66 pages • 2 hours read
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Doubling
Versions of doubling permeate The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Readers who peruse the genealogy provided before the novel’s chapters will notice that Ailey’s family line contains an unusually high number of twins. While the reader never meets many of these twins, their presence in the genealogy signals that doubling will be an important motif throughout the novel and across generations.
For instance, Samuel Pinchard and Gandee both prey on young girls and lose interest when the girls reach puberty. Pop George and Uncle Root both live extraordinarily long lives and have reputations as expert storytellers. Mahala and Nana Claire both adore whiteness and think their proximity to it makes them superior to their peers. In some cases, these doubled pairs illustrate the passage of ideals, norms, or tendencies from one generation to the next within the family. In other cases, they indicate that society as a whole has failed to progress over time. In still other cases, they serve as evidence of a spiritual or even supernatural connection between Ailey’s ancestors and their present-day descendants.
The frequency of twins and pairs of characters who serve as each other’s doubles also underscores Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness: the idea that Black Americans exist with two distinct identities, one of which is constantly aware of white society’s perceptions of Blackness. In this sense, the novel’s Black characters each exist as doubles of themselves. Ailey experiences this sensation vividly when she starts graduate school in North Carolina and feels the need to censor her behavior so as not to harm her professional future. Doubling is a particularly malleable motif in the novel, sometimes highlighting similarities and stasis, sometimes differences and change.
Name Changes and Name Choices
Many of the novel’s characters change their names, some by force and others by choice. Coromantee, the oldest ancestor of Ailey’s that we know of, was renamed by European traders; the reader never learns his original name. Aggie is forced to change her birth name, Beauty, to Ahgayuh, which she hates but reclaims some agency over by shortening it to her preferred moniker, Aggie.
As the unnamed narrator of the “Song” sections indicates, European settlers changed the names of many places and peoples. Names that indicated African group affiliations (sometimes inaccurately), such as “Coromantee,” “Igbo,” Wolof,” or “Fula,” were all flattened to “Negro” or “slave.” The Creek people became “Indians” along with every other tribe on the continent. European settlers flattened their own distinctions, like “English” or “Scottish,” to “white.” Even the land the Creek people lived on was renamed “Georgia.” Name changes like these serve to erase any distinction other than “in power” or “not in power.”
On the other hand, some people in the novel change names of their own free will. David chooses to trade the childish nickname “Baybay” for his birth name to signal his manhood. Uncle Root chooses to take his wife’s last name when the two marry because he wants to separate himself from his fraught childhood. Rabbit and Leena change their names for their own protection when they run away and start new lives in the North.
Name changes, then, always signal power: When someone changes someone else’s name, they do so to establish their power over that person or group, whereas when someone changes their own name, they do so to exercise personal autonomy (and often to reverse the lack of autonomy their former name signified). Names may not change a person’s character, but they do change their own sense of freedom and control. Moreover, name changes exert a very real influence over a Black person’s ability to trace their heritage in the US, making them not just a matter of abstract preference but of material importance.
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