James McBride’s GLB is a wild ride, part historical novel, part fantasy, legend, cultural core sample, narrative experiment, part stylistic stunt.  In short, it is not a realistic account or a psychological revelation.  Though it employs facts, often as backdrop, sometimes as touchstones, often as shadows, securing from it a balanced historical truth would be harder than getting milk from an owl.  Such evasiveness and jazzing about is maybe what I want a large portion of the novels I read to achieve.

Here’s McBride’s method of attack.  The prologue is a supposed newspaper article from 1966 claiming that a fireproof box rescued from the ruins of a burned Negro church in Delaware contains some Confederate money, “ a rare feather from an ivory-billed woodpecker” and notebooks of a congregant who recorded the life of former slave and orphan Mr. Henry Shackleford, who lived to be over a hundred.  Shackleford, as a child and under the nom de guerre “the Onion” and the guise of a female, rode and fought with John Brown in his rowdy days, observed him, admired him, feared him but sometimes faced up to him.

The narrator is Henry/Onion from Kansas, and his/her struggles with identity, loyalty, belief and the slings and errors of outrageous fortune drive the narrative of antebellum bellicosity, religion, politics and night riding.

I don’t know if this somewhat picaresque premise is preposterous or postposterous, but it allows for some antic battle scenes, understated violence (and excessive violence), inventively obscene language and nightmare adventures.  At times McBride seems to be channeling Cormac McCarthy or Pinckney Benedict, which may be rich but risky.

The language and dark humor are at the heart of this story, the blood frolic and moral combustion.  Some of the brightest moments occur when the Onion cuts through the tangle of verbiage and employs understatement, and when the book falters, the plot stalls and wheels spin, it’s usually because we’re in the midst of intentional overwriting meant to convey the un-savvy mind of a former slave about twelve or fourteen years old trying to negotiate through questions of sexuality, freedom, righteousness.  The thematic waters are deep, but the characters don’t match up to them.  A comic bent doesn’t always undermine the serious wind, but here it happens more often than I wanted.

Maybe I’m trying too hard here not to be a spoiler.  We know what Brown’s history in the border wars of Kansas was, the hostilities at Pottawatomie and the depredations at Osawatomie, and the Onion is along as a kind of aide-de-camp and sounding board, as well as a pet who has strong feelings about many of the Brown clan and a range of diction that outstrips her/his range of action.  The big figures of history (Frederick Douglass, for one, portrayed as an equivocator, drunk and potential molester) enter and leave obliquely, and Brown is portrayed sometimes as a monster, sometimes as a card-carrying idiot and on other occasions as an terrifying and inspiring leader like the one in John Steuart Curry’s famous painting of a cruciform prophet with outstretched arms, Bible and rifle in hand, tornadoes and flames behind, Negroes, Yanks and Rebs all around.  On occasion, however, Brown seems genuinely reflective and tender, even funny.  His recitations from imagined books of the Bible are slyly ridiculous, and McBride seems engaged in a disclosure of how zealotry can go berserk and burlesque.  It doesn’t hurt that the naïve yet cunning Onion is a sympathetic, resourceful, sometimes hilarious guide.  If only he had more Huck-gumption, but then that may be unfair, as the book I seem to be preferring has already been written and can be read again, if I need to.

Just when I would feel this Gordian knot of the oracular and vernacular less satisfying than frustrating, the author provides a bridge to the history of fiction about slavery, channels Twain a bit (though not as intent of issues of moral gravity and character complexity).  He knows his history, and ingesting it is sometimes nourishing enough to forgive GLB its inconsistencies of  period vernacular (like “a legend in your own mind” in the 1840s?), its easy jokes (like “Judge Fuggett”), anachronisms (like the 1950’s monkey wrench) or its absurdities, such as the capture of “sorghum syrup from sugar maple trees,” which is not presented as the confused boy/girl’s memory but that of the older man narrating his memoir.

But then you get the Onion saying Brown was “smooth business in the woods, quiet as a deer,” and it sounds pitch-perfect.  So here’s a large slice of the problem.  We’re expected to sift through the language of the notebooks and sort out  Higgins from the Onion from the mature and reflective Shackleford to the declining Shackleford in his ancient of days manifestation, all in the service of weighing credibility and verisimilitude.  It like to give me the fantods.

Lampoon, folktale, metaphoric history, cartoon?  This is not a book very much about slavery but about a sometimes-addled adolescent crossdresser’s understanding of an enigmatic giant of American history.  Complete with extended digressions and catalogues, several epic gestures.  Perhaps it’s time to say that the phantasmagoria and grand guignol of the volume reflect that volatile period of American history more conventional historians usually shy away from.

