Review by New York Times Review
"SONG YET SUNG" is the second novel by James McBride, best known until now for "The Color of Water," his memoir of growing up as the black son of a white mother. Defining the son of a white mother as 100 percent black is a special device of American racism that has defied logic for more than 200 years. His unusual position may well give McBride an advantage in writing this antebellum story of fugitive slaves. Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride's portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing. "Song Yet Sung" isn't flawless. There are moments, though fortunately not many, when McBride's expositions of the Underground Railroad's communication code look as if he's grappling with a Rubik's Cube. Some elements in the generally masterly plot have to be battered into place at the end - when it seems that McBride, steering clear of Harriet Beecher Stowe's viscous sentimentality, overcorrects by applying more toughminded restraint than is strictly necessary. But these defects are too small and peripheral to seriously detract from the pleasure or value of this book. The story takes place on Maryland's Eastern Shore - Harriet Tubman's territory. Tubman herself never makes it into the novel, though she is present in the characters' minds as the "Moses" who leads escaping slaves to the promised land of freedom. McBride's heroine, Liz Spocott, has some things in common with Tubman: both women become visionaries after being bashed in the head with a chunk of iron in the course of somebody else's quarrel. Liz's vatic dreams, which begin on Page 1 and continue throughout, provide a sort of Martian view of 21st-century gangsta culture: "Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards - every bit of pride, decency and morality squeezed clean out of them." The persistence of these visions suffuses the whole book with the mostly unspoken question, Is this really the freedom we're struggling for? "I just thank God I ain't born tomorrow," Liz remarks at one point. "Ain't no freedom in it." McBride is excellent on the unusual social nuances of the backwater that was the antebellum Eastern Shore, where largescale plantations (and the crops to support them) were few and far between. Most masters owned no more than a handful of slaves, on terms likely to include a quasi-familial intimacy. Many of the Chesapeake Bay watermen owned no slaves at all and took a dim view of the whole system, for reasons of religion or just libertarian temperament. The free black population was significant, especially in towns like Cambridge, which, in the isolation of 1850, could pass for a metropolis. The action starts quickly with a breakout of slaves imprisoned in a tavern operated by a roguish woman named Patty Cannon and her partners in crime, who hunt down runaways and steal docile slaves from owners they had no plans to flee. Menaced with rape by one of Patty's black accomplices (himself a slave), Liz manages to stab him with a pike clenched in her teeth; she escapes Patty's precincts along with 14 others, who soon scatter and leave her to her own devices. After rescuing a feral black child from a muskrat trap, Liz is discreetly helped on her way by his father, a long-term runaway known as the Woolman, who lives a speechless life in the swamps. Here, McBride turns a hoary scrap of racist mythology - a savage blue-gummed black man, first cousin to Sasquatch, who lurked in the woods and swamps - on its head, transforming the old bugaboo into a hero comparable to the maroons of Caribbean lore. It's a testament to McBride's skill as a writer that although you really ought not to believe this kind of thing, you do. Liz returns in the direction of civilization to be taken under the wing of Amber, a slave owned by a waterman's young widow, Kathleen Sullivan, who relies on her blacks as if they were relatives even as she contemplates selling them to settle her debts (and to pre-empt their likely escape). As pursuit closes in, Amber arranges to put Liz on the Underground Railroad, but this game keeps being forced by various twists in the well-designed, gripping plot. One often risks turning the pages so fast as to miss some of the richness and subtlety of the writing. McBride has a good ear for period black dialect, and a deft touch with all sorts of dialogue. A personal favorite: "You can't kill me, Gimp. I own a tavern. It's paid for." This author also has a special feel for his villains, and not all of them are villains wholeheartedly. Patty Cannon (a historical figure whom McBride presents under her real name) is wicked to the bone, but she's also strong and smart and sexy; though you can't really like her, you can't help admiring her just a little. A more complex character is Denwood Long, aka the Gimp, the region's most expert slave-hunter, grudgingly respected by his quarry because, however unwillingly, he has to admit their humanity: "He disliked making deals with slaves and free blacks," McBride writes, "because in making deals with them, they became more human to him, and in doing so - try as he might to resist the feeling - they became less slave and more man to him. He could not make a deal with a pig, or a dog, or a piece of pork. But if a man says to another man or woman, I'll give you this for that, then who are you dealing with? An equal?" One of the untouchable subjects of slave times is that cross-racial comprehension was often found in such apparently improbable circumstances. EDWARD P. JONES, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in "The Known World" was like writing about Hitler from Hitler's mother's point of view. In "Song Yet Sung," McBride has captured a version of Jones's dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That's a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal. Madison Smartt Bell is the author of numerous books, including a recent biography of Toussaint Louverture.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Wounded and imprisoned in the Chesapeake Bay attic of vicious slave hunter Patty Stanton, Liz Spocott, 19, foresees the future and leads a breakout of 14 slaves, who are then hounded by hunters from many sides. With a strong focus on the role of women, the author of the The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1996) recounts the history of slave revolts without sentimentality in a stirring novel of cruelty, betrayal, and courage, including the part played by the young slave who runs from a kind mistress and is determined to help Liz on the gospel train to freedom. More than all the escape action, what holds you is the detail of the secret codes ( Double wedding rings ; Five knots. Five directions ) that the brave runaways pass on to show each other the way. And Liz's dreams of the future reach an unforgettable climax when she hears a leader preaching, Free at last, a song yet sung.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future-from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop-in her dreams. Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America. McBride hasn't lost his touch: he nails the horrors of slavery as well as he does the power of hope and redemption. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
McBride's second novel, following Miracle at St. Anna (soon to be a Spike Lee-directed major motion picture), might better be titled Novel Yet Edited: the review copy, at least, reads like a very rough first draft. Its setting-a small Chesapeake Bay town just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a place where the reality of slavery was more ambiguous than in other parts of the country-certainly lends it potential. The mature reader, however, learns very little new about the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, or the feelings of either the oppressed or the oppressors. Indeed, the novel largely seems written for a YA audience. The pace of the action is slowed by implausibility, repetitive and often cartoonish description, fairly obvious anachronisms, and a tremendous amount of unnecessary detail to the exclusion of the feelings of the (mostly flat) main characters. This is particularly disappointing given McBride's poignant 1996 memoir, The Color of Water. Recommended with reservations to public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/07.]-K.H. Cumiskey, North Carolina State Univ. Libs., Raleigh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
