| The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Riverhead, 417 pages, $27.95 2013 National Book Award Winner |
The Omen of The Good Lord Bird: American Slavery and the Story of John Brown as Tragicomedy
Nearly two decades since the publication of his sensational memoir, The Color of Water, James McBride has spun another fantastic and comedic yarn--this time of John Brown’s rebellion in The Good Lord Bird. Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, McBride frames his novel as a recovered slave narrative recounted by Henry ‘the Onion’ Shackleford and ghost-written by an “amateur historian” of dubious reputation. This fiction, the prologue informs readers, is the product of an unverified document, written by a person of uncertain character, recounted from the memory of a another man said to be a centenarian that nobody remembers, about an event that lacks historical eyewitness testimony. So, while, incredulous readers won't be fooled by the creative historic framing of this story, they’ll almost undoubtedly be entertained by its possibility.
The Good Lord Bird chronicles the four years leading up to that fated day in American antebellum history--October 16, 1859--the ruinous raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As Henry ‘the Onion’ Shackleford tells it, he was 10 years old when he encounters Old John Brown and his abolitionist militia, the Pottawatomie Rifles. Brown confuses Henry to be a girl because “like most colored boys did in them days”, he wore a potato sack for clothing. Brown consequently hears “Henry ain’t a--” (a stalled attempt to correct the gender confusion) and takes it to mean “Henrietta”. Thus completes the narrator’s gender reassignment and the identity he takes for most of the novel. And by the end of this first encounter, Henry’s father, Gus, will be dead and Henry will have a new liberator and ironically new 'Massa' in Mr. Brown.
In one sense, Henry’s transvestitism serves a simple survival technique. He admits, “I weren’t for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, an fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy, and figuring you is tired when you is not, and just general niceness in the way folks render you” (78). But in a deeper sense, it symbolizes the blindness of whites--even the best intentioned like John Brown who “just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man” (19). This blindness to see across the racial divide is a recurring theme throughout The Good Lord Bird and one that crops up on many fronts. Later in the novel, Henry muses:
“...for it weren’t in me to be a man. I was but a coward, living a lie. When you thunk on it, it weren’t a bad lie. Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside your, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your need and wants got no track whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, ... What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.” (343).
This is Henry’s rationale for an awkward but not entirely unwelcome yasabossin. Different slaves reiterate this observation over and over: “Some folks’ll climb a tree to tell a lie before they’ll stand on the ground and tell the truth” (152); “Truth is, lying come natural to all Negroes during slave time, for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thought to the boss. Much of colored life was an act, and the Negroes that sawed wood and said nothing lived the longest” (28); “I’d got used to living a lie--being a girl--it come to me this way: Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway (318); “There ain’t nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person....So I played dumb and tragic (234); and “Every nigger got the same job....Their job is to tell a story the white man likes” (179).
One of the prominent features that sets McBride’s novel apart from other slave narratives or stories recounting slavery is its burlesque. Using an ebullient bumpkin slave (or, as Henry might say “full of beans”) to frame the narrative is brilliant--not entirely unlike Mark Twain’s Huck Finn or Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. It’s not uncommon for some historical events to emotionally calcify as sacrosanct in the reiteration & retelling--American slavery and the Nazi holocaust foremost among them. So, when novels, films, plays, & songs come out depicting such macabre events; readers, viewers, attendees, and listeners can usually sit back in a staid expectation for what they’re going to get. Sure, it might be ghastly, but at least it’s familiar. Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful exquisitely shows just what an alternate tone can bring to a familiar historical event like Nazi concentration camps. More recently--and Dreisinger points this out in his New York Times review--comedians like Key & Peele have tackled both slavery and the holocaust with some darkly hilarious sketches--at once familiar and yet fresh, riveting and yet disorienting on account of the hilarity squeezed from situations that are supposed to be horrifying and repugnant.
