James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is a comical, page-turning tale about abolitionist John Brown

JAMES McBride's new book, The Good Lord Bird, isn't your typical historical novel. It's a raucous, blood-spattered page-turner that reads like the novelization of a Quentin Tarantino flick.

And get this: It's about the life of abolitionist John Brown, told through the eyes of a cross-dressing freed slave named Onion.

When I got the award-winning author on the phone last week to talk about the book, out this month from Riverhead Hardcover, I didn't quite know where to start. So I asked him about Onion's name. Turns out there's a cultural relevance to that choice.

"I grew up in a house and in a community where we all had crazy nicknames," McBride said. "I used to know a kid named Onion. I knew kids named Pig, Bucky, Buck Boy. You know, Sugar Bear. That's the kind of stuff that kicks around in black America."

I nodded as he spoke. After all, my parents nicknamed me Cookie.

"There you go. Cookie, Tookie," McBride said, freestyling a bit. "I mean, these days, it's a little different. It's Taquan. Raquan. Shaquan. Beyonce. You know, everybody's trying to get that little French thing. But when we were coming up, we were more like Junior, Lightbulb. I know tons of Juniors."

So the name came easily, then.

"The stretch, really, was making him a boy disguised as a girl," McBride continued. "It was a difficult thing to pull off. Questions about identity are really what drive character. . . . I had to work on that quite a bit to make Onion believable and also funny."

McBride achieves that in part by telling the story from Onion's point of view and, mostly, in his voice, which brings to mind comparisons to Huckleberry Finn.

"Of course, I love the black vernacular, the old-time country talk," McBride said. "That's how my father talked. My stepfather talked like that. All of my relatives talked like that. They were all from the South. They didn't talk quite as colorfully - some of them did. I love that language. It's a real art."

I made a serious dent in The Good Lord Bird last month while relaxing under a beach umbrella. When I tossed it in my beach tote, I wasn't sure it'd make a good beach book. When you're alternating between staring at the surf and flipping pages, you don't want anything too heavy.

So I brought along the latest People magazine as backup. But I never did finish that article on Britain's new royal baby. Although there's a serious, historical framework to McBride's book, he takes Brown's fateful tale and runs with it.

Henry "Onion" Shackleford is a young male slave whom Brown frees during a violent shootout in Kansas. The abolitionist decides that Onion, whom he thinks is a girl, is his good-luck charm. Onion joins Brown's ragtag crew of freedom fighters as they roam around the countryside fighting pro-slavers.

By the time we packed up to leave, I'd given the novel a sandy thumbs up. I was hooked on the cray-cray antics of Onion and Brown, whom McBride manages to demystify.

But that's no surprise to those familiar with McBride's creative genius. He's a former journalist best known for his 1995 memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The book - about a Jewish woman from Poland who married a black man and raised 12 children, including McBride, in a Brooklyn project - spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list. It's an American classic, taught in high schools around the country.

His sophomore effort was Miracle at St. Anna, a novel about World War II's black 92nd Infantry that Spike Lee made into a 2008 film.

McBride's third book, Song Yet Sung, was about a runaway slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore and the slave catcher trying to retrieve her. While researching that book, he became intrigued with Brown, who was hanged at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., in 1859. Tension about slavery was already high at that time, and Brown's abolitionist crusading is believed to have sped up the start of the Civil War.

"I went to visit Harpers Ferry several times," McBride recalled. "I spent a lot of time at the library. I went down to the Pennsylvania Historical Society and did some work there. I researched the heck out of this book before I threw my pen to the page."

As he was getting started, McBride's personal life hit a rough patch. His mother died and his marriage broke up the same year. His 2011 divorce, he said, "was pretty nasty."

"This book really was kind of an escape from my divorce," said the author, who recently moved to Lambertville, N.J. Writing and researching it, which took five years, "helped me recover, because instead of sitting around worrying about myself and my troubles, I just dove into the life of Onion Shackleford. . . . It was a balm. It was healing. It allowed me to laugh and make fun of people and cut loose on the page."

McBride doesn't watch much TV and mostly keeps to himself, although he does frequent a local gym. An early riser, he writes all morning until he needs a break. He's also a writer in residence at New York University.

McBride said that he dates occasionally but dedicates most of his free time to his children. His daughter is an aspiring filmmaker at Pratt Institute; his son is a bassist at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music; and his 11-year-old sings in the Philadelphia Boys Choir. McBride declined to give their names, citing privacy concerns.

A musician himself as well as an accomplished songwriter who has written for Anita Baker and Grover Washington Jr., he recently formed a gospel quintet that he hopes will perform at upcoming book signings, including one next month in Philadelphia.

The cover of yesterday's New York Times Sunday Book Review featured a glowing review of The Good Lord Bird. It noted that "for all his play, McBride studiously honors history, perhaps more than many previous portraits of Brown have done."

McBride told me he won't be reading the review - he never does. Matter of fact, he probably won't read this story, either.

Not that I have a problem with that.

After all these years writing and reporting, I've developed a pretty thick skin, as they say. But no one wants to be critiqued by one of the best novelists of our time.

Blog: philly.com/HeyJen