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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 \u201cAfterword\u201d or \u201cAuthor\u2019s Note\u201d that distinguishes fact from fiction.<\/p>\n
Not so with James McBride\u2019s The Good Lord Bird. This rousing romp through John Brown\u2019s quixotic and bloody attempt to liberate slaves at Harper\u2019s Ferry in 1859 left me breathlessly scanning Wikipedia entries to figure out what was real and what was fake.<\/p>\n
McBride\u2019s fictional narrator is a young Negro boy nicknamed \u201cOnion,\u201d who dresses like a girl, gets \u201cadopted\u201d by Brown and dragged into the \u201cOld Man\u2019s\u201d 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\u2019s worth of memorable metaphors. Of Brown\u2019s mentally-challenged son Fred, Onion tells us \u201chis brain was muddy. His cheese had pretty much slid off his biscuit.\u201d Getting hunted by pro-slavers, he(she) quips, \u201cweren\u2019t a notion that throwed a lot of sugar in my bowl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through Onion\u2019s eyes we witness the slow unwinding of John Brown\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Kind of like our soon-to-be former President.<\/p>\n
But there the similarity ends. As Onion tells us, \u201cthe Old Man was a lunatic, but a good, kind lunatic\u2026he had the weight of my people on his shoulders. It was him who left house and home behind for something he believed in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Funny, sad, and at times profound, this book definitely belongs on your reading list.
\nDavid Jessup, December 15, 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3315"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3318,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3315\/revisions\/3318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}