James McBride and the Good Lord Bird Band

January 25, 2014

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening.

AUDIENCE: Good evening!

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I love that. Good evening. My name is Paul Holdengräber,

I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as

LIVE from the New York Public Library. My name is Paul Holdengräber, and as all of you know here my goal at the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 1 institution dance, and when successful as tonight to make it levitate. It is my pleasure to welcome you all tonight to the New York Public Library. I’m delighted to introduce to you tonight the most recent recipient of the National Book Award, James McBride.

(applause) It is such a pleasure, such a delight, such a delicious pleasure to welcome

James McBride back. Last time he shared this stage with Spike Lee upon the release of the feature film he wrote, The Miracle at St. Anna. James, as you all know as well is the author of The Color of Water. I am thrilled to have James opening our Spring 2014 season with the incredible Good Lord Bird Band. Following tonight’s performance, there will be a book signing as well of The Good Lord Bird—here it is—be sure to stop by the table of 192 Books, our independent bookseller, and have James McBride sign your books.

We have big news for those of you in the audience. Our Spring 2014 season will be announced in full early next week. Early next week. Make sure you don’t miss out, join our newsletter, our mailing list, go to www.nypl.org/live and follow us on Facebook,

Tumblr, and Twitter. (laughter) Speaking of Twitter, we are live tweeting our events this season and invite you all to follow us using—this is still a word I’m not sure I quite understand—but use the hashtag #LIVENYPL.

Let me tease you a bit and tell you that among those who will be LIVE from the New

York Public Library on this very stage, just a few of them to tease you, foreplace, foreplay, not foreplace, but foreplay, maybe foreplace, but anyway foreplay, but anyway the filmmaker Wes Anderson, the artist Kara Walker, Brooklyn Brewery cofounder Steve

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 2 Hindy, for those beer drinkers here. A National Book Award winner, another National

Book Award winner Katherine Boo, together with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and a magician, actor, author, and sleight-of-hand extraordinaire Ricky Jay. And next week I invite you all to come and hear Rebecca Mead, who’s written an extraordinary book about her reading of Middlemarch. It’s called My Life in Middlemarch. She started reading it when she was seventeen, and every three or four years she rereads it and rereads herself in the process. To find out more be sure to join our mailing list by going as I told you to www.nypl.org/live and while you’re at it, become a Friend so you get discounts and first dibs to this upcoming spring season of LIVE from the New York

Public Library and I invite you to do so over the weekend and then Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday check us out and you will find out what’s coming up.

Now, for the last seven or eight years I’ve been asking the various guests I invite to define themselves in seven words, to offer me a haiku or if you’re extremely modern, a tweet, (laughter) and here are James McBride’s seven words: “God put sugar in my bowl. Amen.” James McBride.

(applause)

JAMES MCBRIDE: Thank you very much. It’s so nice to see so many white—I mean nice people here. (laughter) Yeah, for those of you who saw the National Book Award, you realize, if you didn’t see it, when I won I didn’t have a speech prepared, and I still don’t have one prepared, actually. I walked up here chewing gum, which was like it was

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 3 a mistake. My mother used to say if you chew gum and swallow it, your behind will close up, (laughter) so you have never seen me swallow, you have never seen me or any of my brothers or sisters ever swallow anybody’s gum ever, but it’s really nice to be here, it’s a pleasure, and I’m very delighted to see Paul again, he’s a unique New York institution, and this reading series is a unique New York thing, and I’m very, very proud and delighted to be a part of it.

