Point of View

There are two primary points of view: Ailey's first-person, past tense narration of her childhood and young-adulthood, and the third-person, past tense narration of Ailey's maternal ancestors' enslavement in the Songs. There are two chapters devoted to Maybelle and Lydia, narrated in a third-person, past tense point of view. The first-person point of view featured in Ailey's story and the Songs lends a degree of intimacy to the development of the plots, bringing the reader closer to these characters' experience than a third-person narration would entail.

The third-person narration featured in Lydia's and Maybelle's chapters creates distance between these two characters and the reader. This forces the reader to read these chapters objectively, which facilitates the ability to compare these two characters with Ailey. The reader can thus clearly see how the three women are similar and how they differ. The third-person narration of the...