Song Yet Sung

Are you participating in Susan’s Color Me Brown Summer Challenge?  Come on–brown up!  Add some color to your blog and the list of books you’ve chosen to read and review.  Were you pissed off by Bloomsbury’s decision to put a white girl on the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s novel, LIAR?  Then DO something about it.  Prove publishers wrong, pick up a book with someone of color on the cover, and give it some space on your blog.  If you’re not reading books by and about people of color, you’re part of the problem…

If you don’t know by now, I’m a big fan of neo-slave narratives.  These “new” tellings of the slave experience are endlessly fascinating, because there was a range of realities and authors today have endless options when it comes to representing what life was like for slaves and those who enslaved them.  Original slave narratives were written in support of abolition; they followed a certain arc, starting with the moment of enslavement (or awareness of one’s status as a slave) and ending with the pursuit of freedom (not always a destination, but more of an ongoing process).  Slave narrators were often fugitives, still running from the law and former owners, so they couldn’t be too explicit when telling their stories; their audience was almost exclusively white, Christian, middle-class, and genteel, and therefore mention of rape, extreme violence, or rage/revenge was not allowed.  Slave narrators often had to have their story validated by a prominent white figure, since enslaved Africans were believed to be incapable of literacy (which was made illegal).  NEO-slave narratives aren’t constrained by these considerations, and authors can portray the full humanity of enslaved people.  One of my favorite neo-slave narratives, Beloved by Toni Morrison, has one of the best lines in all of literature, I think; an elderly black woman who has lost most of her loved ones to “the peculiar institution” takes to her bed and before dying declares: “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.”  Whenever I read a neo-slave narrative and the author has his or her enslaved characters declare their love for whites, I’m wary.  I do believe some slaves cared for the people who owned them, but as a group, I think whites must have been contemptible in the eyes of those they tortured, exploited, and brutalized for hundreds of years.  When I read a neo-slave narrative, I want to see what *wasn’t* allowed in those original antebellum slave narratives, and that is just what you’ll find in James McBride’s Song Yet Sung.  I’m also wary when male authors try to create believable female characters, but this author does an admirable job creating nontraditional women of both races: Patty Cannon, a white slave trader known for her murderous rage and cold, calculating personality, and the Dreamer, a fugitive slave of remarkable beauty and the gift of second sight, which makes her both feared and admired in this coastal community of Maryland.  The novel begins with the Dreamer’s capture by a black male slave owned by Patty Cannon; as the Dreamer recovers in an attic filled with other slaves, she is taught The Code by an elderly black woman and then leads an impromptu insurrection by killing Patty’s favorite slave while he was trying to rape her.  Fourteen slaves flee the tavern owned by Patty, and the novel mostly revolves around the efforts to recapture the Dreamer who refuses to get on board “the gospel train” and head north to freedom.  Her “gift” allows the Dreamer to see into the future, and what she sees is so repellent she decides to just linger in the swamp rather than seek a freedom that doesn’t really exist.  What is it that the Dreamer sees?  Basically, the videos on BET.  For real.  She dreams of rappers flaunting gold chains and obese black children rejecting books and young men shooting at one another from car windows.  So McBride’s clearly making a statement about the “progress” African Americans have made since Emancipation, and the debt we all owe to those who struggled every day just to stay alive and stay human.  McBride truly excels when describing relations between whites, almost all of whom are driven to engage in the slave trade by their own desperate economic circumstances.  I would like to have known more about the Dreamer’s life before she became a fugitive; we know her owner, Captain Spocott, likely wants to use her for sexual purposes (“he built a house for me”), but we don’t know much else.  McBride invents a complicated code used by slaves to conduct fugitives on the Underground Railroad, but most of the participants are black men.  Still, this novel is highly original, and quite moving (I was teary and almost breathless at the end).  McBride clearly knows the Maryland coast, and his novel shows just how inextricable the lives of whites and blacks were in the antebellum period.