I’ve written a new book and it’s called, this is what it’s called. What happened was, first, just to back up, the three of you who haven’t read The Color of Water, my mother died in

January of 2010, and she was eighty-eight, and I was talking to Paul, who lost his mother just eight weeks ago today, and we were talking about what that means and what happens, I think, is that there’s—in addition to the mourning process—is there’s also a new kind of growth if the mother or the father or the you know, the parent person does their job, and I’m so happy that Paul’s mother did the job because he says, he wants to work more and he wants to work harder, he wants to do more, he wants the series to grow, he wants to find new writers he wants to present, and that meant that someone did the job, and in my case my mother did the job as well. I wish that she were here to see this, because she really loved libraries, and she loved the New York Public Library, in fact we owe this institution quite a bit of money. (laughter) We aren’t going to talk about that. In any case—

I was fooling around with my previous novel called Song Yet Sung, eight people read it, and I have eleven brothers and sisters, so that shows you. In any case I was in Maryland

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 4 and I was in one of these historical societies and I was reading the diary of a Jewish merchant on the Eastern shore, on Maryland’s Eastern shore, of which there were probably eight between 1900 and 1940 or something like that, and anyway this guy was an interesting guy, and he wrote in his—every day he kept a diary of everything that happened. And every time he would write, “Such and so, like Dorothy came by and bought a pound of salt, and the daughter has the some kind of fever and so it goes,” and then the next day he says, “Mr. Johnson came by and bought you know two packs of flour and some meat for you know and got his horse shod, and so it goes.”

And then I turned the page and he said, “John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry” and there was a long list of stuff at the end, “and so it goes.” I was like, “Wow,” and I was only about an hour from Harper’s Ferry, so I said, “Well, I’m going to take a ride.” I just took a ride down to Harper’s Ferry, which is in what is now West Virginia, and I became fascinated with the story of John Brown. And John Brown’s story in brief—and this is not the historian version of this, the historians amongst you please, you know, take your foot off the gas, smoke a little whatever it is you need to.

But essentially what happened was John Brown was an abolitionist who decided slavery was wrong. And he was from the Northeast, he was, you know, he was a Yankee, and he ended up going to Kansas, to fight the pro-slavery movement, which had kind of started in Missouri. Basically what happened after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, slavery became a really hot issue and a lot of white people started to have a lot of issues

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 5 with it as well. Some of these issues were based in race and some were just based in the fact that this thing was so troublesome that it just wasn’t working.

He went out there to help his sons who sent a letter back to him saying, “Please, come out here and bring some guns,” because the pro-slavers had been—Kansas Territory had been established but slavery had not been established in Kansas Territory, so there was a fight between the pro-slavers from Missouri Territory who wanted slavery to continue and the free staters, the so-called free staters in Kansas who wanted slavery to end, who were against slavery and wanted Kansas to be a free state. John Brown went out there to help defend his sons, and immediately fell into the abolitionist movement, not fell—walked into the abolitionist movement at the age of fifty-six, which in those days was pretty old.

I’m fifty-six, so I don’t want to hear, you know.

I remember when I was doing readings for The Color of Water, I used to say, you know,

I’d say, oh I’m just going to, you know, do readings for some young Jewish women aged eighteen to eighty, you know, and this is what happens when you have—I’ll put it this way. You haven’t lived until you’ve done like ten or fifteen coffee klatches in Teaneck,

New Jersey. I say this with all gratefulness because these women made me rich, they bought my book, but they would say, “Let’s check his teeth.” But in any case how did I get to that?

John Brown went to Kansas to fight this war against slavery and when he got out there, see, the Yankees were getting beat up every which way. And so when John Brown

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 6 arrived he did something that the pro-slavers were a little bit surprised about. He actually fought back. He was a profoundly, deeply religious man and so this book is actually the memoir of a 104-year-old black man who’s telling his story to a fellow Sunday school teacher at a Baptist church in Wilmington, Delaware.

So what happens at the beginning of this book is there’s a fire, the church burns down, they find these papers, and they go through these papers and they find this whopper of a story, and this story is told by this 104-year-old man whose name is Henry “the Onion”

Shackleford. And he’s nicknamed “the Onion” by John Brown. And what happens in this book is Henry “the Onion” Shackleford, Onion, is telling the story about how when he was a little boy as a slave working, by the way, the book begins in 1966, so the guy who’s telling it, that’s why he’s 104 years old. The book begins when Henry’s talking about when he was working in a tavern with his father, who was a slave, in Kansas. So

John Brown walks into the tavern and basically this is what happens, this is from page 1, chapter 1.

I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.

