In the book's back pages, the author acknowledges 'all those who. Anna' - manages to novelize real historical events without dreary prostrations to the act.Īnd the portrait of 'the real' John Brown is indelible. 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.

He is almost 14 by the time we arrive at the climactic scene at Harper's Ferry. 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. The novel gallops through a dozen exciting scrapes. 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. 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. Another answer is that sometimes, being a girl saves Henry's (rather thin) skin. One answer is that it is unthinkable for Henry to disagree with a white man. 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.īut this open question is a rich one. There's only one problem, which is that Brown seems to think that the petite Henry is a girl. 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. 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. 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.

Henry Shackelford is McBride's protagonist, a faux-naif square in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn. Such is the persona who narrates James McBride's absorbing and darkly funny novel, 'The Good Lord Bird.' But sometimes history flatters mediocre people - that is, certain members of the fair-to-middling majority who, by happenstance, act bravely. We have heard of good people who get swept up in historical circumstances and act badly.

The good lord bird book