Somebody else got to bother themselves about you.” Nor are white people the only ones corrupted by the institution, and one of the most moving passages involves Onion’s stay at a whorehouse where one of the black prostitutes, whom he loves, is as racist and cruel as the white madam who owns them all. Two years later, he is still griping: As a slave, he says, “Your meals is free. Only when I got free was I eating out of garbage barrels,” he notes early on. James McBride reading from “The Good Lord Bird” in an evening that also featured his gospel quintet.įor starters, Onion doesn’t want to be free. Simply put, the issue of slavery – or of race or gender – is not just black and white. But although Brown is single-minded, the world as Onion sees it is infinitely more varied. Onion, as he is called, accompanies Brown, a drag Sancho Panza to the abolitionist’s Quixote, in his quest to end slavery. What happens next is complicated, despite the hindsight of history. Instead, the bible-thumping abolitionist takes Henry – whose name he has heard as “Henrietta” and who is wearing a sack that he mistakes for a dress – under his wing, declaring the child his good-luck charm and giving him a feather of the “Good Lord Bird,” the now possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, as his own token. Ten years old, he’s slightly built, and Brown isn’t one to give up on a notion once he’s seized on it. Mistaken for a girl by Brown in the sortie that kills his father and results in his being taken up by Brown’s raiders, our picaresque antihero gives up trying to correct the error when he realizes that being female may just keep him out of battle. Henry “Onion” Shackleford, the fictional protagonist, knows something about disguise.

There is more than one way to tell the truth, The Good Lord Bird reminds us again and again, and many reasons to cloak it in humor. But despite the idiosyncratic, unconventionally educated voice, the tale evades minstrelsy because of both the protagonist’s unvarnished honesty and the author’s sly wit. Indeed, its voice – the ungrammatical and often scatological first-person of an unwillingly freed slave – might border on the offensive if the author were not also African American. Considering that its subject – the unsuccessful raid by abolitionist John Brown on Harper’s Ferry, a quixotic attack that would spark the Civil War – is both tragic and honorable, that approach is daring. On the contrary, McBride’s National Book Award winner – his fourth novel – is at times a howler, its message sugarcoated with broad farce. That doesn’t mean The Good Lord Bird, a historical novel, is without humor. James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird serves up history as a morality tale, played out in faith and plumage. There is more than one way to tell the truth, “The Good Lord Bird” reminds us again and again, and many reasons to cloak it in humor.

The good lord bird book