Song Yet Sung (McBride)

Song Yet Sung 
James McBride, 2008
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483509


Summary
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland's eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks.

Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with "the Code," a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz's flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in New York Times bestselling author James McBride's signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.A., Columbia
   University
• Awards—American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award,
   1996; ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, 1996;
   Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA


James McBride's bestselling memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, explores the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity and the experience of his white, Jewish mother, who moved to Harlem, married a black man, and raised 12 children. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (film version by Spike Lee), followed a black regiment through turbulent events in Italy late in World War II. It was a book of considerable breadth and character diversity.

Readers may not know that the multitalented McBride has another dual identity: He's trained as a musician and a writer and has been highly successful in both careers.

After getting his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22, he began a career in journalism that would include stints as staff writer at the Boston Globe, People magazine, and the Washington Post. But McBride also loved writing and performing music, and at age 30, he quit his job as a feature writer at the Washington Post to pursue a music career in New York. After Anita Baker recorded a song he'd written, "Good Enough," McBride had enough contacts in the industry to spend the next eight years as a professional musician, writing, recording, and performing (he plays the saxophone).

He was playing tenor sax for jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott while he wrote The Color of Water "on airplanes and in hotels." Like the jazz music McBride plays, the book alternates voices, trading off between McBride's perspective and that of his mother. The Color of Water was a worldwide success, selling millions of copies and drawing high praise from book critics. "This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths," wrote Publishers Weekly. It now appears on reading lists at high schools and colleges around the country.

After the enormous success of The Color of Water, McBride felt some pressure to continue writing memoirs, or at least to continue with the theme of race relations in America. Instead, he turned to fiction, and although his second book draws part of its inspiration from family history, it isn't autobiographical. "My initial aim was to write a novel about a group of black soldiers who liberate a concentration camp in Eastern Europe," McBride explains on his web site. "I read lots of books and spent a lot of time researching the subject but soon came to the realization that I'm not qualified to write about the holocaust. It's too much." Instead, he recalled the war stories of his uncle and cousin, who served in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, and began researching World War II in Italy—particularly the clashes between Italian Partisans and the German army.

The resulting novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is "an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war" (the New York Times Book Review) and has earned high marks from critics for its nuanced portrayal of four Buffalo Soldiers and the Italian villagers they encounter. McBride, perhaps not surprisingly, likens writing fiction to playing jazz: "You are the soloist and the characters are the bandleaders, the Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies. They present the song, and you must play it as they determine.

Extras
• McBride has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and the PBS television character Barney. He has also written the score for several musicals and currently leads a 12-piece jazz/R&B band.

• One of his most taxing assignments as a journalist was to cover Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for six months. "I thought I was going to lose my mind," he told USA Today.

• For a book fair, he performed with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of writers including Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Ridley Pearson. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride's portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing…Edward P. Jones, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in The Known World was like writing about Hitler from Hitler's mother's point of view. In Song Yet Sung, McBride has captured a version of Jones's dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That's a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times

In a complex, ever-tightening, increasingly suspenseful web that rises toward a dramatic climax..., McBride shows the complexity of his characters' inner lives and dilemmas — particularly his black characters. The cadence of their speech, the way they interact, the small details of their thoughts, desires, fears and hopes: These the author renders with exquisite ease. In scene after scene McBride shows the many ways blacks worked to aid each other to freedom. "The Code" is part of this, a secret language of actions, signs, symbols and words by which the slaves communicate messages of resistance right under their masters' noses. The novel does have its weaker moments. At times McBride's exposition seems rushed, as if he's got more information to give than time to give it. His action scenes can feel like stage directions for a film. Some may groan that Liz's prescience is forced, especially as she sees further and further into the future, right up to bejeweled rappers spitting violence and misogyny. And some may point out the convenience of Liz's only predicting a future up to our present.... [Nontheless,] McBride...does have the ability to captivate, compel and challenge those of us still working to shape those tomorrows
David Anthony Durham - Washington Post

Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future—from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop—in her dreams. Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America. McBride hasn't lost his touch: he nails the horrors of slavery as well as he does the power of hope and redemption.
Publishers Weekly

