'The Good Lord Bird,' by James McBride
Updated 5:49 pm, Friday, August 23, 2013
The Good Lord Bird
By James McBride
(Riverhead; 417 pages; $27.95)
We have heard of good people who get swept up in historical circumstances and act badly. But sometimes history flatters mediocre people - that is, certain members of the fair-to-middling majority who, by happenstance, act bravely. Such is the persona who narrates James McBride's absorbing and darkly funny novel, "The Good Lord Bird."
Henry Shackelford is McBride's protagonist, a faux-naif square in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn. We receive Shackelford's memoirs, "discovered" in a fireproof box, more than 70 years after they were dictated to a fellow member of his Delaware church. In the opening lines of his narrative, Shackelford confesses that he "lived as a colored woman for seventeen years." Why a woman? During a raid on his master's tavern in Kansas, the young slave Henry gets "liberated" by a gaunt man whose "toes stuck clean through the toe points." This "sorry-looking package" turns out to be the feared and revered abolitionist John Brown.
Whisked to a crude camp on the prairie, Henry gets conscripted into Brown's army as Brown's personal good-luck charm, and dubbed the Onion. There's only one problem, which is that Brown seems to think that the petite Henry is a girl. Neither we nor our hero ever figure out exactly why Henry doesn't protest when Brown rechristens him "Henrietta," or why he keeps his enforced identity for so long.
But this open question is a rich one. One answer is that it is unthinkable for Henry to disagree with a white man. Another answer is that sometimes, being a girl saves Henry's (rather thin) skin. But gradually, we also see how his role-playing allows him into the point of view of another, the exercise of which reminds him, in a roundabout way, why one human being cannot enslave another. However you slice it, in the lawless, dung-smelling, infested prairie, Henry's sanguine reaction to his absurd gender switch makes sense, and McBride makes sure everyone in the book is equally confused, playing and being played in a kind of survivalist theater. The novel gallops through a dozen exciting scrapes. Henry/Henrietta lands briefly in a brothel as a maid and falls in love with a treacherous prostitute; he witnesses the hanging of a powerful slave named Sibonia; he meets a formidable Harriet Tubman.
He is almost 14 by the time we arrive at the climactic scene at Harper's Ferry. The reimagining of this doomed raid alone is reason enough to read "The Good Lord Bird," and here as elsewhere, McBride - whose books include the memoir "The Color of Water" and the novel "Miracle at St. Anna" - manages to novelize real historical events without dreary prostrations to the act.
And the portrait of "the real" John Brown is indelible. In the book's back pages, the author acknowledges "all those who ... have kept the memory of John Brown alive," and at heart, the novel is an homage to a complex and fascinating American hero and a superbly inventive retelling of an American tale.
John Brown was a thunderously single-minded abolitionist, a visionary and a one-man show, and throughout "The Good Lord Bird," one can see why McBride admires him. We witness Brown's suicidal blindness, his long-windedness and his radiance. Even a ne'er-do-well like Henry can't fight off a growing tenderness for the man, and in the end, is made better by their association, risking his own life at Harper's Ferry, at least partially to protect Brown's illusions.
Despite the fact that John Brown is a widely known figure, "The Good Lord Bird" doesn't stand on ceremony, and McBride never delivers the sanctimonious speeches that could appliance such a tale (except ironically, during a cameo appearance by a drunken Frederick Douglass - ouch!).
Though the story is about an idealist, it is told by an unsentimentalist and a career liar. "Being free weren't worth s-," Henry says in several different ways throughout his tale. Years go by when he is separated from his guardian Brown, and characteristically, Henry barely thinks of him. He thinks about sex and food, how to get johnnycakes down his "red lane."
Still, we see how Henry suffers, and how slavery destroys both body and soul. Befriended by Brown's pious daughter, Annie, Henry says, "I come to enjoy those talks, for even though I'd gotten used to living a lie - being a girl - it come to me this way: Being a Negro's a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. ... You just a Negro to the world." A freed slave like Henry is not "free" - his continued cross-dressing only exemplifies his estrangement from himself. As Henry says, "Every colored did what they had to do to make it."
In this vacuum of truth and kindness, the white man takes every advantage. Even Brown is susceptible. "Whatever he believed, he believed," says Henry. "It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man."
And yet he was the white man whose hell-bent and perhaps delusional crusade helped bring about the end of slavery. Things didn't end well for Brown, but for a while he scorched a path through a complacent nation. As one slave marvels to Henry, in the wake of an encounter with Brown, "They gonna kill him for being so dumb. He ain't right in his mind. Ain't you seen that?"