The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
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| Ivory-billed woodpecker (the Good Lord bird) |
James McBride was born September 11, 1957. His father, Andrew was a Christian minister, and his mother, Ruth was a Polish Jewish immigrant who converted to Christianity upon her marriage. He was raised in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects and was the last of eight children Ruth had from her marriage to Rev. Andrew McBride, who died of cancer at age 45. Ruth eventually remarried and had four more children.
James McBride earned an undergraduate degree in music composition from Oberlin College in 1979, after which he earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He went on to work for The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the Wilmington News Journal, and People magazine. He also wrote pieces for Rolling Stone magazine, Us magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Essence magazine, The New York Times, and others.
In 1995, McBride published his first bestseller, a memoir, The Color of Water, which dealt with the story of his family life and his relationship with his mother. Other novels included Miracle at St. Anna (2002), which was made into a movie by Spike Lee, and Song Yet Sung (2008). In 2013, he released The Good Lord Bird, for which he won the National Book Award for fiction. On September 22, 2016, President Barack Obama awarded McBride the 2015 National Humanities Medal "for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America. Through writings about his own uniquely American story, and his works of fiction informed by our shared history, his moving stories of love display the character of the American family."
McBride is also an accomplished tenor saxophonist and has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, and Gary Burton. He was awarded the American Music Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award in 1993, the American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award in 1996, and the inaugural ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award in 1996.
He is currently a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University. He has three children and lives between New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.
The above biographic facts were plagiarized wholesale from Wikipedia as usual, but McBride's official biography is also worth a look. In it you will learn that:
... James has other talents. He's the worst dancer in the history of African Americans, bar none, going back to slavetime and beyond. He should be legally barred from dancing at any party he attends. He dances with one finger in the air like a white guy. He has other skills too. Like when he takes off his hat, fleas fly out. Stuff like that. Little things. Little talents.
In the following video, also on his biography page, James McBride talks about The Color of Water, his memoir about his mother, which sounds like a really good book.
In this second video, McBride talks about The Good Lord Bird, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, writing, and gentrification.
John Brown
One of the proudest possessions of the poet Langston Hughes was a shawl that belonged to his grandmother's first husband, Lewis Leary, who died in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In the 1920s, Hughes wrote this poem:
October 16: The Raid by Langston Hughes
Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.
John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another—
And died
For your sake.
Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground—
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town—
Perhaps
You will recall
To help you remember John Brown, a good historical account that was recently published is Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz (our group read another book of his, Confederates in the Attic). I also found a good blog, John Brown the Abolitionist, maintained by Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., an associate professor of church history at Alliance Theological Seminary, whose particular passion is all things John Brown and who believes that Brown's image should be changed from terrorist to hero.