McBride's second novel, following Miracle at St. Anna (soon to be a Spike Lee-directed major motion picture), might better be titled Novel Yet Edited: the review copy, at least, reads like a very rough first draft. Its setting-a small Chesapeake Bay town just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a place where the reality of slavery was more ambiguous than in other parts of the country-certainly lends it potential. The mature reader, however, learns very little new about the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, or the feelings of either the oppressed or the oppressors. Indeed, the novel largely seems written for a YA audience. The pace of the action is slowed by implausibility, repetitive and often cartoonish description, fairly obvious anachronisms, and a tremendous amount of unnecessary detail to the exclusion of the feelings of the (mostly flat) main characters. This is particularly disappointing given McBride's poignant 1996 memoir, The Color of Water. Recommended with reservations to public libraries.
Library Journal

The slave-owning culture of Maryland's eastern shore in the 1850s comprises the world of McBride's second novel (following Miracle at St. Anna, 2002, and the bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, 1996). Recaptured runaway slave Liz Spocott, wounded by a musket blast and chained to fellow runaways in the attic of "trader"-crime boss Patty Cannon, learns "the Code" by which embattled slaves communicate and survive from a skeletal woman ("The old Woman With No Name") and, acting on a chance opportunity, escapes again. The novel then assumes the shape of a series of quests and pursuits. Liz wanders along a perilous route which she hopes will lead her to the Freedom Train, hence northward to safety-accompanied and bedeviled by prophetic "visions" that reach far into "the future of the colored race." The latter are often eerily compelling, but when "the Dreamer" Liz "sees" rap and hip-hop performances, and eventually Martin Luther King's "Free At Last" speech, the novel groans under the weight of forced Significance. Far more compelling are parallel tales: of the Woolman, a gigantic black who lives in a swamp and keeps an alligator named Gar; widowed landowner Kathleen Sullivan, unhinged by sexual longing for her handsome young slave Amber; and Denwood Long, a former slave-catcher lured out of retirement to return Liz to her irate owner Colonel Spocott. While its language is frequently stiff and unconvincing, the book has great compensatory strengths. McBride views the "peculiar institution" of slavery from an impressive multiplicity of involved characters' and observers' viewpoints. He describes emotionally charged, hurried actions superbly, and he makes expert use of folklore, legend and the eponymous unsung song (which we do eventually hear). In Denwood's grim, fatalistic pursuit of his destiny, McBride has fashioned a myth of retribution and sacrifice that recalls both William Faulkner's sagas of blighted generations and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Explosively dramatic.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. When we first meet Liz, she is on the run from her master. Yet throughout the book she refuses offers of passage to the North, saying “I’m free here.” What do you think Liz’s plan was when she first ran away? If she was planning to go North, what changed her mind? Or did she simply wish to die in the wilds of Maryland?

2. Discuss the author’s use of language. How does he evoke the speech patterns of an earlier era? What techniques does he use to bring the rural Maryland eastern shore to life?

3. Although he is a notorious slave catcher, Denwood Long—“the Gimp”—commands a degree of respect even from those he has caught. But he himself claims, “I’m going to hell in spite of redemption.” Based on his actions in the book, do you think he is worthy of respect? Do you find him sympathetic? Do you think he has found any measure of redemption by the end of the story?

4. Late in the book, it becomes clear that the singer of the “song yet sung” is Martin Luther King. Given that Liz’s nightmare vision of tomorrow, with its evocation of rap music and gang culture, clearly postdates King, why do you think the author chose him to fill this role?

5. Discuss the death of the Woolman. What motivates Liz to kill him? Is it an act of mercy? Do you think she has any thought of saving the Gimp? If so, why?

6. Amber believes that “Some [people] is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t.” What do you think of this assessment? Is decency an inherent trait, or is it a conscious choice? Based on the characters and events in this book, what do you think the author’s answer to this question would be?

7. Throughout the book, Liz becomes more and more attuned to the world around her: “a kind of clarity seemed to settle upon her… at times she felt so sensitive to the elements about her, she felt as if her skin were ready to fly off her body.” What is the connection, if any, between this growing sensitivity and Liz’s visions of the future? How does Liz’s “two-headedness” allow the author to develop the larger themes of the novel?

8. Consider the ending of the novel—the violent deaths and Liz’s precarious future. At the same time, Amber is free, Kathleen’s future is secure, and Woolman’s son offers a link to the far-off coming of the song yet sung. Overall, did this novel leave you with a sense of hope? Did it provide you with any new insights on human nature? On America?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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