Review by New York Times Review
FAMILY SAGAS WRITE HISTORY through microcosm, tracing a clan's rise, survival and, more often than not, ultimate dissolution. Thomas Mann's healthy bourgeois Buddenbrooks succumb to decadent sterility; Gabriel García Marquez's Buendias are erased by a hurricane; the Starks of Winterfell are massacred in the Riverlands. A family is sacrificed to time, and in their entrails readers find auguries of larger motions. The critic Frank Kermode believed that novels developed alongside a loss of faith in biblical chronology, as substitutes for Adam and Eve's universal family plot. He is borne out by recent years' fruitful crop of epics rooted in the familiar soil of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, blood, sex, bastardy and inheritance. They are books like Annie Proulx's "Barkskins" (2016), a tale of two families and five centuries of worldwide deforestation; Min Jin Lee's "Pachinko" (2017), an account of the 20 th century as undergone by four generations of a Korean family in xenophobic Japan; and a spate of African-American novels, like Ayana Mathis's "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" (2012) and Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing" (2016), that use the dispersal of families to chart the precarious red thread of black survival. Perhaps the most expansive family novel of the last two years, C. E. Morgan's "The Sport of Kings" (2016), synthesizes the black epic of lost roots with the dynastic accrual of white property. Morgan tracks three generations of Kentucky's aristocratic Forge clan, horse breeders whose self-aggrandizing mythology is shadowed at every step by a black Ohioan family descended from their founder's slaves. A picture of the hidden costs of cultivating enduring privilege, Morgan's novel offers a calculus of ancestral sins, a deep history of inequality, and, like so many interracial family novels in American literature, the faint prospect of national reconciliation. Its refrain is, tellingly, "How far away from your father can you run?" Novels like Morgan's draw the past into moral and emotional proximity, allowing readers entry to vast historical schema while borrowing their propulsion - the "illusion of historical flow" that Irving Howe called "a secret of genius"- from the family plot. More and more, they also expose the genre's disavowals and patriarchal dirty secrets, vindicating erased maternal contributions and buried collateral lines. But genealogy isn't everything. In many ways, the family saga runs a blinkered race, eyes locked on the straightaway between the present and its most obvious progenitors - those who managed, despite every obstacle or with the assistance of every unjust privilege, to reproduce. We are interested, to put it otherwise, in people who became "our" ancestors. What about those who didn't? PUBLISHED IN 2015 by New Directions, John Keene's quietly acclaimed but undersung "Counternarratives" surveys the vast tracts of uncharted territory beyond the family-novel paradigm. Chronologically arranged but narratively discrete, Keene's collection of 13 stories and novellas examines lives marked by the tectonic historical pressures of its five-century scope. Jumping from Reformation-era Brazil to Puritan New England to Langston Hughes's Harlem, it is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams. Some of Keene's characters are documented if obscure figures like the Prussian circus performer Miss La La, or "La Mulâtresse-Canon," whom Degas immortalized hanging from a rope by her teeth. Others are plausibly invented, like Zion, an 18th-century Massachusetts bondsman who disappears from his cell - after a debauched career across the Commonwealth - on the eve of his execution. All exist on history's fringes, not forefathers or foremothers but frustrated artists, defeated revolutionaries, monks, nuns, eccentric balloonists and social deviants. Same-sex relationships and their erotic undercurrents are a central focus. But even the stories without explicitly homosexual narratives "queer" history, in Keene's words, raising unwritten possibilities from the past's dormant margins. The book opens with "Mannahatta," a vignette evoking the 1613 landfall of Juan Rodriguez, a black Dominican sailor and Manhattan's first immigrant. Disembarking alone from his canoe, Rodriguez finds himself so entranced by the landscape and Algonquian language that he resolves to desert the crew of the Jonge Tobias - "shielding this place and its particularities from their imaginations" - to join the Indians. A counterspell to the arrival of that lost génocidaire Columbus, the moment is within history but not of it, an overture suggesting alternative chronologies. Other stories mourn disfigured potential. "Cold" dissects