My Pa was a full-blooded Negro out of Osawatomie, in Kansas Territory, north of Fort

Scott, near Lawrence. Pa was a barber by trade, though that never gived him full satisfaction. Preaching the Gospel was his main line. Pa didn’t have a regular church, like the type that don’t allow nothing but bingo on Wednesday nights and women setting

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 7 around making paper-doll cutouts. He saved souls one at a time, cutting hair at Dutch

Henry’s Tavern, which was tucked at a crossing on the California Trail that runs along the Kaw River in south Kansas Territory.

Pa ministered mostly to lowlifes, four-flushers, slaveholders, and drunks who came along the Kansas Trail. He weren’t a big man in size, but he dressed big. He favored a top hat, pants that drawed up around his ankles, high-collar shirts, and heeled boots. Most of his clothing was junk he found, or items he stole off dead white folks on the prairie killed off from dropsy or aired out on account of some dispute or other. His shirt had bullet holes in it the size of quarters. His hat was two sizes too small. His trousers came from two different colored pairs sewn together in the middle where the arse met. His hair was nappy enough to strike a match on. Most women wouldn’t go near him, including my

Ma, who closed her eyes in death bringing me to this life. She was said to be a gentle, high-yaller woman. “Your Mama was the only woman in the world man enough to hear my holy thoughts,” Pa boasted, “for I’m a man of many parts.”

Whatever them parts was, they didn’t add up to much, for all full up and dressed to the nines, complete with boots and three-inch top hat, Pa only come out to ’bout four feet eight inches tall, and quite a bit of that was air.

But what he lacked in size, Pa made up for with his voice. My Pa could outyell with his voice any white man who ever walked God’s green earth, bar none. He had a high, thin voice. When he talked, it sounded like he had a Jew’s harp stuck down his throat, for he

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 8 spoke in pops and bangs and such, which meant speaking with him was a two-for-one deal, being that he cleaned your face and spit-washed it for you at the same time

(laughter)—make that three-for-one, when you consider his breath. His breath smelled like hog guts and sawdust, for he worked in a slaughterhouse for many years, so most colored folks avoided him generally.

But white folks liked my Pa fine. Many a night I seen my Pa fill up on joy juice and leap atop the bar at Dutch Henry’s, snipping his scissors and hollering through the smoke and gin, “The Lord’s coming! He’s a’coming to gnash out your teeth and tear out your hair!” then fling hisself into a crowd of the meanest, low-down, piss-drunk Missouri rebels you ever saw. And while they mostly clubbed him to the floor and kicked out his teeth, them white fellers didn’t no more blame my Pa for flinging hisself at them in the name of the

Holy Ghost than if a tornado was to come along and toss him across the room, for the

Spirit of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood was serious business out on the prairie in them days, and your basic white pioneer weren’t no stranger to the notion of hope. Most of ’em was fresh out of that commodity, having come west on a notion that hadn’t worked out the way it was drawed up anyway, so anything that helped them outta bed to not kill Indians and not drop dead from ague and rattlesnakes was a welcome change. It helped too that Pa made some of the best rotgut in Kansas Territory—though he was a preacher, Pa weren’t against a taste or three—and like as not, the same gunslingers who tore out his hair and knocked him cold would pick him up afterward and say “Let’s liquor,” and the whole bunch of ’em would wander off and howl at the moon, drinking

Pa’s giddy sauce. Pa was right proud of his friendship with the white race, something he

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 9 claimed he learned from the Bible. “Son,” he’d always say, “always remember the book of Heziekial, twelfth chapter, seventeenth verse: ‘Hold out they glass to thy thirsty neighbor, Captain Ahab, and let him drinketh his full.’”

I was a grown man before I knowed there weren’t no book of Heziekial in the Bible. Nor was there any Captain Ahab. Fact is, Pa couldn’t read a lick, and only recited Bible verses he’d heard white folks tell him.

