Reviewed by Sidik Fofana

In the tradition of The Confessions of Nat Turner and other works that co-opt history for the fictional imagination, James McBride rejiggers John Brown, off-the-rocker militia captain whose Bible is the revitalizing spinach behind his maniacal abolitionist crusades. The Good Lord Bird is told by Henry “Onion” Shackleford, a gender mistaken, freed slave, who witnesses Brown’s tumultuous clashes to bring freedom for all below the Mason Dixon line. Onion, who was freed by Brown, is left with little choice but to travel the country with Brown’s army as it revs up for his poorly executed raid on Harpers Ferry.

McBride, who was recently awarded the National Book Award, stays true to historical markers in crucial ways. In 1856, Brown launched a series of raids that included the Pottawatomie Massacre in Franklin County, Kansas, which resulted in the deaths of five pro-slavers; and an attack on neighboring Osawatomie where he fought pro-slavery rebels. Brown would eventually head north to raise money for his Virginia campaign where he also met with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman –celebrated black leaders of the day. It is the fictional dialogue between them where the real gold lies: a world of imagined conversations, poetic Southern twang, and thought-provoking what ifs.

One of novel’s most prevalent thematic currents is what American History scholar Thaddeus Russell calls “the slavery of freedom.” The idea is straightforward: freedom can feel like a burden if one is not used to the rigors of independence. Onion faces this acerbic irony the moment Brown frees him. “I was starving fooling with him,” he says of his first few days in the abolitionist’s camp. “I was never hungry when I was a slave. Only when I got free was I eating out of garbage barrels.” Yet, failure to grasp this concept, according to McBride and his cross-dressing narrator, is what ultimately does Brown in. He underestimates the “comforts” of slavery and assumes that slaves will come running to his army to fight for their freedom. It doesn’t cross his mind that most slaves would hesitate to leave their relative state of security for the uncertain spirit of rebellion.

The Good Lord Bird is at its most profound when it plays with these antebellum contradictions, shifting the lines between independence and enslavement. John Brown, the emancipator sometimes becomes John Brown, the involuntary master. Biblical truth is claimed by both abolitionists and slavers alike. The free and prosperous Negroes in the North are sometimes as complicit in the evil institution as the plantation owners of the South. Being declared free doesn’t always feel the same as being free.

At once obedient to history and irreverent, The Good Lord Bird brings our heroes down to Earth to live, interact, and make mistakes again. Frederick Douglass can, for a moment, be the showy “man of parlor talk, of silk shirts, and fine hats” and Harriet Tubman can fuss about being on schedule, both orbiting John Brown’s psychotic zealotry. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, The Good Lord Bird is also the rare story of a white man told by a black protagonist. It is an imaginative account that keeps the grave soil of one of America’s most beguiling figures warm with folklore.