the final hours of Robert Allen Cole, a turn-of-thecentury vaudevillian, ragtime composer and tragic pioneer of African-American theater. Carving a Faustian niche for black musicians in a deeply racist genre, Cole is most famous today for "Under the Bamboo Tree." He also co-wrote more than 150 "coon songs" and introduced the first New York musical conceived, directed and performed by black entertainers. Unlike his more famous collaborators, John Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson - the brothers wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing"; James Weldon Johnson was executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. from 1920 to 1930 - Cole did not survive the coliseum of commercial disenfranchisement and requisite self-denigration that encircled black artists of his era. He killed himself in 1911 while recovering from a mental breakdown at a hotel in the Catskills. Cole's is a story few writers would think to tell. Remembered now, if at all, as a footnote or an embarrassment, he is neither an overlooked hero to rescue from erasure nor a tragic martyr like the quixotic John Brown of James McBride's "The Good Lord Bird," the defeated Béhanzin of Mary¿e Condé's "The Last of the African Kings" or the filicidal Sethe of Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Undaunted, Keene finds Cole sweating through his lavender linen suit, tormented by "devil's arias" on his dying day. Lyrics from his "coon songs" interrupt the text, while a tantalizing blues - "undreamt, unsummoned ... terrible samplings of the old and the unfamiliar" - drifts beyond his reach. This description could double as an epitome of "Counternarratives" itself. Keene has a Borgesian flair for invented primary texts and pseudoscholarly ephemera. "Rivers," a postscript to "Huckleberry Finn" narrated by Jim (now a Union army veteran), begins as an interview in the style of the W.RA.'s Depression-era oral histories. "Blues," which imagines an affair between Langston Hughes and his Spanish translator, the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, is a fantasy spun from the slenderest evidence: the latter's dedication of an erotic poem to Hughes and the knowledge that their time in New York and Mexico City overlapped. Disguised as marginalia, these stories are hard to imagine fitting into any novel. Larger narratives would only destroy that apartness from the chain of events which gives them escape velocity. HAUNTED BY ORIGINAL SIN and nourished by dreams of upward mobility, family sagas rarely extricate themselves from a sense of inevitability. They are about how the world came to be as it is, and even when they include characters outside the rubric of struggle and reproduction, it is usually a way to ruminate on their own boundaries. Toni Morrison coined the phrase "black surrogacy" to describe how blackness in classic American literature marked the limits of rational experience. Family novels often position queerness similarly, using it as a counterpoint or rebuke to the patriarchal dynamics driving the plot. "No one knows my name - or my history!" boasts Reuben Bedford Walker III, the jockey who rides the Forges' prize filly in "The Sport of Kings." Clearly marked as queer, he mocks both the aristocratic pretensions of his employers and another black character's self-consciously stereotyped family debilities. "I piss on family and order," Walker declares. "No mother made me, I bore my own damn self." Quey, the son of a Fante woman and a British slave trader in the 18th-century Ghana of "Homegoing," encounters an alternative to the novel's fateful trans-Atlantic course in his attraction to Cudjo, a childhood friend and wrestling companion. Both a tragic mulatto and tragically queer, Quey briefly considers an invitation to visit Cudjo's village - even fantasizes about living in his compound like a wife - but ultimately capitulates to the white, patriarchal role his father has marked for him: slaver. The novel's subsequent generations process in this betrayal's wake, as though if only Quey had spurned his father's dirty work for Cudjo's wrestler's arms, some quantum of the diaspora's tragedy might have been averted. In "Counternarratives," queerness is not a wrinkle in generational time, but a subject - and lens - in its own right. Glimpsed from the peripheries of gender and sexuality, history confesses concealed depths and old stories reveal unsuspected trajectories. The novella "A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon" begins deceptively as a story of "civilization" in distress, adopting the portentous register of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." A Jesuit priest, Joaquim D'Azevedo, arrives to lead a failing monastery in Alagoas, on