Now, Dutch Henry’s tavern sat right near the Missouri border. It served as a kind of post office, courthouse, rumor mill, and gin house for Missouri rebels who come across the

Kansas line to drink, throw cards, tell lies, frequent whores, and holler to the moon about

Negroes taking over the world and the white man’s constitutional rights being throwed in the outhouse by the Yankees and so forth. I paid no attention to that talk, for my aim in them days was to shine shoes while my Pa cut hair and shove as much johnnycake and ale down my little red lane as possible. But come spring, talk in Dutch’s circled ’round a certain murderous white scoundrel named Old John Brown, a Yank from back east who’d come to Kansas Territory to stir up trouble with his gang of sons called the Pottawatomie

Rifles. To hear them tell it, Old John Brown and his murderous sons planned to deaden every man, woman, and child on the prairie. Old John Brown stole horses. Old John

Brown burned homesteads. Old John Brown raped women and hacked off heads. Old

John Brown done this, and Old John Brown done that, and by God, by the time they was done with him, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low-down son of a bitch you ever saw, and I resolved that if I was ever to run across him, why, by

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 10 God, I would do him in myself, just on account of what he done or was gonna do to the good white people I knowed.

Well, not long after I decided them proclamations, an old, tottering Irishman teetered into

Dutch Henry’s and sat in Pa’s barber chair. Weren’t nothing special ’bout him. There was a hundred prospecting prairie bums wandering around Kansas Territory in them days looking for a lift west or a job rustling cattle. This drummer weren’t nothing special. 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 his 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. As usual, Pa worked the top end and I done the bottom, shining his boots, which in this case was more toes than leather.

After a few minutes, the Irishman glanced around, and, seeing as nobody was standing too close, said to Pa quietly, “You a Bible man?”

Well, Pa was a lunatic when it came to God, and that perked him right up. He said,

“Why, boss, I surely is. I know all kinds of Bible verses.”

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 11 The old coot smiled. I can’t say it was a real smile, for his face was so stern it weren’t capable of smiling. But his lips kind of widened out. The mention of the Lord clearly pleased him, and it should have, for he was running on the Lord’s grace right then and there, for that was the murderer Old John Brown hisself, the scourge of Kansas Territory, setting right there in Dutch’s Tavern, with a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward on his head and half the population in Kansas Territory aiming to put a charge in him.

(applause)

One of the things that I really—one of the things that really attracted me to John Brown was his religion. I grew up in the church, all of my brothers and sisters, we all grew up in the church, and we were, you know, we understand, or at least thought we understood or understand the power of God. When I was a kid, my sister Judy used to play in church and when she—I played in Sunday School and Judy and my sister Helen played in church, and when my sister Helen retired from playing, she couldn’t make it to anymore,

Judy was recruited, and every once in a while when Judy wasn’t around, I would be pressed into service. And that was always a problem, because I could play like—I’m not really a piano player. I could play certain songs, that you know, you play something in the key of F, but you know people, they would get up there and they’d start singing in the key of D flat, you know, and they’d sing the whole song, you know, and I’d say please come back to F, and then they’d witness and they’d sing the second verse that nobody knew the words to and they’d sing that, and I’m saying, please F. And you know the

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 12 other thing was like the minister, you know, and when you play piano in church, you know, the minister he has a thing, he goes, and then when he’s finished he kind of nods and you’re supposed to you know, “pass the money and the basket right now,” that’s really what. So when he was—you know, when the minister would preach, you know, he would nod and you were supposed to—but, see, he would start like a train, and then he’d get going, then I’d be, I never knew when to—

We played lots of games, see, like my brother Richie was into jazz and I got into jazz too, and I would take church songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and I’d be talking about, and my mother when she’d see that, “I’m going to kill you, I’m going kill you.”

But one of the things that was really, really wonderful about growing up in church and understanding, having some understanding of the power of religion was that on Sunday morning, after it was over, you found that you’d found a place to lay your burden down, and that part of John Brown’s life I really understood and related to even though he was a little bit crazy, so I brought some friends to help me lay my burden down as I lay my story on you about John Brown. On bass and cello, from Ithaca, New York, Mr. Trevor

Exter.

