There’s a scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar nominated film Django Unchained where slave owner Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo Di Caprio, cuts open the skull of a slave named Old Ben to prove, though phrenology, that people of colour are more submissive than the white man. Phrenology aside, the scene is problematic because the rest of the movie does very little to refute Candie’s claim. Yes, Django kicks arse, but the film goes at lengths to show that he’s exceptional, that aside from him the other slaves are exactly as submissive as poor Old Ben.

While James McBride’s National Book Award winning novel, The Good Lord Bird, isn’t specifically a response to Django Unchained (for one they came out around the same time), it does provide a more nuanced approach to slavery than three dimples on the back of a coloured man’s skull.

Brown pre beard

The novel tells the story of Captain John Brown (Old Man Brown), the devout abolitionist who believed that armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the evils of slavery. Brown, a white man with twenty-two children, spent a number of years trying to form an army of white and coloured folk that would fight the good fight against slave owners and the Federal Government. A bit like Ned Kelly, opinion is divided as to whether Brown was a true American hero, an iconoclast who stood for liberty, freedom and God, or a total nutter, who murdered innocent civilians (not all of them slave owners) and whose actions ultimately led to the Civil War.  Either way, there’s a mythic quality to Brown that’s ripe for story-telling, something that McBride takes full advantage of.

Sporting scary beard

Brown’s worldview is filtered through the eyes of Henry Shackleford, a young coloured boy, whose first encounter with the freedom fighter leads to the death of Henry’s father. Feeling guilty that he might have been the cause of Henry’s father’s death (and he most certainly was), Brown does two things, he takes Henry with him and mistakes the young boy for a girl. This leads to the books magnificent opening line, “I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.”

This gender confusion immediately gives the novel its comedic tone.  This is entirely intentional on the part of McBride.  As he noted in an interview with Edan Lepucki he was looking to counter the more serious books written about Brown with something that informed and also made people laugh.  And so, at least in the first half of the novel, much is made of Brown’s capacity to drop everything and pray at a moment’s notice, even if this means shouting Biblical passages to Federal soldiers as they’re shooting at him.  As Henry describes:

The Old Man’s prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. Just when he seemed to wrap up one thought, another come tumbling out and crashed up against the first, and then another crashed up against that one, and after a while they all bumped and crashed and commingled against one another till you didn’t know who was who and why he was praying it, for the whole thing come together like the tornadoes that whipped across the plains, gathering up the sagebrush and boll weevils and homesteads and tossing them about like dust.

Also, as noted above, humour is generated from the fact that Henry is dressed as a girl for the bulk of the novel.  This results in all sorts of sit-com like hi-jinks and shenanigans as Henry alternatively finds older white man trying to bed him, while coloured men and woman attack him for acting like a “sissy”.  While some of these comedy moments are genuinely funny, Henry’s ability to hide his true nature from people like Brown and his family start to stretch credulity.

Fortunately, there’s more to the novel then the comedy generated from Old Man Brown’s over the top prayers and Henry wearing a bonnet.  At it’s best, The Good Lord Bird explores the question of slavery and why someone like Captain Brown was able to attract so much attention and support and yet not achieve his aims – at least not in his lifetime.  In contrast to Calvin Candie’s simplistic take on the world, what McBride makes abundantly clear throughout the novel is that the black community was not a single monolith with a single voice.  Yes, fear and submission, as evidenced by slaves like Nigger Bob who want to be free but are too frightened to fight for it, does partly explain why there wasn’t a black uprising.  But as The Good Lord Bird illustrates there were those people of colour, like Frederick Douglass, who never submitted to slavery but eschewed a violent response in favour of showing white folk that a person of colour could match it with them intellectually.

And then there’s Sibonia, an old coloured woman cooped up like a chicken in a pen next to the whore house that Henry is staying at.  In one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, Sibonia and her cohorts and taken to be publicly hanged after it’s discovered that they planned to kill a Reverend.  Just before she’s executed, Sibonia explains to a wide eyed Reverend why she planned to kill him:

‘Reverend, it was you and your wife who taught me that God is no respecter of persons; it was you and your missus who taught me that in His eyes we are all equal. I was a slave. My husband was a slave. My children was slaves. But they was sold. Every one of them. And after the last child was sold, I said, ‘I will strike a blow for freedom.’ I had a plan, Reverend. But I failed. I was betrayed. But I tell you now, if I had succeeded, I would have slain you and your wife first, to show them that followed me that I could sacrifice my love, as I ordered them to sacrifice their hates, to have justice for them. I would have been miserable for the rest of my life. I could not kill any human creature and feel any less. But in my heart, God tells me I was right.

It’s Sibonia’s execution that lingers in Henry’s mind, and when the time comes for him to make his own choice – to run or to fight – he ultimately chooses to go back to Harpers Ferry and join Old Man Brown on his raid of the Federal armory.

The Good Lord Bird isn’t a perfect novel.  Laughing at a boy dressed as a girl isn’t exactly the height of comedy and also has a nasty connotations attached to it.  And yet, while it might provide a broad caricature of Old Man Brown and his mission it gives a nuanced understanding to the question of slavery, one that not only refutes Calvin Candie’s simplistic view on the world but also counters the idea that Django was exceptional, that he was the only person of colour who refused to submit.