the frontier of Portuguese Brazil. His predecessors have either died or disappeared, and Catholicism's influence is threatened by the monks' slackening morals, imminent Dutch invasion and an ineffable malevolence that seems to revolve around one of the monastery's eight African slaves: Joäo Baptista, caught one night in women's clothing trying to burn the compound down. The ensuing confrontation ends with the slave liberating his master. Baptista - who is really Burunbana the "Jinbada," a bigender seer sexually involved with many of the men at the monastery - discovers that D'Azevedo is a Jewish converso, secretly adherent to his old faith, and endangered if he remains at Alagoas. He spirits the Jewish Jesuit to a hidden settlement - possibly Palmares, a city founded by runaway slaves that before its 1695 destruction counted more than 10,000 inhabitants - and from there to Dutch territory, where he is free to practice his ancestral faith. Burunbana's clairvoyance echoes the slant reappraisal of the past in "Counternarratives," one that proceeds not along the vector of generations - each a kernel containing the next - but the strange byways of identities in flux. Catholics become Jews, Portuguese captaincies are subsumed by Dutch colonies or supplanted by armed fugitive settlements and purported apostles of white Christian civilization are rescued by queer representatives of African spirituality. History is restored to miraculous contingency, no longer fraught with the present. THERE IS MUCH TO BE SAID for heredity's tethers, and for the writers who unravel them. But art has other ways to humanize time's passage, forms emphasizing lines of continuity and species of kinship that family sagas - still the dominant genre for putting history's course on an individual scale - largely ignore. Keene echoes writers like the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, whose three-volume "Memory of Fire" chronicles the Americas in a monumental collage of myths, crimes, encounters and skirmishes in a long anticolonial struggle. Or Patrick Chamoiseau, whose novel "Texaco" recounts Martinique's history as remembered by the insurgent residents of a shantytown menaced by city planners. Among contemporary American writers, the poets Layli Long Soldier, Robin Coste Lewis and Susan Howe stand out as fellow travelers, ventriloquists of the archive who wring new voices from settled texts. Their liberating attention to the interstitial and unwritten contrasts with the family saga's sentimental attachment to endurance, what the scholar Lauren Beriant describes as a "confusion between survival and freedom." Entranced by the ancestor who crossed on the Mayflower, escaped from the plantation or started anew in a hostile foreign city, we too often limit our retrospective gaze to those predecessors who made provisions for a future we recognize in our own present. We deprive ourselves of people whose visions were never realized, who left no obvious legacy. More people have lived on earth than the tendentious nets of genealogy - inevitably tangled in the chronologies of faith, race, nation - can catch, and we are connected to them by threads more subtle, and resonances more profound, than have yet been explored. Imagining those lives, deeply and without the prejudice that they must be prologue to our world, can be both radical and beautiful. We Eire interested in people who became 'our' ancestors. What about those who didn't?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Abolitionist John Brown calls her Little Onion, but her real name is Henry. A slave in Kansas mistaken for a girl due to the sackcloth smock he was wearing when Brown shot his master, the light-skinned, curly-haired 12-year-old ends up living as a young woman, most often encamped with Brown's renegade band of freedom warriors as they traverse the country, raising arms and ammunition for their battle against slavery. Though they travel to Rochester, New York, to meet with Frederick Douglass and Canada to enlist the help of Harriet Tubman, Brown and his ragtag army fail to muster sufficient support for their mission to liberate African Americans, heading inexorably to the infamously bloody and pathetic raid on Harpers Ferry. Dramatizing Brown's pursuit of racial freedom and insane belief in his own divine infallibility through the eyes of a child fearful of becoming a man, best-selling McBride (Song Yet Sung, 2008) presents a sizzling historical novel that is an evocative escapade and a provocative pastiche of Larry McMurtry's salty western satires and William Styron's seminal insurrection masterpiece, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). McBride works Little Onion's low-down patois to great effect, using the savvy but scared innocent to bring a fresh immediacy to this sobering chapter in American history.