The Good Lord Bird by James McBride: review
Exploring what it means to be free after being born as property.
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Just after dusk on October 16, 1859, white abolitionist John Brown led a small group of men to attack the loosely guarded armoury in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Brown intended to seize guns and spark an uprising of slaves and white sympathizers.
Although Brown's plan failed and he was hanged for treason, the raid is an oft-touted symbol of the slavery debate that galvanized emotions and split North and South on the eve of the U.S. civil war.
Composer, screenwriter and author James McBride retells the story of the raid and its preceding events in satiric fashion in his latest novel, The Good Lord Bird. The bird in question is the rare ivory-billed woodpecker, a good luck charm for the Brown clan.
Although the abolitionist — in McBride's depiction a scruffy, Bible-quoting fanatic — is a central character, McBride has created a 10-year-old boy named Henry Shackleford as the main protagonist. Henry, whom Brown mistakes for a girl named Henrietta, perpetuates the misunderstanding, initially for fear Brown will harm him. After donning a dress Brown gives him, Henry continues to pretend to be Henrietta for the next four years as he travels with Brown around the country rallying support for the anti-slavery cause.
Henry grows to admire Brown, despite the hardships journeying with him inflicts upon the boy. The ensuing years bring Henry into proximity with some of the era's leading abolitionist figures, including Frederick Douglass, the eloquent former slave who McBride describes as bearing himself “like a king.” Douglass, however, ultimately has feet of clay — at least where Brown is concerned. Henry is more impressed with Harriet Tubman, the legendary conductor of the Underground Railroad, whose strength of character and perception make Henry afraid she has discerned his secret. “Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane,” McBride writes.
McBride has a flare for dialogue. His talent shows itself in memorable exchanges between Brown and Henry/Henrietta, as well as between Henry and other supporting characters. McBride has done extensive research and uses Henry's pragmatic nature to strip away much of the idealism surrounding Brown's quest. Instead, McBride portrays the realities of the political difficulty involved in inciting slaves to rise up to free themselves. McBride's language is also earthy and contemporary; readers should be prepared for references to “niggers,” “Negroes” and “coloreds.”
Despite the plot's potential, the novel moves slowly. In Henry, McBride has not created an entirely sympathetic or convincing character. We don't learn enough about Henry's interior life or motivations, other than his strong desire for self-preservation. Consequently, there's no strong emotional connection for the reader. Although it's clear Henry's gender-bending charade causes him difficulties, as when Henry falls in love with Brown's daughter Annie, the narrative advantage of having Henry pose as Henrietta is neither completely clear nor well-exploited.
Where McBride shines in his depiction of lesser characters, like Sibonia, a slave who organizes an aborted rebellion and pays with her life.
Questions of identity are central to much of McBride's work, including his earlier acclaimed autobiography, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. In The Good Lord Bird, Henry not only struggles with how to become a strong black man while masquerading as a young woman, but with what it means to be free after being born as property. McBride doesn't fully resolve that question for us, and suggests Henry can't resolve it for himself. In the prologue to the book, we learn that members of the church where his story is discovered apparently believed, well into the 1940s, that he was a woman.
Laura Eggertson is an Ottawa-based freelance journalist.
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