And this book is particularly for Black women. KING: As you write, do you envision a particular person reading the book? And does that affect how you put things down on the page?

So I made sure that, you know, my heroine was representative of a line of Black women and that she would honor them. But when we went outside of that community, that's when we were expected to make ourselves small and silent and to consider ourselves not as pretty as white or lighter-skinned girls. I grew up around girls like that and girls that we all thought were pretty in the Black community. I just wanted to create someone that I grew up around. I wanted her to be chubby and to have people consider her beautiful. And so when I thought about Ailey, I wanted cocoa brown, you know, nudging up against chocolate brown girl. I wanted to tell the story of heroic Black women and dark-skinned Black women, because I feel like although Black female authors write a lot about darker-skinned Black women, we don't really usually see them in the center of their own world. You know, when we think of epic in the Western tradition, it's always the heroic feats of white men. JEFFERS: Well, I describe this story as a kitchen table epic. Tell me about Ailey and how she became the person through whom we largely see this story unfold.

And so she spends summers back in the town. And the main character is Ailey Pearl Garfield. KING: Now, the town comes into play in an enormous way because the characters in this book spring from this town. So I can see Chicasetta so clearly in my mind because I went to Eatonton every summer as a little girl. And my people are from Eatonton, Ga., in Putnam County. But it is set in a real county, Putnam County, Ga. A few people tell me they actually tried to look it up on the map. JEFFERS: Well, Chicasetta is a fictional town. And give us a sense of how you understand that place and how you think readers will understand that place. Before we get to the characters, I want to ask you to tell us about the town, the town that came to you first, Chicasetta. But if people notice that it seems to be more lyrical, those songs seem to be more lyrical, more poetic, it's because when they came to me, they came to me in very long poem.

HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS: You know, when I would wake up and the words would come to me, it was almost like a very long prose poem. And there was even a point where her characters started talking to her in her dreams. I asked Jeffers, who is a poet, how she took to writing a work of such length that takes place over centuries. But this book was meant to be an epic, and it is. Over the span of almost 800 pages, the writer Honoree Fanonne Jeffers traces the story of a family, the town in Georgia where they come from and their migration outward over generations.

The love songs of web dubois