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Musician and author McBride offers a fresh perspective on abolitionist firebrand John Brown in this novel disguised as the memoir of a slave boy who pretends to be a girl in order to escape pre-Civil War turmoil, only to find himself riding with John Brown's retinue of rabble-rousers from Bloody Kansas to Harpers Ferry. "I was born a colored man and don't you forget it," reminisces Henry Shackleford in a manuscript discovered after a church fire in the 1960s. Speaking in his own savvy yet naive voice, Henry recounts how, at age 10, his curly hair, soft features, and potato-sack dress cause him to be mistaken for a girl-a mistake he embraces for safety's sake, even as he is reluctantly swept up by Brown's violent, chaotic, determined, frustrated, and frustrating efforts to oppose slavery. A mix-up over the meaning of the word "trim" temporarily lands Henry/Henrietta in a brothel before he rejoins Brown and sons, who call him "Onion," their good-luck charm. Onion eventually meets Frederick Douglass, a great man but a flawed human being, Harriet Tubman, silent, terrible, and strong. Even more memorable is the slave girl Sibonia, who courageously dies for freedom. At Harpers Ferry, Onion is given the futile task of rousting up slaves ("hiving bees") to participate in the great armed insurrection that Brown envisions but never sees. Outrageously funny, sad, and consistently unflattering, McBride puts a human face on a nation at its most divided. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In the turbulent times just before the Civil War, abolitionist John Brown visits the Kansas Territories to free the slaves. In the midst of a gunfight between slave owner Dutch Henry and Brown, a young slave named Henry Shackleford watches his father die. Now freed and under the protection of the wily abolitionist, who mistakes the ten-year-old boy dressed in a potato sack for a girl, Henry maintains this feminine guise as he rides with Brown and his band of volunteers. After becoming separated during a skirmish, Henry finds himself in a Missouri brothel only to rejoin Brown's ragtag group two years later. Brown takes Henry on a fundraising tour back East, meeting with other abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Despite John Brown's reputation for violence, Henry discovers an old man whose intense passion for the abolitionist cause tends to overrule common sense, proving disastrously detrimental as they travel to Harpers Ferry in 1859. Verdict With its colorful characters caught in tragic situations, McBride's (The Color of Water; Song Yet Sung; Miracle at St. Anna) faux memoir, narrated by Henry, presents a larger-than-life slice of an icon of American history with the author's own particular twist. [See Prepub Alert, 2/25/13.]-Joy Gunn, Paseo Verde Lib., Henderson, NV (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In McBride's version of events, John Brown's body doesn't lie a-mouldering in the grave--he's alive and vigorous and fanatical and doomed, so one could say his soul does indeed go marching on. The unlikely narrator of the events leading up to Brown's quixotic raid at Harper's Ferry is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, whose father is killed when Brown comes in to liberate some slaves. Brown whisks the 12-year-old away thinking he's a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years. This fluidity of gender identity allows Onion a certain leeway in his life, for example, he gets taken in by Pie, a beautiful prostitute, where he witnesses some activity almost more unseemly than a 12-year-old can stand. The interlude with Pie occurs during a two-year period where Brown disappears from Onion's life, but they're reunited a few months before the debacle at Harper's Ferry. In that time, Brown visits Frederick Douglass, and, in the most implausible scene in the novel, Douglass gets tight and chases after the nubile Onion. The stakes are raised as Brown approaches October 1859, for even Onion recognizes the futility of the raid, where Brown expects hundreds of slaves to rise in revolt and gets only a handful. Onion notes that Brown's fanaticism increasingly approaches "lunacy" as the time for the raid gets closer, and Brown never loses that obsessive glint in his eye that tells him he's doing the Lord's work. At the end, Onion reasserts his identity as a male and escapes just before Brown's execution. McBride presents an interesting experiment in point of view here, as all of Brown's activities are filtered through the eyes of a young adolescent who wavers between innocence and cynicism.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
