Good Lord Bird (McBride)

The Good Lord Bird 
James McBride, 2013
Penguin Group USa
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486340


Summary
From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl.

Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War.

An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride’s meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 11, 1957
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; M.A., Columbia University
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.


James McBride, an American writer and musician, was raised in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects. His father, the Rev. Andrew D. McBride (1911–1957), was African-American and his mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska (1921–2010), was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. McBride was the last child Ruth had from her first marriage, and the eighth of 12 children in all.

I'm proud of my Jewish history,...Technically I guess you could say I'm Jewish since my mother was Jewish...but she converted (to Christianity). So the question is for theologians to answer.... I just get up in the morning happy to be living.

Two of his older brothers, Dennis and Billy, graduated with doctorates in medicine, but medicine had no appeal for James. Instead, he attended Oberlin College and received an undergraduate degree in music composition, followed by a Master's in journalism from Columbia University.

Journalism
As a journalist, he was on the staffs of many well-known publications, including Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, and People. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Us, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Essence, New York Times, and others. Mr. McBride is a charter member of the Clint Harding Network, a group of well-known journalists, writers and musicians who periodically have appeared live on a Missouri radio program for the last two decades.

Author
McBride is best known for his 1996 memoir, the bestselling The Color of Water, which describes his life growing up in a large, poor African American family led by a white, religious, and strict Jewish mother, whose father was an Orthodox rabbi, but converted and became devoutly Christian during her first marriage to Andrew McBride.

The memoir spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and has become an American classic. It is read in high schools and universities across America, has been translated into 16 languages, and sold more than 2.5 million copies.

In 2002, he published a novel, Miracle at St. Anna, drawing on the history of the overwhelmingly African American 92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from mid-1944 to April 1945. The book was adapted into the movie Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee, released in 2008.

McBride's 2008 novel, Song Yet Sung, is about an enslaved woman who has dreams about the future, and a wide array of freed black people, enslaved people, and whites whose lives come together in the odyssey that surrounds the last weeks of this woman's life. Harriet Tubman served as an inspiration for the book, and it provides a fictional depiction of a code of communication that enslaved people used to help runaways attain freedom. The book, based on real-life events that occurred on Maryland's Eastern Shore, also featured the notorious criminal Patty Cannon as a villain.

In 2012 McBride co-wrote and co-produced the film Red Hook Summer with Spike Lee, and in  2014 he published The Good Lord Bird, a comic novel recounting the life of notorious abolitionist John Brown. It won the National Book Award.

Musician
McBride is the tenor saxophonist for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of best selling authors—Mitch Albom Dave Barry, Amy Tam, Scott Turow, to name a few—who are lousy musicians. "Hopefully," according to McBride, "the group has retired for good." However in 2013, along with the with the rest of the group, he co-authored Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Bank Ever (of Authors) Tells All.

He has also toured as a saxophonist with jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott and has his own band that plays an eclectic blend of music. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, and Gary Burton.

In 2005, he published the first volume of The Process, a CD-based documentary about life as lived by low-profile jazz musicians.

McBride composed the theme music for the Clint Harding Network, Jonathan Demme's New Orlean's Documentary, Right to Return, and Ed Shockley's Off-Broadway musical Bobos.

McBride was awarded the 1997 American Music Festival’s Stephen Sondheim Award, the 1996 American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award, and the 1996 ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award.

Personal
McBride is currently a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University. He has three children and lives between New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/7/2014.)

Book Reviews
[A] magnificent…brilliant romp of a novel about [John] Brown…McBride—with the same flair for historical mining, musicality of voice and outsize characterization that made his memoir, The Color of Water, an instant classic—pulls off his portrait masterfully, like a modern-day Mark Twain: evoking sheer glee with every page…McBride sanctifies by humanizing; a larger-than-life warrior lands—warts, foibles, absurdities and all—right here on earth, where he's a far more accessible friend…In [McBride's] hands, John Brown is a wild and crazy old man—and more a hero than ever before.
Baz Dreisinger - New York Times Book Review


A superbly written novel.... Through crackling prose and smart, wryly humorous dialogue, McBride tells his story through the eyes of the slave Henry Shackleford, who as a young boy is kidnapped by Brown during one of his Kansas raids. Wrapping the ugliness of slavery in a pitch-perfect adventure story is more than just a reimagining of an historic event. McBride, as he did in Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, transcends history and makes it come alive.
Chicago Tribune


Absorbing and darkly funny.... [A]t heart, the novel is an homage to a complex and fascinating American hero and a superbly inventive retelling of an American tale.
San Francisco Chronicle


