The Good Lord Bird

The Good Lord Bird is James McBride's 2013 novel, the National Book Award winner and McBride's structural masterwork in the historical-comic-literary register that Deacon King Kong would later develop further. The structural premise is Henry Shackleford, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy in 1856 Bleeding Kansas Territory, who falls in with the abolitionist John Brown after Brown shoots Henry's father in a Pottawatomie tavern. Brown mistakes Henry for a girl, names her Henrietta and then Onion, and takes her with the abolitionist company for the next three years through the Kansas raids, the funding-raising tour of New England, the 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the December 1859 execution at Charlestown. The novel is structured as Henry's first-person memoir of those three years.

McBride's structural method is the sustained first-person Henry voice across the entire novel, in the literary tradition that Mark Twain established with Huck Finn and that Percival Everett's James (2024) recently rewrote against. The John Brown chapters are the structural moral center of the novel; McBride's Brown is rendered with the kind of patient ambiguity (charismatic, sincere, prophetic, mostly insane, and the only major nineteenth-century American figure who was actually willing to die to end slavery) that the historical record requires and that contemporary American literary fiction rarely commits to. The Frederick Douglass cameo in the Rochester chapter is one of the funniest pieces of contemporary American historical-literary writing. The Harpers Ferry sequence in the back third is the structural emotional payoff the entire novel has been building toward.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right McBride entry point for readers coming from the historical-literary shelf, and as one of the canonical contemporary American historical-comic novels. The 2020 Showtime Ethan Hawke limited series is the strongest contemporary adaptation of any McBride novel. The Michael Boatman audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.