The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Summary
Henry Shackleford is ten or so, enslaved in a Kansas Territory tavern in 1856, when Old John Brown himself blows in, gets Henry's father killed in the ensuing argument, and carries the child off to freedom under one small misapprehension: Brown has taken Henry, in his shift, for a girl. Henry, no fool, stays a girl. As Henrietta, soon nicknamed the Onion and adopted as the old man's good luck charm, he spends the next three years in a dress at the elbow of American history's most terrifying saint, and narrates it all decades later in a voice that is the book's engine: profane, self serving, comically honest about his own cowardice and slowly, against his will, awed.
McBride runs the Onion through Bleeding Kansas, the Pottawatomie killings, prairie battles, fundraising parlors in New England where Brown's madness is dressed as celebrity, a long interlude in a Missouri brothel, and audiences with the era's giants, Frederick Douglass rendered with a satirist's nerve, Harriet Tubman with none, and then walks him, because history is walking there, to Harpers Ferry, the doomed raid the whole book has been dreading, where the comedy finally stands aside.
Brown himself is the great creation: ragged, scripture drunk, praying for hours over stolen breakfasts, wrong about everything except the one enormous thing.
Around four hundred and fifty pages, fast and funny until it decides not to be.
Best for readers who want American history's rawest wound handled with Twain's tools, and a narrator worth the whole ride.
Historical Context & Significance
The Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2013, an upset over the season's favorites, and the judges' comparison to Mark Twain has followed the book since; the voice made it. James McBride was already nationally known for The Color of Water, his 1996 memoir of his white Jewish mother, and the win completed his conversion to the front rank of American novelists, confirmed when Deacon King Kong became a bestseller and Obama named it a favourite.
The title bird is the ivory billed woodpecker, so beautiful, the book's people say, that a person seeing one cries good Lord, and its feather is the novel's token of grace.
Ethan Hawke, who had carried the book around for years, made the 2020 Showtime series, starring as Brown and keeping the tone's dangerous balance, with Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion. The novel now shares custody of John Brown's memory with Cloudsplitter and the histories, the comic version that somehow honours him most.