The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
New York : Riverhead Books, 2014.
458 p. ; 21 cm.
When a book wins the National Book Award (2013), that definitely puts in on one's radar - and so I brought home The Good Lord Bird with me during the spring and summer pandemic lock-down.
This novel is a rollicking, funny, provocative and hard to put down read. It follows the adventures of Henry, an enslaved 12 year old freed in Kansas by the passionate and violent abolitionist, John Brown. Mistaking Henry to be Henrietta, a girl, Brown "adopts" him into his band and nicknames her "Little Onion." The novel is told by Henry who - with his maturing over about three years, his change from enslaved to free, and his passing as a girl - allows McBride to explore many angles of John Brown's movement and eventual assault on Harper's Ferry. McBride is able to present shifting and complex takes on fanaticism, recklessness, posturing, violence, racism, slavery, sexism, opportunism, danger, and sacrifice by giving his smart-alecky, wry and cynical main character center stage.
The cover of the book has a quote from the New York Times referencing Mark Twain, and I definitely felt the sensibilities of Twain's character Huck Finn in McBride's Henry.
The novel is not without provocation. Henry - suffering the harsh, spartan life of being with a paramilitary band on the frontier - at times wishes he were back being enslaved. Fredrick Douglass comes in for some harsh treatment as a "diva" of the antislavery circuit and as an intemperate sexual harasser. But all in all, the novel is a brilliant run through a historical episode in US history that still reverberates to this day. I would definitely recommend it to a reader who wants a good literary read that will grab them and not let go.
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