Most of McBride’s comedy stems from the narrator’s zany point of view and quirky idioms. You wouldn’t expect to hear someone who witnessed their own father’s murder at the age of ten to describe it thusly: “[Pa] staggered back, dropped to the floor, and blowed out his spark right there” (20). Too, one could easily imagine a very different account of John Brown’s rebellion told by John Brown, himself, or if told by the so-called uppity or high-siddity folks that crop up in the story like Fredrick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. Matthew Karp puts it well: “In McBride’s hands, the picturesque comes by way of the picaresque—the novel’s narrator is a fictionalized scamp who follows Brown’s adventures from the prairie to the scaffold, and speaks in a folksy drawl that cloaks high reverence in low comedy.” In a way, this coupling of humor & horror is what helps makes the story palatable. For instance, an “objective” account of a pre-pubescent slave-child throwing exorbitant quantities of Whisky (“rotgut”, “moral suasion”, or “giddy juice”) down his throat (“little red lane”) in a whore house (where breasts become love bags, knobs, lumps, or knockers) after witnessing murders, killings, and public executions (people being “aired out”, “buttered with lead” or “blowed out their sparks”) might be factual but not altogether endurable. Little Onion’s comical slang serves as a helpful capsule that allows the gravity of each situation to slide down easily but take affect in reflection. It yields a sort of double take, readers will inevitably think back and wonder "What the hell happened?" not so much from confusion but from a stunned sense that they could laugh about such disturbing events. Cue Cards Against Humanity comments.
What heightens the comedy in this novel, though, is the plausibility of the farce. It’s not a stretch to compare the humor of McBride’s Good Lord Bird with Heller’s classic, Catch-22. While it’s obvious Little Onion occasionally exaggerates in scenes like the Pikesville firefight where “bullets zinged high overhead and kicked around [Brown’s] boots and near my face, but he stood where he was a good five minutes, lecturing his thoughts on King Solomon and about me not reading the Good book” (196). This image of obstinate Brown could easily be attributed to the lionizing legend of Stonewall Jackson or any other devout military leader of the time. Even John Brown’s hyperbolic persona seems to have historic parallels. John Wilkes Booth--yes, that JWB--a man who ardently hated John Brown’s Free-State agenda gave him credit for being “the grandest character of the century”. But as Arana points out in her Washington Post review: “We tend to forget that history is all too often made by fallible beings who make mistakes, calculate badly, love blindly and want too much. We forget, too, that real life presents utterly human heroes with far more contingency than history books can offer.” If anything, Little Onion’s story serves to simultaneously elevate Brown into a singular hero who helped spur the Yanks into a Civil War while satirizing his religious fervor. And Dreisinger proposes that “irreverence becomes not a lampooning of champions and calamities but a new kind of homage.” It’s one thing to hear stale praise from a stranger or third-party observer and quite another to hear personal ribbing from an intimate acquaintance. In this personalization of Brown, readers feel closer to him and are, therefore, more apt to accept his blustering idiosyncrasies.
And despite all Onion’s jibber-jabber about Brown’s farcically long religious prayers (“powwowing with his Maker”), orations, & moralizing; by the end of the novel, McBride manages to dimensionalize Brown as the titular totem of restoration & liberation for American abolitionism. John Brown is the good lord bird. And in the telling of it, as they travel across the country together, Onion’s opinion of Brown shifts from a man whose “cheese had slid off his Biscuit” to one of retrospective reverence. While in prison, awaiting his public execution, Brown confides in Henry:
[John Brown] reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Good Lord Bird feather. “The Good Lord Bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. You know why? He’s searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing gets tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes ’em strong. Gives ’em life. And the circle goes ’round. (415)
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A few references & links:
The New York Times “Marching On” by Dreisinger
Los Angeles Times “‘The Good Lord Bird’ is a twisted take on an Abolitionist’s Story” by Hector Tobar
The Washington Post “‘The Good Lord Bird’” by Marie Arana
Salon “‘The Good Lord Bird’: A new take on Huck Finn” by Laura Miller
NPR “A Little Onion Reveals Layers Of History In 'Good Lord Bird'” by Bobbi Booker
Public Books “John Brown’s Body” by Matthew Karp
Slate's Audio Book Club by Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon, and David Haglund
Slate's Audio Book Club by Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon, and David Haglund
LitLovers The Good Lord Bird
2013 National Book Award speech “E. L. Doctorow and Toni Morrison and Mya Angelo, they’re our John Browns. And it’s our responsibility to pave the way, to further widen the trial they’ve set for us. And I’m proud to be part of that number.”
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