Song Yet Sung

The election of our first African American president lends particular resonance to the reading of Song Yet Sung, chosen by the Capital Area District Library for a county-wide reading program, Capital Area Reads. Filled with complex characters and page-turning action, McBride’s novel is a multi-faceted exploration of life in the slave state of 1850s Maryland, where a fairly large free black population mixed with whites who owned few or no slaves.

The story begins when Liz Spocott is shot in the head by the slave-catching gang of the notoriously cruel (and real) Patty Cannon after two exhausting days on the run. When she awakens days later, chained to an attic floor, she tells other captives about her wound-induced nightmares – visions of a dark future. Her ability to see another world helps those in the attic escape and makes her a legend.

As he writes about Liz’s attempts to follow the confusing code of the Underground Railroad, McBride explores themes of inward and outward freedom in all of his characters- the ways in which bonds on the mind can be as binding as bonds on the body. Denwood, a retired slave-catcher, is pulled into the chase and back into the battle with his soul that made him quit. Kathleen, the recently widowed owner of a small farm, depends upon her slaves’ good will to eke out a marginal living. The young slave Amber is especially important to her survival. He’s ready to run but stays out of loyalty to her and his family. By doing so he runs the risk that she will go bankrupt and he will be put on the auction block.

McBride writes about the “peculiar institution” of slavery from all of these viewpoints, combining suspense with emotional truths in the style which endeared him to readers of his autobiography, The Color of Water. Author Madison Smartt Bell caught the book’s essence in his review for The New York Times: “McBride…can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness.”

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