Here’s a note of clarity and sanity.  As the book reaches its third and final section (about half the 400-odd pages) it gallops toward more familiar ground for me – the Kennedy House, Harper’s Ferry, the unrealistic strategies and expectations, the intricate unfolding of events – it fairly races, working hard to infuse (stuff, really) the story with the actual names and times, weather, geography of the town and so on.  At first I was relieved to be in this less swampy linguistic ground, to see cause-and-effect running on all four wheels, but after a hundred pages of that, I yearned a bit for the Keystone Cops abolitionists and Jethro Bodine slavers.  I missed the kink and romp of the earlier episodes and the invitation to speculate how the Onion will keep identity secret here or turn a Brown to reason or hornswoggle one of the Madam he serves  in a frontier brothel.  SO I am of two minds (or half a one) on this book.  It offers pleasures and irritations, but it is seldom dull reading or sleepy writing, and I wish I saw its ilk more often. . . if you can get ilk from an owl.

Maybe it’s best to say of Henry Shackleford (got that name, right?), “He had a dream and it shot him.”  Or to accept the judgement of the Mad Hatter: “We are all mad here.”

But no need, as McBride’s dedication of the book reads: “For Ma and Jade,/ who loved a good whopper.”  At least, he’s not trying to pull the sheep over our eyes.

However, since I dealt this hand, I should say something more about the bird, it’s disappearance from nature but occasional flights through the story.  Almost none of this tale unfolds even close to the nineteenth century habitat of the Campephilus principalis, often called the Lord God Bird, Grail Bird or the Good Lord Bird.  But a dead one appears long enough to be, off-stage, disassembled, its feathers distributed as talismans and credentials among the freedom fighters who are also terrorists.  Maybe there’s a systematic metaphorical intent here, but I can’t untangle it.  The bird is still  extant in the middle of the nineteenth century but now extinct (so they say) due to loss of habitat and collectors.  I can’t quite see that parallel as appropriate to develop either Brown or Shackleford, though I will keep looking.

I delight in reading about the ivory bill woodpecker and pine to see one in flight or hammering away.  Unfortunately, they’re evidently extinct, according to all but the most optimistic lost-cause birders.  Fortunately, however, a pair of pileated woodpeckers – similar in silhouette but smaller, less musical and different in coloring from their vanished cousins – haunt the woods I live in.  I keep my eye peeled for them and discovered last year that two juveniles were foraging in the area as well. When I want to inquire deeper into matters ornithological, I go to a source like The Race to Save the Lord God Bird by Phillip Hoose, Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird or Michael K. Steinberg’s Stalking the Ghost Bird.  There’s a good but desperately hopeful documentary film about possible Arkansas survivors, too.  (And I wonder why my bookshelves runneth over. . . .)

That rarum avis (and zealot and rebel, liberator, charismatic terrorist) John Brown has long fascinated me, as well, and about two decades ago I served for two months as the first (maybe only, as it turns out) writer-in-residence at the Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park.  I read Robert Penn Warren’s John Brown: The Making of a Martyr while I was there, along with Stephen B. Oates’s hagiographic To Purge this Land with Blood (which is more admiring of Brown than I can be) and was on hand to examine (with gloves) a newly-loaned artifact for display, the Sharps carbine Brown probably carried during his quixotic (but in some ways right-minded) raid on the Federal arsenal as HF.  I studied the landscape, the maps, the artifacts, the various accounts in books and on park videos.  I spent afternoons at the Kennedy Farm (nearby lurk headquarters) across the river in MD and even made a cobbler from fruit (both dark purple and white) off the mulberry trees there.  I had already read Russell Banks’ brilliant (and again, admiring of the subject) Cloudsplitter, as powerful a historical novel as I know, and followed the fictional account that presented Brown as a hybrid bred from Moses, Ahab, one dupe and maybe three demons, while still painting him as a real and inevitable, if infuriating, man.  Needless to say, I hated to leave that haunted corner of W. VA. when my time there expired, and I left with all my senses and inquiries sharpened..

Where is this headed?  Oh ye of little faith. . . .

When I saw in 2013 that James McBride had written a novel entitled The Good Lord Bird and that it was about John Brown, I couldn’t believe my luck.  Salt-cured ham and sweet potato on the same plate!  So I ordered a copy and, true to form, swiftly misplaced it.  Well, as Frostian way leads on to way, I followed the distraction trail to dabble in and read other things, while the book received kudos and McBride collected his National Book Award.  My memory serves no master, so the book’s existence melted like ice in July.  But then, serendipity, I stumbled upon another reference to the book and recovered my resolve to read it, despite my commitment to a summer of Patricia Highsmith novels and stories.  And luck was with me: for some reason – probably that NBA – our college library had a copy, which was available.