James McBride made a gutsy decision when he chose to retell the rather tragic story of John Brown's failed slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 as a historical romp with a gender-bending male slave as the great abolitionist's sidekick. The resulting new novel, The Good Lord Bird, is not only an irrepressibly fun read, but an iconoclastic exploration of a period in American history, the antebellum slave era, that we tend to handle with kid gloves.
Seattle Times


It takes a daring writer to tackle a decidedly unflattering pre-Civil War story. Yet, in McBride's capable hands, the indelicate matter of a befuddled tween from the mid-19th century provides a new perspective on one of the most decisive periods in the history of this country.
NPR


[A] fresh perspective on abolitionist firebrand John Brown in this novel disguised as the memoir of a slave boy who pretends to be a girl in order to escape pre–Civil War turmoil, only to find himself riding with John Brown’s retinue of rabble-rousers from Bloody Kansas to Harpers Ferry.... [Henry] eventually meets Frederick Douglass...Harriet Tubman...[and] the slave girl Sibonia, who courageously dies for freedom.... Outrageously funny, sad, and consistently unflattering, McBride puts a human face on a nation at its most divided.
Publishers Weekly


McBride continues exploring the long history of America's color line, begun in his landmark memoir, The Color of Water. A young slave in the Kansas Territory, Henry Shackleford must flee with abolitionist John Brown after Brown clashes with Henry's master. Complicating matters: Brown thinks Henry is a girl, a disguise Henry maintains up to the bold raid on Harpers Ferry.
Library Journal


The unlikely narrator of the events leading up to Brown's quixotic raid at Harper's Ferry is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, [who]...Brown whisks the 12-year-old away thinking he's a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years.... At the end, Onion reasserts his identity as a male and escapes just before Brown's execution. McBride presents an interesting experiment in point of view here, as all of Brown's activities are filtered through the eyes of a young adolescent who wavers between innocence and cynicism.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens with a newspaper article about the discovery of an old document-”a wild slave narrative.” Did having this context from the outset adjust your expectations of what would come? Would you have read the novel differently if this article hadn’t been included?

2. When they first meet, the Old Man misidentifies Henry as a girl, forcing “Little Onion” to disguise himself as a girl for much of the story. How does Little Onion’s attitude toward this disguised identity change throughout the novel? How does he use it to his advantage? When does it become a hindrance?

3. Discuss the significance of the title. Fred tells Little Onion that a Good Lord Bird is “so pretty that when man sees it, he says, ‘Good Lord,’” and that a feather from this bird will “bring you understanding that’ll last your whole life.” What role do the Good Lord Bird and its feathers play in John Brown’s story? In Little Onion’s? Why is the title appropriate for the novel?

4. In what ways is this a narrative about Onion? In what ways it is a narrative about larger issues? How do these two aspects of the novel interact?

5. How familiar were you with John Brown and the events at Harpers Ferry before reading the book? Has the fictional retelling changed your perceptions of John Brown as he relates to American history?

6. The novel includes several historical figures-John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman. Does the blending of actual, historical events and figures with the author’s fictional reimagining of them make you rethink history? Explain why or why not.

7. Consider the use of dialect in the novel. The narrator, Little Onion, speaks with a very particular dialect; the Old Man, who constantly refers to the Bible, speaks with a different cadence and rhythm entirely. Little Onion says of the Old Man: “He sprinkled most of his conversation with Bible talk, ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and ‘takest’ and so forth. He mangled the Bible more than any man I ever knowed . . . but with a bigger purpose, ’cause he knowed more words.” What roles do speech, dialect, and elocution play in this story?

8. The Old Man attaches significance to several unlikely objects; among his collection of “good-luck baubles” are the feather of the Good Lord Bird and the dried-up old onion that Henry eats, earning him his nickname. Why does a man like John Brown accumulate such objects? Why does he call them both “good-luck charms” and “the devil’s work”? Do you own any objects to which you attribute good or bad luck or attach other superstitious beliefs?

9. In the abstract, a funny story about slavery might not seem possible. How does the author bring humor to a subject not typically written about in this tone? Is he successful? What does humor allow us to contemplate about history that we might not have thought otherwise?

10. Since the publication of this book, repeated comparisons have been made to Mark Twain. Do you see this similarity? If so, where? Does James McBride’s writing style remind you of any other authors or books? In what ways is this a “classic” American story, and it what ways does it feel more contemporary or otherwise different?

11. Loyalty is a major theme in the book. Political beliefs are a matter of life and death. Even Little Onion feels conflicted about whether to stick by John Brown’s side or flee from him. Where do the major characters’ loyalties lie, with regard to each other and with regard to the cause of abolition? Are the allegiance lines as cut-and-dried as you might expect?

12. The measures that John Brown and his posse take in The Good Lord Bird could be seen today as those of revolutionaries, even terrorists. What would your response to Brown and his actions have been if you had lived during that tumultuous era of American history?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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