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

This summary covers “For You to Love,” “The Night I Fell in Love,” “Till My Baby Comes Home,” “My Sensitivity Gets in the Way,” “A House Is Not a Home,” and “The Other Side of the World.”

Ailey’s timeline backtracks to fill in the story of Lydia’s life beyond what Ailey knows about it. Lydia’s earliest memories involve Gandee’s sexual abuse, including his warnings that he would kill her and her entire family if she ever told anyone about it. The abuse lasts for years, until Lydia begins menstruating and Gandee loses interest.

In contrast to her time at Nana Claire’s house, the family’s summer visits to Chicasetta provide a loving safe haven. In her teenage years, however, Tony Crawford starts cornering her when she is alone, eventually escalating to kissing and then to sex. Crawford is roughly twice Lydia’s age and she is not attracted to him, but she enjoys feeling that she has some power and volition when he begs her for sex. Tony eventually keeps Lydia overnight at a motel, causing Belle to panic about her whereabouts. The secret now out, Lydia’s Uncle Norman beats Tony and Belle hits Lydia with a switch. Worse yet, Lydia soon realizes Tony has impregnated her. Belle takes her to get an abortion.

When she starts college at Routledge, Lydia meets Dante. They bond over shared experiences with sexual abuse—Lydia with Gandee and Dante with his Uncle Warren. The relationship grows more serious, and the pair eventually marry at a courthouse. She does not tell her family, though, fearing that they will consider him beneath her.

One day, Lydia is disturbed to find a bag of drugs in Dante’s drawer, but he assures her he is merely selling the drugs, not using them. This turns out to be true, but Lydia nevertheless tries to warn Dante against his best friend, Tim, who got him into the business. Dante tearfully maintains he cannot desert his oldest friend.

After the stress of a brief pregnancy scare, Lydia tries a “primo”—a marijuana joint rolled with cocaine—one Saturday night at a party. She repeats this week after week and eventually finds herself unable to endure the days between the parties; she starts stealing small amounts of cocaine from Dante’s stash. It is during this period that she takes Dante home to meet her family, getting high in the bathroom late at night when others are asleep. When Dante realizes the extent of her drug use, he makes a plan: She will leave their home to stay with her family until she regains sobriety, at which point they will move to a new neighborhood where drugs are not so readily available.

Lydia agrees to try this plan, but that very day a person with a drug addiction kills Dante while attempting to rob him. Still using drugs and now dealing with the loss of her husband, Lydia sells more and more of her possessions to fund her dependency. When she runs out of things to sell, Tim tries to persuade her to trade sex for crack. Realizing that her life has spun out of control, she drives home to Chicasetta to plead with her family for help.

The next two months comprise the period after Belle takes Lydia to rehab. There, she gets sober and starts to process her trauma from Gandee’s sexual abuse. She re-enrolls at Routledge and resumes her previous life until she attends the sorority party with Coco. When a song played at the party reminds her of Dante, she seeks refuge in a quiet room but finds a man doing cocaine there. He offers it to her and she takes it, beginning a spiral into relapse. Outside, she sees Coco kissing a woman next to the car; although Lydia does not bring it up, Coco seems anxiously aware that Lydia might have seen.

Belle and Geoff realize Lydia is back on drugs and tell her they’ll put her back in rehab. When her father begins driving her there, though, he reveals his secret plan: Because they do not have the money to put Lydia in rehab, Geoff is instead going to rent her an apartment owned by Zulu Harris and check on her regularly, all the while telling Belle that Lydia has run away again. He buys Lydia some furnishings and a sewing machine, which she uses to support herself by making dresses for women in the neighborhood. Though she wants to be fully recovered, she occasionally follows anyone who looks like a person with a crack addiction to find their dealers.

After seeing no one in her family for many months, she decides to try to get sober so she can resume her old life. This is short-lived, however. She takes a bus to Nana Claire’s house because she knows Ailey is there; this is the argument Ailey overhears from upstairs, as Lydia confronts Nana Claire about Gandee’s abuse. She leaves the house so despairing that she wants drugs. When she hears the news of Geoff’s death from Zulu, she goes into a deep depression and barely leaves her room all winter. She emerges in the spring and soon runs into Ailey at the clinic where Ailey volunteers.

Ailey keeps the secret of Lydia’s whereabouts from Belle but visits her regularly. The sisters are as close as ever—they read The Color Purple together, shop together, eat together, and discuss the family together. Ailey continuously urges Lydia to come home again, but Lydia maintains that she wants to get clean before she sees Belle. Eventually, Lydia admits that she and Dante did not merely split up, but that Dante is dead. When she goes on to confess Gandee’s abuse, she is horrified to learn that Ailey survived his abuse too, blaming herself for not telling anyone. That night, Lydia gets high as soon as Ailey leaves her apartment. While in this state, she hears a knock on the door and gets up to investigate. A woman with long dark hair and a ragged dress beckons her down the stairs; a young Dear Pearl is there too, as well as Geoff and Dante, all waiting at the bottom of the stairs, happy to see her.