graduate studies, as well as secrets of the Black female founder of her family’s alma mater. Du Bois’s theories emerge in epigraphs throughout and are sagaciously reflected in the plot, as the accounts of Ailey’s college life correspond to the “talented tenth.” Later, tragedy unfolds as Lydia, Ailey’s oldest sister who is haunted by childhood sexual abuse, succumbs to crack addiction. Ailey follows in the footsteps of her parents, attending the southern HBCU where they met and married as undergraduates before moving north to the “City,” where Geoff attended medical school at Mecca University (a thinly veiled Howard).
Throughout, historical sketches (or “songs”) link Ailey to her ancestors: Creeks, enslaved Africans, and early Scot slave owners.
Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light-skinned Washington, D.C., physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher, reckons with ancestral trauma while growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. Poet Jeffers ( The Age of Phyllis) debuts with a staggering and ambitious saga exploring African American history.
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