The timing was right.  Just three years since the acclaimed film of Twelve Years a Slave threw the spotlight on the original (if ghostwritten) book, a year since Tom Piazza’s challenging novel A Free State explored ante-bellum identity through a mixed race runaway eluding capture while masquerading as a very dark African while playing exhilarating banjo in a minstrel show.  And this summer we have a new Roots miniseries.  Add these to Banks’ established and provocative Cloudsplitter and William Styron’s much-debated Confessions of Nat Turner, and you have an exciting and controversial literary landscape of historical novels on similar subjects, many of them thriving under the vast canopy of Huckleberry Finn.  But none of them have the ivory bill.

Nor does McBride’s book very much have the bird, though feathers materialize and are brandished on occasion.  And it’s not likely to become a movie, because it’s a novel about narrative voice as much as anything else, and MacBride gallops in where angels fear to tread on the matter of whether or not to use language that is authentically offensive or offensively authentic.  In the current political/rhetorical climate in which book banners are sour because book BURNING has been given such a bad name, McBride weighs in on the side of offensive language but with a tactical mind.  He out-offends anything Twain’s wife would let him write, but he does it with high and low, outrageous mischief, The Good Lord Bird being a rollicking, twisted discourse on obscenity, grittiness, ultra-violence and insanity, all wrapped in a historical blanket.  I won’t say it makes David Milch’s HBO Deadwood look tame, but that series appears less radical in juxtaposition to McBride’s Brown/bird/cross-dressing (yes, Caitlin’s transformation is almost anticipated) gallimaufry.

So the stage is set, but do I recommend McBride’s novel, which is presented as a long-lost document narrated or written by a former slave who lives to be a hundred (shades of Berger’s Jack Crabbe)?  It’s certainly an ambitious book with pleasures and frustrations to offer, but for my conflicted and enigmatic scorecard will have to wait for the next post.  I’ll try not to be away too long.  Stay tuned.

[P.S. If you want something to do in the meantime, I recommend The Life and Letters of Captain John Brown, edited by Richard Webb and published in London in 1861.  The book was re-issued by Negro Universities Press in 1972, and there’s a copy of the original edition in the Duke University Library.]

The current media blitzkrieg reminds me of a time when the American icon called Donald was a duck.  A Disney character often scolding or combating his cricket-capped nephews Huey, Dewy and Louie or some other zoomorphic nemesis, that Donald wore a sailor suit (though he never seemed to claim a nautical background, even in his romantic life) and seemed pretty middle class.  He was not the best or the greatest at anything, was in fact, a simple enough bird, though one who enjoyed his creature comforts and feathering his nest. He did not savor opposition.  DD was amusing and sometimes admirable, not excessively addicted to the truth.  He is also the most widely broadcast comic character outside the superhero genre.

What I most miss about that Donald is not his huge bill nor his inclination to belittle those not like him or those opposed to him.  Though he didn’t seem to have huge hands, I don’t miss his big feet or his greed.  And this is the moment I experience some passing regrets about copyright protection.  I would love to post right HERE an image of DD displaying the mode which, as a kid, I most enjoyed: the ghost-white duck in mid-tantrum.  Such a posting might be reckless, though.  [I should mention that DD was most famously drawn by the trio of Taliaferro, Banks and Rose.]  I loved those renderings of our hero in full hissy fit, leaping and stomping, spit and pin feathers flying, as if he were scrapping with some invisible force.  His bill might sprout fangs, he might spit lightning, he would squawk and stammer, with squiggles in the air around him to signal that he was employing transgressive and downright unprintable language as he wheezed and yammered like Rumpelstiltskin in full fury or a Celtic war poet screaming his scorn song against an enemy fortification.  He was impressive, and I was enchanted.  Even the other animals like Mickey and DD’s own moneybags-rich Uncle Scrooge McDuck might recoil in awe, though they did not seem smitten by his persona, all that ire and twisted inconsistency, all that verbal shrapnel and dragonfire.  They indulged him or gave him space till the fits passed, the feathers settled, and soon the Peaceable Kingdom would be, for a spell, restored.  He was, after all, a decent fowl at heart and perhaps the founder of Ducks Unlimited.

Much as I delighted in the whirlwind of the Tasmanian devil or the stormy outbursts of Elmer Fudd, it is Donald Duck with that orange-ish broad bill that I wish the satellite TV networks would resurrect more often.  Entertaining as he was, he remained somewhat marginal, as he lacked the good heart of Steamboat Willie (the inevitable M. Mouse), the ingenuity of Tweety-bird, the enterprise of the coyote, the wit and percussion of the woodpecker.  Plunging into my morning Cheerios, I keep wishing he were not disrespected, ignored, short shrifted, wondering if it’s not time for a movement, as the general atmosphere we now swim in suggests that Donald Duck’s hour has come round at last to slouch toward Hollywood or the Beltway to be reborn.  That bat signal good old Commissioner Gordon used to summon his nocturnal hero to Gothem — somebody needs to get to work on a Duck call right away.