Reflections on "An Interview with James McBride"

At the Calvin conference, I had several opportunities to hear James McBride, whom I've previously mentioned on this blog. He brought the first keynote I heard, but he also allowed himself to be interviewed before a live audience in "An Interview with James McBride." 

He is a writer, musician, and screenwriter who wrote The Good Lord Bird, which won theNational Book Award for fiction. He's also well known for The Color of Water. 

The Good Lord Bird is about abolitionist John Brown. McBridehas written—a times a bit irreverently—about other historical characters, as well. Onewas Frederick Douglass, whom the author described as having a black wife and awhite mistress: “You [still] can’t do that in Brooklyn.” A historiandescribing McBride’s treatment of Douglass predicted the latter's “gonna bestewing in his teriyaki sauce when he reads it.”

McBrideadmitted making fun of all his subjects—except Harriet Tubman. He puts her onthe same level as Lincoln. He admires her because she didn’t make speeches. Shenever told how she got people to freedom. She. Never. Told. And the fact is, westill know little about African-American life during her time.

In The Good Lord Bird, he said, he recounted the mayhem on the Kansas border in Brown's day, which he described as “sheer craziness.” Hespent time on location in Kansas doing research, and afterward he “ruminated,pontificated”—resulting in his award-winning novel. He told us, “What slaverymade white people do to each other is enough to fill thirty novels a week.”

Hecontinued, “I love Westerns and the notion of the wild west." And in that vein, "The Good Lord Bird was a ready-madestory. John Brown truly had religion. That’s what I respected about him, thoughhe was a man of conflicting impulses. [The story] was ripe for humor because hewas serious. Today he’d be called a terrorist.”   

McBridepresents the narrative from the point of view of Onion, a black kid posing as agirl—anything for self-preservation. “The truth has many faces,” he said. McBride told us he borrowed the character’s name from a kid who stole his bike.

Reflectingon Brown’s life before Harper’s Ferry, McBride said slaves were terrorizedat the thought of being sold to New Orleans. He quickly added that today “there’s a new kindof slavery. It’s called hip-hop.”