The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird

What's really striking about James McBride's The Good Lord Bird is his refusal to see things, for lack of a better analogy, in black and white. This is a novel about the life and death of John Brown, inspired, brave, committed abolitionist who died for the cause and gained little or nothing except his martyrdom. But McBride does not make Brown heroic; we see him as stubborn, foolish, delusional, in some cases exploitative and self-centered - leaving his family of 22(!) behind, forcing some of his sons to fight his battles, liberating those who would prefer to be left alone. Similarly, there are cameos by other great black leaders, notably Frederick Douglass, who comes across as a narcissistic ass. (Harriet Tubman comes off better.) The northern abolitionists have their hearts in the right place but are seen, at least by Brown, as cowardly and uncommitted. Blacks, too: though some are brave and idealistic, many are unwilling to join the fight - not because they're cowardly but because the stakes are so high - even those who don't rise up in rebellion will be punished, slaughtered in the inevitable backlash. He does a great job showing the whole range of social pressures and views, in making all the combatants not exactly complex and full characters - but they're not saints, either. I suspect he built this novel by following pretty closely the records of Brown's marauding army and, as a result, characters get established and then wander off from the plot, never to be seen again - because that's how life was, how life is - life is not a Dickens novel in which all the strands tied together at the end. So rather than make his novel fictive or heroic, he leaves it open and ambiguous, much like life. In fact, perhaps, much like his life: McBride's first highly successful book was his memoir of growing up bi-racial, The Color of Water; it's a study of boundaries and perceptions. I think that's a theme throughout Good Lord Bird as well, that it's difficult, maybe impossible, to identify and categorize characters by race: what looks from a distance like a conflict between blacks and whites, with a group of valiant white abolitionists aligning with blacks to help their cause, is from the inside, from within the narrative voice, a much more complex racial melange - the narrator is black but living in both genders, many characters are of mixed race, a topic of much discussion - and it's mixed not only in race but in attitude toward race - the many blacks who align with their white masters or who resent the abolitionists for stirring things up and making life dangerous, and other blacks and white bravely take up the fight.