I love writing historical fiction. Digging up dry bare bones of long-dead people and reassembling them with imagined personalities, motives and quirky character traits. In both the writing and the reading, one can break the chains of current reality and escape, Houdini-like, into an imagined fantasy world. At the end, most authors bring you back to earth with an “Afterword” or “Author’s Note” that distinguishes fact from fiction.

Not so with James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. This rousing romp through John Brown’s quixotic and bloody attempt to liberate slaves at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 left me breathlessly scanning Wikipedia entries to figure out what was real and what was fake.

McBride’s fictional narrator is a young Negro boy nicknamed “Onion,” who dresses like a girl, gets “adopted” by Brown and dragged into the “Old Man’s” hardscrabble army of liberation. More worried about saving his own skin than freeing his fellow slaves, Onion regales us with canny observations of the real people and events in the story, along with a whole dictionary’s worth of memorable metaphors. Of Brown’s mentally-challenged son Fred, Onion tells us “his brain was muddy. His cheese had pretty much slid off his biscuit.” Getting hunted by pro-slavers, he(she) quips, “weren’t a notion that throwed a lot of sugar in my bowl.”

Through Onion’s eyes we witness the slow unwinding of John Brown’s bible-inspired dream of provoking a massive slave rebellion. His followers split into realists who abandon the cause, and true believers who stay devoted to the disastrous end. Brown clings ever more fervently to his alternate reality even as his fantasy world washes away in a flood of facts.

Kind of like our soon-to-be former President.

But there the similarity ends. As Onion tells us, “the Old Man was a lunatic, but a good, kind lunatic…he had the weight of my people on his shoulders. It was him who left house and home behind for something he believed in.”

Funny, sad, and at times profound, this book definitely belongs on your reading list.
David Jessup, December 15, 2020

Killers of the Flower Moon
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann

This book is a history that reads like a whodunnit.  A page-turner that bring to life one of the most shocking atrocities in Oklahoma history: the murder of Osage Indians by upstanding white citizens to acquire oil rights in the 1920s.  Who knew?  The Tulsa massacre of Blacks has received a lot of attention recently, but the Osage murders—possible in the hundreds by author David Grann’s account—aren’t even mentioned in the Wikipedia Oklahoma history entry.

This book shines a light on the obscure time period marking the end of the “wild west” and the emergence of modern investigate work of the FBI.  Well worth your time.

As a writer who has worked to give voice to an Indian woman growing up in 1840s Montana (Mariano’s Woman), I am awestruck by a book I just read entitled The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles.  It tells the story of a freed slave named Britt Johnson who hauls his family to Texas after the Civil War only to lose his wife and children to a Kiowa-Comanche raiding party.  To get them back, Britt must learn Kiowa bargaining rituals with the help of a Comanche drifter who shares with Britt a love of fine horses.  In the process he learns that some young captives, despite the trauma of watching their parents brutally murdered, have no desire to return to “civilization.”  (the psychology of captives taken by Indians is the theme of another excellent Jiles book, The News of the World.)

Most of the characters in The Color of Lightning were real people, and the cultures in which they are embedded—Kiowa, Comanche, liberated slave settlements hunkering uneasily among Confederate Texan towns, buffalo soldiers and earnest Quakers volunteering as Indian agents—are rendered with convincing authenticity by Jiles.  Yet her characters retain their individuality and unique voices without becoming cultural stereotypes. How she pulls this off is amazing to me.  I had to research only three cultures in my book.

Jiles also brings the Texas landscape to life with poetic imagery, and describes the everyday clothes, tools and dwellings of the time period with astonishing historical detail, without detracting from the narrative.

The chapter where Britt re-connects with his injured and sexually brutalized wife is one of the tenderest and most compelling love scenes I have ever read.

This has got to be one of my all-time favorite books.