Song Yet Sung

Unlike his more recent The Good Lord Bird (2013), with its irreverent first-person narrator trailing in the wake of John Brown, James McBride's Song Yet Sung (2008) neither deconstructs period heroes (The Good Lord Bird's Frederick Douglass comes off...badly) nor comments sardonically on white abolitionist politics.  Instead, it tracks the chaos that follows in the wake of escaped slave Liz Spocott, known as "the Dreamer," who, as she nears death, accurately foretells more and more of the future.  Although the ailing Liz spends more of the novel being carted around (sometimes literally) than moving on her own, the novel's plotlines all intersect in the quest to recapture her.  First, Liz draws down the enmity of the real-life (albeit chronologically transplanted) slave stealer Patty Cannon after she frees herself and several other slaves from Patty's clutches; then, Liz's owner sets the eerie, unstoppable slave-catcher Denwood after her; and soon Amber, a conflicted slave planning to escape from the impoverished mistress he respects, falls deeply in love with her.  Finally, Liz's dreams of a strange and powerful Black preacher from the future make her realize that the strange son of the Woolman, a quasi-mythic escaped slave with near-superhuman powers, must be protected so that the future can actually come to be. 

One of the novel's refrains is, as Amber tells Liz at their first meeting, "You in it now.  You got to stay in it" (90).  At the most local level, being "in it" means being admitted to the community of slaves who know the code, something that a frustrated Liz struggles to master throughout the novel; this alternate language (of knots, quilts, numbers, and so on) enables the slaves to communicate both secretly and far more efficiently than their masters.  The code is integral to running Moses' (Harriet Tubman, offstage in this novel) "gospel train," and rather than sacrifice the code's integrity, characters like the Blacksmith or the elderly Clarence make it clear that they'd kill Liz first.  But being "in it" also means, as Clarence warns Liz, "[w]e all connected" (276): her attempts to hold herself aloof from both the community and their goals are doomed to backfire fairly spectacularly, sometimes with serious consequences for all concerned.  Decisions once made cannot be undone; "[o]nce you're on [the gospel train]," Amber is told, "you can't get off" (123).  The narrative pushes all of its characters forward to two options: seek freedom or die.  Or seek freedom and die.    But once the seeking begins, there's no stopping.

Liz's double quest--to find out "the meaning" (1) of her dream and to understand the code--highlights one of the key obstacles on the route to freedom: interpreting the signs.  (This theme crops up again in The Good Lord Bird, when Henry inadvertently causes disaster because he doesn't know the code.)  Liz's dream, which eventually turns out to foretell the coming of Martin Luther King, Jr., embeds the reader in this interpretive quest, for the dream is sometimes literal (the reader eventually recognizes the "I Have a Dream" speech), sometimes allegorical (the vision of Black children simultaneously "gorging" themselves and sobbing in "hunger and starvation" [40]), sometimes a combination of the two.  The twenty-first century reader can decode the implications of Liz's dream--of African-Americans supposedly enjoying the freedoms of consumer capitalism, for example, but other freedoms, not so much--but our gift of hindsight also reminds us that we lack Liz's gift of foresight.  For part of the novel's point is that "freedom" is located somewhere beyond not only the novel's horizon, but also our own; if we (and especially, no doubt, "we" who are not African-American) rest secure in believing that our comfort with Liz's dream means that we are reading the novel from some position of historical plenitude, "freedom" neatly achieved, then we commit the same kind of error of which Liz accuses Amber.  "Freedom ain't up North" (80), Liz insists; later, she continues, "You love the North [...] You love a place.  There ain't nothing there to love.  Not today.  Not tomorrow" (156).   Identifying "freedom" and "North," that is, makes freedom seem concrete, easily grasped, finite, but it also denies the fact of being "in it."  

The novel insists that all characters are "in it" in another fashion--in a system that codes whites as superior.  In his afterword, McBride mentions his daughter reading Gone with the Wind for class, and in many ways Song Yet Sung deliberately averts GTW-style tropes:  the only plantation owner we meet is derided as a fool, the whites (slave owners included) are mostly poor and/or struggling, and the Black women are all savvy, powerful figures in their own right.  Moreover, the only hint of white romance, between Kathleen Sullivan and Denwood, is entirely one-sided on the man's part and goes nowhere--no Rhett and Scarlett here (and Kathleen's obvious Irish roots may be an additional whack at Scarlett O'Hara).  This shift to slave-ownership amongst impoverished whites actually highlights the difficulty of being "in it."   Amber is grateful that the widowed Kathleen has not sold off her slaves, and even though he plans to escape, he still intends to pay her back fully for his own value (124); similarly, his sister Mary "cared for the missus" (272).  Kathleen, for her own part, thinks of her slaves as "part of her family," and vice-versa (101).  And yet, as the novel shrewdly insists, these affective ties are part of the systemic horror.  Emotional ties cannot override the fact that Amber, Mary, and Mary's son Wiley are all Kathleen's property, and that she remains perfectly capable of contemplating their eventual sale; moreover, as Liz points out to Amber, his gratitude for Kathleen's kindness is, if anything, terrible on the face of it.    It's easy to believe that Kathleen and the monstrous Patty Cannon are the novel's binary opposites (good/evil), but although the novel ultimately rejects Liz's claim that "[s]he [Kathleen] ain't no different than that woman that tried to kill us over yonder" (197), it nevertheless insists that Kathleen's subjectivity is inescapably scarred by the racism that enables her to keep slaves in the first place.  Patty's professed fondness for Black men--"She actually liked the colored.  She trusted them  more than she did the white man" (21)--chimes uncomfortably with Kathleen's own professed fondness for her slave "family"; the reader who denounces the first as hypocritical and the second as authentic rather drastically misses the point.  For even though Kathleen is, as Amber says more than once, "up to the job of being decent" (160), the reader is reminded again and again that "decent" and "racist" are not incompatible.  Quite the contrary.