(applause)

(sings snippet of “Glory, Glory”)

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 13 On piano, from Filthadelphia, Pennsylvania, a fellow Oberlin Conservatory graduate, a wonderful composer and arranger, also plays with Billy Paul of “Me and Mrs. Jones” fame, Mr. Adam Faulk. (applause)

(continues to sing “Glory, Glory”)

On drums and vocals, making his first appearance in the United States, from Trenton,

(laughter) New Jersey, the deeply talented Show Tyme Brooks.

(applause)

(“Glory, Glory” continues)

(applause)

On guitar, from Moss Point, Mississippi, now living here in New York, just came back from playing at the Kennedy Center, where he honored Carlos Santana, formerly with

Earth, Wind, and Fire, plays with Vanessa Williams, plays with all kinds of people, mostly he plays with himself, no he doesn’t, Mr. Keith Robinson.

(The Good Lord Bird Band performs “Glory, Glory”)

(applause)

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 14 What happens in this book after John Brown makes his visit to Harper’s Ferry is that our protagonist finds himself kidnapped. The thing goes bad, John Brown pulls out his weapon, and everyone pulls out their guns, and John Brown grabs the kid, and looks at this ten-year-old little boy and he thinks the boy’s a girl, so he says, “Come on

Henrietta,” and he ends up the whole book John Brown believes that little Onion is a girl, and Onion plays along with that because he figures, “He’s a crazy white man. I’m not messing with him, he’s nuts.” So John Brown takes him off into the woods, and the little boy his first introduction is when they’re in the woods they have to eat and someone brings a pheasant and the old man stands over the bird and he starts to pray and this is

Onion’s witnessing John Brown, who was a religious zealot, witnessing the praying for the first time.

I ought to give you a full sample of Old John Brown’s prayers, but I reckon they wouldn’t make sense to the dear reader who’s no doubt sitting in a warm church basement a hundred years distant, reading these words wearing Stacy Adams shoes and a fake fur coat, and not having to do more than waddle over to the wall and flick a button to warm his arse and heat his coffee. The Old Man’s prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt bird rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department. Just when he seemed to wrap up one thought, another come tumbling out and crashed up against the first, and then another crashed up against

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 15 that one, and after a while they all bumped and crashed and commingled and cojangled against one another till you didn’t know who was who and why he was praying it.

(The Good Lord Bird Band performs “In the Garden”)

(applause)

After Mr. John Brown takes this young boy off, this young boy disguised as a girl, off to his adventures they have all kinds of things of happen that are not good, but mostly what they’re doing is they’re trying to free the slaves, and they’re involved in this war against the pro-slavers from Missouri. At a certain point the kid gets cut off from, he gets separated from John Brown, and he ends up in a house of ill repute, something I’ve never actually personally experienced, I just want you to know that, except for that one time, remember, Adam? I don’t want to talk about that, but anyway, what you laughing at,

Keith? You were there. No, anyway, just kidding. Anyway, he gets caught up at a house of ill repute, and he’s still posing as a girl, as a little girl—he looks like a little girl, nobody really pays attention to a little black girl in those days because she was a slave, and one black looked like the next, and so forth but she is working in the house, I’m sorry, Onion is working in the house and Onion gets involved with and meets some outdoor slaves. Turns out that they’re involved, these outdoor slaves who were working out in the yard, they get involved in an insurrection and the town finds out about it, and so they bring in the leader of this slave revolt, and her name is Sibonia, and this little boy witnesses what happens when Sibonia comes in, and the judge and all the white folks in

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 16 town, the white men who run the town, they bring in Sibonia because they want to find out who else is involved in this insurrection. They know she’s involved and they know her sister’s involved, but they don’t know who else is involved, and they’re really panicked about it because apparently there were lots of people involved, so they brought

Sibonia in and she wouldn’t tell them, and they said, “We’re going to hang you. We’re going to burn you. We’re going to tear your arms out. You’re going to tell us.” And she said, “No, we’re not. You can do whatever you want, string me up or you can pour tar down my throat, you will not get this information out of me.” So they sent her back to jail, and they send for the local minister, they say, “You know what? She likes him. She’s religious and she likes him. We’ll send him to the jailhouse and we’ll have him talk to

