/ 18 December 2009

Read of the year: Song yet sung

Song yet sung
by James McBride (Sceptre)

There is nothing comfortable about this tale of runaway slaves and those who make their living out of stealing them or hunting them down and returning them to their owners.

Almost from its opening lines it is a brutal account of an evil world in which human beings as commodities are at the mercy of predators, venal and violent.

That said, in the hands of James McBride, a redemptive thread and lyrical prose make Song Yet Sung a compelling and moving read, vividly evoking the swamplands of Maryland in which it is set and the mores and morals of those who populated those lands in the 1850s.

The novel had its genesis in McBride’s fascination with the story of one of the United States’s leading abolitionists, Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of her people”, whose escape route, known as the “underground railroad”, enabled an estimated 300 slaves to make their way to freedom in the North.

In its telling McBride evokes, with intriguing effect, the legendary “code” by which slaves, whether in bondage or among those who had purchased their freedom, were said to have communicated to runaways the presence of the enemy and the direction of the “railroad”. So it is that a complex five-point knot represents “north, south, east, west and free”, a man with one trouser leg rolled up signifies danger, the rhythm of a blacksmith’s hammering carries a warning.

Central to the story, set in the decade before the Civil War that would finally result in emancipation, is the fictional Liz Spocott — “the Dreamer”. Her disturbing visions of the future evoke a time when the black people of her country will exchange the slavery of forced labour for a different form of bondage — the thrall of high living and the attendant costs in a loss of values and moral direction. But she dreams, too, of another dreamer — a preacher who will, a century later, call for and promise true freedom for all … “at last”, in words that are, for the enslaved people of this book, the song yet sung.