McBride's sweet 'Song'

Trek from slavery to freedom makes a compelling novel

By Jenny Shank , Special to the Rocky

Friday, February 8, 2008

Sarah Leen

James McBride's new book sheds light on a shameful aspect of American history: slavery.

James McBride's 1996 memoir, The Color of Water, chronicled his life growing up in an impoverished Brooklyn family with 12 children, as the son of a black father and a Jewish mother who had emigrated from Poland.

This moving book lingered on The New York Times best-seller list for years, turned up as assigned reading in schools across the country and launched McBride's literary career, which he has juggled along with his other occupations as a journalist and musician.

McBride's next book, the 2003 novel Miracle at St. Anna, was set in World War II, and he has reached even further back in time for his compelling new novel, Song Yet Sung, which opens in 1850, when "a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant."

Haunting and suspenseful, replete with atmospheric language and rich, strange detail, Song Yet Sung casts a powerful spell.

As the book begins, Liz is just gaining awareness of her circumstances: "She'd been lying for three weeks, badly wounded, imprisoned in an attic on Maryland's eastern shore." Liz had been on the run, trying to escape from her owner, when she was hunted down by some slave catchers and took "a musket ball to the head." Liz learns that the notorious Patty Cannon, a "trader of souls," has captured her.

"Miss Patty" is a true figure McBride has taken from history, and she makes for a fascinating, terrifying villain. She's an attractive, brutal woman who leads a ruthless band of slave catchers through the coastal wilds, motivated by money and the thrill of the hunt.

She'll kill anyone without qualms, and she's decided to allow one of the members of her gang to nurse Liz back to health because she's young and beautiful and will be worth a lot of money at auction.

While Liz is in the attic, imprisoned with other slaves, an old woman keeps her company and tells her she must memorize some strange sentences, such as, "We will rise at sunrise and rest at midnight," and, "When you want trust, scratch a crooked line in the dirt." These turn out to be part of "the code," clues and passwords that Liz can use to seek protection on the Underground Railroad.

Liz's dreams have captured the attention of her fellow slaves, who say she is "two headed," able to predict the future. When she leads an escape from Patty Cannon's attic, Liz's fame grows. She becomes known as "the Dreamer," and she heads into the swamps of Maryland's coast with the Cannon gang in hot pursuit.

While running, Liz encounters a brawny, feral black man who speaks no English, has lived in the swamps for most of his life and is feared among the slaves as "The Woolman." Liz frees The Woolman's son from a trap on her way to seek further refuge, which a slave named Amber grants to her. Meanwhile, Liz's former owner has convinced a canny waterman named Denwood Long to come out of retirement and pursue her. Long and Cannon's gang clash as they seek the same quarry.

Amid this chase, two children, one black and one white, are taken from their families, and all these suspenseful elements come to a furious boil in the book's climax.

Like The Known World, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Song Yet Sung lays bare the complicated and unexpected loyalties that the slavery system gave rise to: Some blacks worked to keep others in bondage, while some whites formed familial attachments with their slaves.

The unique setting also plays a large part in the novel's success. The mysterious wilds of the Maryland coast contribute to the drama and shape the story's characters. McBride has created a vivid world, detailed down to its landscape, weather, social mores, distinctive dialect and community tensions.

The only off note in Song Yet Sung is some of Liz's vision of the future, which reads like political commentary from the author. Liz sees nothing but obese black children who "ran from books like they were poison," "long lines of girls dressed as boys in farmer's clothing" and people listening to angry hip-hop (of which McBride obviously disapproves), "every bit of pride, decency and morality squeezed clean out of them."

It sometimes seems like Liz is dreaming about an episode of Jerry Springer rather than a representative reality of contemporary black life.

But Liz's dreams become more nuanced and intense as the book develops, and there's a heartbreaking moment when she's explaining her vision of what readers will recognize as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to a black man, and he replies, "If that preacher you seen in your dream was hollering 'bout being free . . . well, then, he wasn't free, now was he? How long that gonna take? What time of tomorrow was you dreaming about?"

When reading a book about slavery, I always make a quick calculation of the difference between the year the book begins and the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. When I care about characters, even fictional ones, as much as McBride's, I want to know if they'll experience freedom during their lives.

The sad truth that freedom didn't begin with emancipation is difficult to bear, then as now, which is why there can never be too many books about slavery, especially those as fine as Song Yet Sung.

The repercussions of this shameful portion of American history, which swept up so many lives, are so complicated that its story will always remain a "song yet sung," but talented singers like McBride can help others see the past more clearly.

Jenny Shank is a Boulder author who writes about books for New West.net. Her novel "Mile High" is currently a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Song Yet Sung

* By James McBride. Riverhead, 368 pages, $25.95.

* Grade: A

From page to multiplex

The film of McBride's debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is now in production, directed by Spike Lee. McBride wrote the screenplay, with Lee's guidance.