Sibonia and she’ll tell him because she loves the minister. So they send for the minister, and the minister says, “You’re right, I’ll go down there, she’ll talk to me,” and he comes back to the jailhouse to see Sibonia, this is the minister, and he comes back to the bar like four hours later and he’s exhausted. And they say, “What happened?” And he says,

“Well, I’ll tell you what happened.” So he tells them what happened when he went down to the jailhouse to make Sibonia confess about her collaborators, her coconspirators in this insurrection. He’s talking to his fellow taverngoers. He said,

“I said, ‘Sibonia, I come to find out everything you know about this wicked insurrection.’—and she cut me off.

“She said, ‘Reverend, you come for no such purpose. Maybe you was persuaded to come or forced to come. But would you, who taught me the word of Jesus; you, the man who

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 17 taught me that Jesus suffered and died in truth; would you tell me to betray the confidence secretly entrusted to me? Would you, who taught me that Jesus’s sacrifice was for me and me only, would you now ask me to forfeit the lives of others who would help me? Reverend, you know me!’”

The reverend said, “For the first time in my ministerial life, I felt I had done a great sin. I could not proceed,” he said. “I accepted her rebuke. I recovered from my shock at length and said, ‘But, Sibonia, yours was a wicked plot. Had you succeeded, the streets would run red with blood. How could you plot to kill so many innocent people? To kill me? And my wife? What have my wife and I done to you?”

“And here Sibonia looked at me sternly and said, ‘Reverend, it was you and your wife who taught me that God is no respecter of persons; it was you and your missus who taught me that in His eyes we are all equal. I was a slave. My husband was a slave. My children were slaves. And they was sold. Every one of them. And after the last child was sold, I said, ‘I will strike a blow for freedom.’ I had a plan, Reverend. But I failed. I was betrayed. But I tell you now, if I had succeeded, I would have slain you and your wife first, to show them that followed me that I could sacrifice my love, as I ordered them to sacrifice their hates, to have justice for them. I would have been miserable for the rest of my life. I could not kill any human creature and feel any less. But in my heart, God tells me I was right.’”

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 18 The reverend sagged in the chair. “I was overpowered,” he said. “I could not answer her easily. Her honesty was so sincere, I forgot everything in my sympathy for her. I didn’t know what I was doing. I lost my mind. I grasped her hand—I grasped her by the hand and said, ‘Sibonia, let us pray.’ And we prayed long and earnestly. I prayed to God as our common Father. I acknowledged that He would do justice. That those deemed the worst by us might be regarded the best by Him. I prayed for God to forgive Sibby, and if we was wrong, to forgive the whites. I pressed Sibonia’s hand when I was done and received the warm pressure of hers pressing mine in return. And with a joy I never experienced before, I heard her earnest, solemn ‘Amen’ as I closed.”

The reverend stood up. “I ain’t for this infernal institution no more,” he said. “Hang her if you want. But find someone else to minister to this town, for I am finished with it.”

And with that he got up and left the room.

(The Good Lord Bird Band performs “Standing in the Need of Prayer”)

Standing in the Need of Prayer. This book is written by a man who does not believe. I mean, not me, but the person who’s speaking in this book is a nonbeliever. And he stays a nonbeliever until John Brown and his men attack Harper’s Ferry, which was America’s biggest armory. That’s when you find God usually, like when you really need him or her, you know? You know, my great nightmare is like if I go to Heaven and I find out like

God’s like Rudy Giuliani or somebody, that would be just like—I would be so

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 19 disappointed, but he ain’t, you know, she ain’t, not that Rudy’s a bad guy, I’m sure he’s a nice guy, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sure he’s a great guy. I don’t know him personally,

I just hope he’s not God. (laughter) I really should write my speeches out before I get in front of people.

(laughter)

In any case, as John Brown and his men attacked Harper’s Ferry, Onion is part of that attacking group, and this is the point where he actually finds God. He says,

As we crossed the bridge, I had a clear sight of the Harper’s Ferry from above. By God, there was three hundred militiamen down there if there was one, milling around the gate and walls and more coming from town and Bolivar Heights above it, cramming at the entrance, lining the riverbank, all along the sides of the armory wall. All white men. Not a single colored in sight. The armory walls were surrounded. We was riding into death.

