Review: "The Good Lord Bird," by James McBride

Is comedy the best way to tell a tragic story? That's certainly true for "The Good Lord Bird," by James McBride, which tells the story of antislavery vigilante and revolutionary John Brown from the point of view of 13-year-old former slave Henry Shackleford. Nicknamed "Onion" and mistaken for a girl by John Brown, Henry somewhat unwillingly joins Brown's gang after his father, also a slave, is killed in one of Brown's raids in Kansas. The light-skinned Henry's single-minded pursuit of self-preservation contrasts sharply with Brown's single-minded pursuit of the violent overthrow of the slave state. This conflict drives the book's comedic arc and its ultimately tragic conclusion.

McBride's use of humor makes John Brown--whose armed struggle against slaveowners and the slave state in Missouri, Kansas, and Virginia is considered a key precursor to the Civil War--less of a legend and more of a human being, and his actions therefore that much more brave, and his fate that much more tragic. I didn't think the book was perfect--I wish McBride had trusted his readers to remember some of the plot details (instead of repeating them throughout the book), and it seems a bit rich for a professional writer to criticize Frederick Douglass for being a man of words and not action--but I did think it was startling, provocative, funny, tragic, accessible, and absolutely worth reading.

There is a lot going on in the book about race, gender, literacy and education, sexuality, violence, geography, and religion, and the performances thereof, and how these lines divided and united the categories of people created by slavery and its westward expansion: slaves, runaway slaves, field slaves, house slaves, free people of color, abolitionists, slaveowners, those who didn't own slaves but supported or benefited from those who did...and on and on. The brutal political economy of slavery touched everyone, just as the brutalities of today's political economy touch us all.

This historical period and McBride's complex, specific, and often hilarious portrayal of those who lived it, challenges us to question how far we are willing to go for what we believe in. It's comforting for me to think, from the vantage point of the 21st century, that I would have been part of the Underground Railroad or the abolition movement. But the laughter that I shared with Onion as he pursued his own survival made me ultimately more vulnerable to his observations, which might otherwise sound trite, of the real bravery and sacrifices of those who fought back, and along with Onion, to question whether I would have done the same.