History abounds with women who lived as men: Charley Parkhurst, the whip-snapping coachman of the Gold Rush days who may have been the first woman to vote in a California election; or Billy Tipton, the jazz musician who found love with a stripper named Kitty Kelly. Literature, too, has girls donning breeches to take up the sword and dames donning mustaches to cross enemy lines.
But history and literature seldom have it the other way around: boy passes as a girl. Rarer still: boy consigned to girlhood in a cockeyed, befuddled moment by a Very Important Person whom no one dares to contradict.
That, at least, is the premise of by James McBride.
The boy in question is young Henry Shackleford, described in “The Good Lord Bird” as a Baptist who lived to 103 and “claimed to have been the only Negro to survive the American outlaw John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859.” The Very Important Person is none other than fiery abolitionist Brown, who, hard into the freeing business in Kansas, sees a black boy with a pretty face, takes him for a girl and, when he hears the child’s father say, “Massa, my Henry ain’t a — ,” makes the cardinal error that will define this rollicking novel until its last page.
As Henry describes it in notebooks that turn up 100 years after the , “The Old Man heard Pa say ‘Henry ain’t a,’ and took it to be ‘Henrietta,’ which is how the Old Man’s mind worked. Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.”
Mistake follows mistake in this rambunctious comedy of errors. Owen — one of the Old Man’s 22 children — is so loaded down by sword, gun and knife that he rattles like a noisy hardware store. Indeed, the Pottawatomie Rifles, as Brown’s raiders are called, are a pitiful sight to behold. Their coats look as if mice have had at them; their boots are more toes than leather; they stink of too many nights on the prairie and rank buffalo dung. They’re hardly the army they’re cracked up to be. And yet, to hear folks tell it, “Old John Brown and his murderous sons planned to deaden every man, woman, and child on the prairie. Old John Brown stole horses. Old John Brown burned homesteads. Old John Brown raped women and hacked off heads. Old John Brown done this, and old John Brown done that, and why, by God, by the time they was done with him, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low-down son of a bitch you ever saw.”
Against the grim grid of history, we see a bumptious American story, and McBride’s use of the vernacular throughout makes for a comical ride. Henrietta is sent off to “hive the bees,” to raise up a mighty swarm of blacks willing to take up arms against slavery. Since she is but a girl, she will hardly be suspected. But we all know how this story ends. Douglass bows out. Tubman meets with the Old Man and wishes him her best. But the bees never do hive. A terrible climax will come to pass, and we hurtle toward it, laughing.
There is something deeply humane in this, something akin to the work of Homer or Mark Twain. We tend to forget that history is all too often made by fallible beings who make mistakes, calculate badly, love blindly and want too much. We forget, too, that real life presents utterly human heroes with far more contingency than history books can offer. McBride’s narrator leads us through history’s dark corridors, suggesting that “truths” may actually lie elsewhere.
FICTION: ABOLITION
ABOLITION
The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride (Riverhead)
