Song Yet Sung: A Review
James McBride’s 2008 novel Song Yet Sung may not be just what you’d expect from a novel of nineteenth-century slavery. Yes, the book shows the inhumanity of slavery, that peculiar institution, as if the inhumane could be ignored. But perhaps because the story is about Maryland slavery, it might not tick off all the boxes some readers expect.
In the Deep South’s ante-bellum economy, large groups of slaves produced crops (mostly cotton) for national and international trade. In Dorchester County, Maryland, the rural economy depended on individual small-farm farmers and watermen, not on large-scale agriculture. Maryland had a much larger number of free blacks than the South. A number of the black freemen made their living as tradesmen who worked under the near watch of whites, circumstances that did not guarantee much real liberty.
In the twenty-first century, the Eastern Shore landscape of swamp, marsh, creeks, coves, underbrush, and forest is a paradise to those who hunt, fish, and enjoy nature. In the mid-nineteenth century, to escaping fugitive slaves, those same landscape elements provided either an obstacle to fugitives, or shelter from vicious slave-catchers, or both. In Song Yet Sung , this Eastern Shore landscape is a passive character, but even so, it is sometimes as deliberate, as forceful as a human opponent or antagonist.
McBride’s complex plot makes demands of a casual reader, requiring look-backs to earlier pages to understand what’s going on in immediate pages. But at least as demanding and engaging are the unanswered questions and mysteries that tease a careful reader. One mystery, the “Code,” is the fugitive network’s set of signals to guide runaways aboard the “gospel train.” Liz learns it as she escapes a second time. It consists in cryptic aphorisms, displayed quilt patterns, the blacksmith’s hammer strikes, patterns of five knots on a cord, and lines drawn in the dirt. Crooked lines, not straight, will get you someone you can trust. One aphorism is “the coach wrench turns the wagon wheel.” These mysterious messages provoke readers but leave them in the dark.
The novel has an ensemble cast of characters, many of whom contain strong elements of the outsider and even the outlaw in their make-ups, qualities familiar to nineteenth-century Eastern Shore residents. Two important white characters are slave-catchers, but neither one is purely evil. One, named Patty, echoes the notorious historical slave-catching figure Patty Cannon. McBride’s Patty, like the historical Patty, is brutal, murderous, and beautiful but she can also view slaves with sympathy, even compassion. The other slave-catcher is Denwood Long, a former waterman who has lost his wife and son, and otherwise experienced a hard-luck life. In spite of his bringing blacks back into slavery, many blacks respect him, and he gradually becomes more human and humane. Patty and Denwood each compete to capture and re-enslave Liz for ransom money. The most thoroughly alienated person is the Woolman, an African-American feral giant who has lived his life in speechless isolation with his son.
If the ensemble has a main figure, it’s Liz Spocott, with whom all the others are at least somewhat connected. An escaped slave re-captured, in her second escape she kills a slave-catcher guard and thus adds to her offenses. As well, Liz echoes the much more benign Harriet Tubman (also of Dorchester). Liz, like Tubman, has suffered an accidental but lasting head injury. And, like Tubman, she has visions and dreams. Liz, “the dreamer,” sees blacks in the future whose twentieth-century indulgent, consumerist lives do not honor their ancestors’ sacrifices.
Liz may be for some readers a puzzle greater than the Code. She tells her ally Amber that she is “free here,” pointing to her heart. Were she to escape to the North, she knows she’d find herself still in a racist society without much more freedom than she has in Dorchester. Coming from her complex, nuanced inner life, that declaration of personal autonomy makes immediate emotional sense. However, when we recall that she has escaped slavery twice and is on the run for most of the book, readers may find her desire finally not to ride the gospel train North a bit contradictory. In her visions, she may see the massive 1963 “camp meeting” in Washington and understand the “Free at last” speech, but she does not want to escape to her own freedom.
Yes, Liz, a partial analogue of “Moses” Tubman, does not want to escape to the North. When Clarence, her underground railway conductor, rows her out in a bungy at the start of the first leg of her escape journey from Dorchester, she convinces him to turn back. In a dream in this boat, she learns that Amber is in custody and on the way back to his owner’s house. She wants to help him somehow.
Liz and Clarence agree that moving North may not be the best answer. Clarence hears Liz’s vision of the 1963 March on Washington speech calling for blacks’ freedom. He rightly hears that the future call for justice means that blacks are not free then in the future. Song Yet Sung carefully presents the moral and psychological complexities of slavery, nor does it hesitate to show that slavery will live on in the present.
© Common Sense for the Eastern Shore, 2024
Title image: Pond at Pickering Creek Audubon Center, Talbot Co. Photo: Jan Plotczyk