I got light-headed on God then. The devil flew off my back and the Lord latched Hisself to my heart. I said, “Jesus! The blood.” I said them words and felt His spirit pass through me. My heart felt like it busted out the penitentiary, I felt those words pass through me, my soul swelled up, and everything ’bout me, the trees, the bridge, the town, became clear. I then and there decided if I ever cleared things, I would tell the Old Man Brown what I’d felt, clear it with him ’bout all that religious babbling I had done, that all the teaching he did for me weren’t for naught, and also clear it with him ’bout not saying

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 20 nothing to him about the few assorted lies I had told him along the way. I really decided to do that thing with him, I thought if I had the chance. If I had the chance.

(The Good Lord Bird Band performs “How Great Thou Art”)

Adam Faulk, ladies and gentlemen.

(applause)

Show Tyme Brooks!

(applause)

I feel like some Robert Frost poetry right about now. I just feel—(laughter) Trenton makes and the world takes. (laughter) The fervor of that feeling is what propelled John

Brown into history. At one point during his slavery fight, he loses badly. They burn his house, they burn his whole settlement down, and they kill his son Frederick, and his other sons are ready to give up, give up the fight, and they say to him,

“We’ve done enough for the cause, Father. Stay with us and help us rebuild. The federals will find the killer of our brother. They’ll catch the killer and put him in jail, and try him for that killing.”

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 21 The Old Man ignored him and mounted his horse, then stared out at the land before him.

He seemed to be someplace else in his head. “This is beautiful county,” he said. He held out he feather from the Good Lord Bird. “And this is the beautiful omen that Frederick left behind. It’s a sign from God.” He stuck it in his weathered, beaten straw cap. It stuck straight up in the air.

“Father, you are not hearing me,” his son Jason said. “We are done! We are finished fighting. Stay with us and help us rebuild.”

The Old Man stretched his lips in a crazy fashion. It weren’t a real smile, but as close as he could come. Never saw him out and out smile up to that point. It didn’t fit his face.

Stretching them wrinkles horizontal gived him the impression of being plumb stark mad.

Seemed like his peanut had poked out the shell all the way. He was soaked. His jacket and pants, which was always dotted full of holes, was a mass of torn and ripped clothing.

On his back was a bit of blood where he’d taken a grape ball. He paid it no attention. “I have only a short time to live,” he said, “and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done. I will give these slaveholders something to think about. I will carry this war into Africa. Stay here if you want. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a cause worth dying for. Even the Rebels have that.”

(The Good Lord Bird Band performs “God’s Gonna Set This World on Fire” and

“Sinnerman”)

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 22 (applause)

Where you going to run to Judgment Day? They say John Brown was a terrorist. That is a difficult thing to think about. Because if he were, if he were not a terrorist, would we be reading this book? If Nelson Mandela were not a terrorist, would we be celebrating his life? I think history involves—it involves who’s telling it and when. What we’re trying to do, as people of literate means, is that we’re trying to learn how to talk about something that is very difficult. And race is a very difficult thing for us to talk about. Our chronic issue is that we have the inability to speak normally and naturally about things that we should be able to speak normally and naturally about. Most of my life, most of what I’ve done professionally has failed, and this book is one of my few successes. I spent my entire life watching my mother fail. Most of what she did did not work, but the things that did work worked on the basis of her belief that God was always watching you try to do the right thing. So what we’re trying to talk about here tonight and what we’re trying to talk about as people of reason and discourse is that we have to try to do the right thing and only when you do the right—when you try to do the right thing individually does the collective inch forward that much more. So while John Brown was a knave and a little bit psychotic he was a great man that I admire greatly and it’s an honor and a privilege to share his story with you tonight. This piece is a piece that was written about him and for him before he passed away.

(The Lord Good Bird Band performs “John Brown’s Body”)

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 23 (applause)

Thank you very much!

LIVEMcBride_1.25Transcript 24