The Good Lord Bird

 

 

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, the author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store which I recently reviewed, is a historical fiction novel about the life of John Brown. As an undergraduate American History major, I was well aware of John Brown’s raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia which occurred in late 1859. I knew that this event was an important precursor to the Civil War. The greatest fear in the South was of a slave rebellion. John Brown hoped that the raid he engineered would lead to the capture of federal weapons, and as a result, would stimulate a slave rebellion. However, the raid was a miserable failure in which many of Brown’s small army were killed including a couple of his sons. Brown was shot and badly injured although he survived until his trial. He was captured, found guilty of fomenting an insurrection, and subsequently hung for treason. But that was really the extent of my knowledge of John Brown and the failed raid. Even when I did an online search for information about John Brown, I got only a little more details about his earlier years.

 

McBride has filled in a lot more information. The narrator of the story was actually a slave boy, about 12 years old in 1956 when he managed to join up with Brown because it was obvious Brown was fond of him and would provide him with food and shelter. Brown had been married twice and fathered a total of 22 children, some of whom died as infants or children. His first wife died and his second wife out lived him. Despite fathering so many children, Brown was often on the road, first as a preacher of apparent biblical material that he often made up. Because literacy was not common, there were few people who could challenge him about his knowledge of the Bible. When he became an obsessed abolitionist, he traveled with a small army to Kansas where he participated in the “bleeding Kansas” when the slavery issue in Kansas was to be determined by a vote of those living in Kansas. It was a most violent time, and Brown came to the attention of federal soldiers after he killed a couple local people there.

 

Meanwhile, the narrator was initially thought by Brown to be a girl who he affectionately called “Onion.” Onion chose to maintain his false identity as a young girl because he was afraid to challenge Brown who was a severe task master, and Onion perceived it was just safer to be a girl in the face of the violence happening around him. McBride mostly concentrated the story in the years in Kansas in 1956 until John Brown’s raid in October 1959, and his hanging two months later. The hanging was was only three months before the first inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President. It was only about 5 weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration that the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter.

 

The dialogue in The Good Lord Bird was incredible, spoken like the language of the time. In the drama of the story, I sometimes felt that Onion was like the ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith who almost constantly yells at his listeners. But the language itself was rich as it seemed to accurately portray the generally uneducated people about whom McBride mostly wrote. Whether it was true or not, McBride wrote of Brown’s friendship with Frederick Douglas and his encounters with Harriet Tubman. There’s no doubt that he was one of the most famous men in the United States at that time. From Kansas to Virginia, John Brown was often operating on bad information, and time-after-time, he had lucky encounters in which he avoided injury or death. He always claimed that the almighty would protect him. He charged on with his goal of abolition, despite the loss of one son along the way before his arrival at Harper’s Ferry, and the loss of two more sons during the raid. He was constantly trying to build up his army only to constantly see his troops take their leave of him. He was continuously and comically preaching his version of biblical words and stories as support for his intent to free the slaves.

 

I found this story to be captivating and I recommend it highly.