James McBride, Song Yet Sung
Friday, February 8, 2008 7:00 p.m.
St. James Episcopal Church
1991 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140
Sponsored by Porter Square Books

In an interview with Time magazine following her 1988 Pulitzer Prize win, Toni Morrison described thinking of Beloved as "the least read of all the books I'd written because it is about something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember… it's national amnesia." Politicians' recent sweeping claims about family members marching "together" with Martin Luther King, Jr. (without actually being in the same city), as well as suggestions that civil rights legislation is more the purview of legislators than activists, bring that sort of national amnesia to the forefront. Have we truly forgotten about our slave-based past and once-institutionalized racism--and, if so, what does that mean for our future?

James McBride definitely doesn't suffer from our national amnesia. Rather, he's working hard to combat it in his latest novel, Song Yet Sung (Riverhead). McBride's previous books, the acclaimed memoir The Color of Water and novel Miracle at St. Anna, also grappled with racial issues, but Song Yet Sung is his first work to confront the topic so directly, and in the context of slavery. The novel addresses difficult topics with remarkable grace, power, and hope.

Song Yet Sung is not a simple tale of noble slaves fleeing from evil whites. It's a detailed portrait of the complex--and rarely acknowledged--interrelationships and loyalties that keep slaves with their masters and give whites second thoughts about the legitimacy of slavery. Beyond its nuanced treatment of “the web of relationships” (as McBride puts it) between blacks and whites, Song Yet Sung is distinguished from other novels about slavery by two main factors: its detailed treatment of the secret “code" that blacks used to help one another chase freedom on the Underground Railway and other paths north, and its focus on the future, seen in the dreams of main character Liz Spocott. Together, these features help make Song Yet Sung a unique and fascinating historical novel that says as much about the present as it does about the past.

Bostonist spoke with James McBride about Song Yet Sung and modern society. Read the author's comments and learn more about the book after the jump. McBride will read from his novel at St. James Episcopal Church in Cambridge tonight.

We asked McBride about the historical context of his novels--Song Yet Sung is set during the Civil War and Miracle at St. Anna during World War II. He cautioned against overemphasizing the historical correlations in his work, saying that he looks more for subjects he can dig his teeth into, that “have meaning and purpose” for him, than for subjects with particular historical ties. Research on real people had an impact on McBride's thought processes, of course, but he feels that over-attributing reality-based traits to novelistic characters is the “kiss of death.”

Beyond their dreams, Liz Spocott and Harriet Tubman have little in common. The correlation is interesting on the surface, but doesn’t go much beyond that. Rather, McBride is “trying to loose these characters into these set of circumstances,” and once they’ve been set loose, “they move in the ways they want to move”--not necessarily with any historical associations. In addition to being influenced--but not governed--by historical figures, McBride was also inspired by geography. Though he’d been to the Chesapeake Bay area before, he was particularly struck by the “beautiful and stark” landscape, where he eventually decided to set his Civil War novel. In addition to researching the area, McBride read many works by writers from the Chesapeake Bay, including Joshua Thomas and Gilbert Byron.

Bostonist was struck by the correlation between the complicity of Song Yet Sung’s white characters in the existence of slavery and our modern day complicity in a society based on the exploitation of low-wage laborers. McBride agreed, describing slavery as “an economic system that used racism as its linchpin,” while our own society uses racism, classism, and propaganda “to keep the working class in its place while a small cadre of increasingly rich people get richer.” Describing the “trapped experience that most Americans live,” McBride notes that many working class citizens are told--or must convince themselves--that making $7/hour is “the way to a better tomorrow” when it’s clearly not. As McBride says, “some of the same walls that existed then [in the time of slavery] exist now.” Song Yet Sung reveals complicated interrelationships that kept some people down and some people up, and our present society has similar structures that are difficult to overcome.

With regard to the propaganda that helps keep the working class down, McBride cites corporate slogans like “Obey your thirst,” proposing that we should promote a thirst for reading over a thirst for corporate products. In Song Yet Sung, Liz Spocott dreams of a future where children run from books like they’re poison; McBride asserts that our society of “instant gratification” is so glutted with information that knowledge has become less valuable. Just as the “ravenous commerciality” of our culture results in us buying so much stuff that we have to pay to put it in storage--a concept that would have been totally foreign to any of the characters in Song Yet Sung--so too has it become so easy to get information that we’re overloaded with it.

Just a few decades ago, people had to depend largely on word of mouth and newspapers to spread information, so finding things out was both more difficult and more valuable. As McBride says, “Now information is easy to get, but most of it’s worthless.” Television is filled with people who “blather on about nothing” and “get paid to do it.” And our TV-centric culture changes our values: “Who cares if you don’t know chemistry--Simon [Cowell] likes you,” McBride says of American Idol and its detrimental effects on thinking culture. McBride also makes the telling point that Cowell is an immigrant, in a sense, saying “Does he have a green card? No one asks because he’s rich." The fact that Simon could probably buy any kind of green card he wanted simply underscores the point that our society values people based on the money they make, regardless of what rules they might bend or who they might exploit to make that money. We like to think of ourselves as having transcended the era of slavery, but we need to acknowledge our present transgressions in order to move forward in the future.

McBride thinks the bar of morality is “slipping for everyone,” but he still has hope--in part because of strong leaders like Barack Obama. He’s heartened by people showing respect for people who are different, and says it’s “wonderful” to see Barack shaking hands with Iowa farmers, noting that “they have more in common than they are different.” And so it is with the characters in Song Yet Sung: they have more commonalities than differences. Those commonalities center on a shared humanity, a rarely acknowledged but always underlying factor in all of our interrelationships.

McBride is “so proud that [Obama] has galvanized young people” in a way that’s necessary to reshape America. Obama has “brought a new vision to America,” according to McBride, and that vision “gives us breathing space to look back with more clarity and look forward with a sense of hope.” Song Yet Sung certainly helps us look back with some clarity at slavery, a terrible institution that nevertheless deeply affected--and continues to affect--our nation. Yet the book also helps us look forward with a sense of hope: hope that we can change what we’ve come to by recognizing where we’ve come from. And that's a hope that appeals--or should appeal--to everyone.