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Discussion Guide for
THE GOOD LORD BIRD
“He was a stooped, skinny feller, fresh off the prairie, smelling like
buffalo dung, with a nervous twitch in his jaw and a chin full of ragged
whiskers. His face had so many lines and wrinkles running between
his mouth and eyes that if you bundled ‘em up, you could make ‘em a
canal. His thin lips was pulled back to a permanent frown. His coat, vest,
pants, and string tie looked like mice had chewed on every corner of ‘em,
and his boots was altogether done in. His toes stuck clean through the
toe points. He was a sorry-looking package altogether, even by prairie
standards, but he was white, so when he set in Pa’s chair for a haircut
and a shave, Pa put a bib on him and went to work”.
– The Good Lord Bird, p. 11
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James McBride is an accomplished musician and author of the American
classic The Color of Water and the bestsellers Song Yet Sung and Miracle at
St. Anna, which was turned into a film by Spike Lee. McBride has written
for The Washington Post, People, The Boston Globe, Essence, Rolling Stone,
and The New York Times. A graduate of Oberlin College, he has a master’s
degree in journalism from Columbia University. McBride holds several
honorary doctorates and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New
York University. He lives in Pennsylvania and New York.
Source: www.nationalbook.org
BOOK REVIEWS
Publishers 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 naïve 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. 2013)
Copyright 2013 PWxyz LLC
The New York Times Book Review:
“...The Good Lord Bird” is hardly the first literary rendering of John Brown; everyone from Herman
Melville to Langston Hughes, from Russell Banks to the rock band Rancid, has written of the man
who tired of talk and demanded action, undertaking a violent crusade against slavery the way Ahab
went after his white whale. Henry David Thoreau called Brown “the most American of us all,” which
partly explains his iconic appeal: zealotry, self-reliance, lone crusading—from the Puritans on down,
this is true Americana. Brown’s racial cross-identification—“His zeal in the cause of my race was far
greater than mine,” Frederick Douglass said; the scholar John Stauffer cites evidence he may have
tried to darken his skin in photographs—makes him doubly relevant to hip-hop America; were he
alive today, Brown might well be Eminem.
In McBride’s hands, though, he’s “prone to stop on his horse in the middle of the afternoon, cup his
hand to his ear and say: ‘Shh. I’m getting messages from our Great Redeemer Who stoppeth time
itself on our behalf.’ ” He’s part Crocodile Dundee, part backwoods preacher, part con man. When the
“Old Man” smiles, our narrator tells us, “stretching them wrinkles horizontal gived the impression of
him being plumb stark mad. Seemed like his peanut had poked out the shell all the way...”
–Baz Dreisinger (Aug. 2013)
Read the entire review at:
www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/books/review/james-mcbrides-good-lord-bird.html
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. W
e see our narrator, Onion (Henry
Shackleford), play many roles throughout
the book. What was the biggest
transformation for him?
2. W
hat role did John Brown play in Onion’s
story?
3.
trong women play an important part in
S
Onion’s life. Which character(s) do you
think made a difference?
4.
Near the end of the book Onion remarks
“You can play one part in life, but you
can’t be that thing. You just playing it.
You’re not real.” What was he referring to?
5.
How did you view John Brown? Do you
think he was a hero or criminal?
6.
How would you explain the author’s
humor in the book?
7. T
he story is expressed with irony and
outsize characterization. How did you
react to this style of writing to a wellknown event in history?
8. W
as there a particular event or person that
stood out besides John Brown or Onion?
9. A
re there other books you have read that
bring to mind the vivid characters and
storyline expressed in this book?
NOTES:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Nonfiction:
Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and Raid That Sparked the Civil War,
New York, 2011
Mull, Carol E. The Underground Railroad In Michigan, Jefferson, NC, 2010
Reynolds, David. John Brown, Abolitionist:The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked
The Civil War, And Seeded Civil Rights, New York, 2005
Sharp, Ellen. “The Legend of John Brown and the Series by Jacob Lawrence.”
Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 67, no. 4 (1993): 15–35
Stauffer, John and Zoe Trodd, eds. The Tribunal: Responses To John Brown And
The Harpers Ferry Raid, Cambridge, MA, 2010
Fiction:
Chevalier, Tracy. The Last Runaway, New York. 2013
Crafts, Hannah. Bondwoman’s Narrative, New York.2002
Doctorow, E. L. March, New York. 2005
Hicks, Robert. Widow of the South, New York. 2005
Jones, Edward P. The Known World, New York. 2003
ONLINE RESOURCES
Civil War Trust/John Brown’s Harpers Ferry Raid
www.civilwar.org/150th-anniversary/john-browns-harpers-ferry.html
James McBride and The Good Lord Bird Studio 360
www.studio360.org/story/james-mcbride-and-the-good-lord-bird
PBS American Experience/John Brown’s Holy War
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/
PBS American Experience/The Abolitionists
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/abolitionists/
Smithsonian.com / John Brown’s Day of Reckoning
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-browns-day-of-reckoning-139165084/
Art + Authors
B O O K D I S C U S S I O N S AT T H E