Song Yet Sung (32 page)

For Moses Hogan

MARCH
13, 1957–
FEBRUARY
11, 2003

This book began one chilly October morning in 2004 when I was wandering around the back roads of Dorchester County, Maryland, in my 1991 Volvo. It was a bad time. I was stuck. The novel I was working on upped and died under its own weight, thanks be to God—the thing was awful. I'd wanted to write about the Civil War and slavery, but the literary graveyard is filled with the bones of writers far more talented than I on this subject, and I'd given up. I was heading home after two nights of drawing blanks at yet another Holiday Inn Express (did I mention I can only write in Holiday Inns when I'm stuck? Long story), when I came across a sign on State Route 50 near Cambridge announcing that the birthplace of Harriet Tubman was nearby.

After moseying a little further, I found myself in a field several miles outside town staring at a tiny sign:

HARRIET TUBMAN

1820–1913

THE “MOSES OF HER PEOPLE,” HARRIET TUBMAN OF THE BUCKTOWN
DISTRICT FOUND FREEDOM FOR HERSELF AND SOME THREE HUNDRED
OTHER SLAVES WHOM SHE LED NORTH. IN THE CIVIL WAR,
SHE SERVED THE UNION ARMY AS A NURSE, SCOUT, AND SPY.

Behind the sign was a dead cornfield, and beyond that a tiny, modest house. Obviously she wasn't born in the house, but on the property somewhere.

I stepped into the cornfield and felt the vibes for a while. Standing there, I thought about who Mrs. Tubman was, beyond the pictures I remember seeing of her when I was a kid. In a society that loves to mythologize its heroes and make them larger than life, her life is treated as a kind of Aesop's fable. With the exception of a couple of excellent biographies, Mrs. Tubman's story is a children's tale, a moral, polite, good-girl story taught to elementary school kids, when in fact the depth, meaning, and purpose of her extraordinary journey were anything but fable. Rather, her life was an adventure that should ring up any writer's imagination.

I got in my car and went to work. This book is the result.

This novel isn't about Mrs. Tubman's life. It's a book that her life inspired. She was a dreamer. She had been struck in the head by a vicious overseer when she was a little girl, a blow so severe that it broke her skull open and left her in a sickbed for months. For the rest of her life, Tubman would suddenly fall into a deep sleep at the oddest moments, sleeping for a few minutes and then awakening to pick up the conversation where she had left off. She confessed that she had dreams that offered solutions to her problems, warned her of impending danger, and led her toward God's purpose. She was a mystical woman.

And she came from mystical land. The eastern shore is a magical, mysterious place. It is a land that even today looks as it did a hundred years ago. It was settled by and peopled by a spirited group of Americans who made their living in the hardest ways imaginable: watermen who oystered in the winter and farmed in the summer. Many of the eastern shore's wonderful native writers—Gilbert Byron, Frederick Tilp, Hulbert Footner, Thomas Flowers, and the Reverend Adam Wallace—capture its beauty and depth to greater effect than I ever could. What interested me about their homeland was the web of relationships that existed there during slavery. The relatively tiny stretch of land is the birthplace of two of America's leading abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, born within twenty-five miles of each other in the same era—Douglass near Easton, Maryland, in Talbot County, and Tubman in Bucktown, Dorchester County. Their area of the eastern shore was a draw for runaways coming from all areas of the South. Why did so many come there? Why not western Maryland, or parts of Virginia to slip into western Pennsylvania? How did the runaways know where to run? How did they communicate? Many of those questions have still not been answered to the satisfaction of historians. Even today, many argue about the methodology and numbers rescued by Harriet Tubman's “gospel train.” How did she manage to run her Underground Railroad so successfully? No one can agree definitively.

I thank Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard for their groundbreaking
Hidden in Plain View,
which offers much for the imagination in that area. That book is required reading for anyone interested in how the Underground Railroad functioned. Some historians contend that no black codes were used in the Underground Railroad, but fortunately, the musings of scholars never stopped writers from drawing plot, content, and character from disputed history to power the muscle of their imaginations.
Gone With the Wind,
which was required reading for my daughter's 2006 ninth-grade Honors English class, portrays blacks as babbling idiots and bubbleheads. I recall no current literary wave challenging that author's license to loose her imagination. We Americans like our mythology. We need it. We pay for it. We want it to run free. Otherwise how to explain the hundreds of novels, films, and television shows based on the Wild West, an era of gunslingers, cowpokes, and cattle drives that lasted twenty years, from roughly 1870 to 1890.

This book is largely out of my imagination, though some elements and characters are based on the real ones. Patty Cannon, the so-called handsome slave stealer of Caroline County, Maryland, was real. The phenomenon of slave stealers, revealed in Ralph Clayton's
Cash for Blood,
was real, as are eastern shore watermen, so humorously and lovingly set forth in Thomas A. Flowers's
Shore Folklore.
Watermen are true American originals.

Special thanks to Frances Cressell of the Cambridge Public Library and Mary Handley, formerly of the library staff. Thanks to the Historical Society of Cambridge, Maryland, and its superb historian, John Creighton, one of the leading authorities on Harriet Tubman. John can be found most any Thursday night in the Cambridge Public Library's Maryland Room, digging, scrounging, organizing, and discovering ever more about this extraordinary, fascinating woman. Thanks to Pete Leshner and boat builders Richard Scofield and Bob Savage at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's, and Erin Titter and Deb Weiner at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Thanks to Wilbur H. A. Jackson of Cambridge.

I read about twenty-five books and various slave manuscripts and testimonies before putting this novel together. To be honest, I can't remember much of what any of them said. But I do remember the spirit of their content. I thank scholars like Kate Clifford Larson, Jean Humez, Catherine Clinton, John Blassingame, Leon Litwack, Ben Quarles, Eileen Southern, John Langston Gwaltney, and my brother Dr. David McBride for bringing that spirit to their work. And finally, thanks to African Americans of the past, both slave and free, whose stories live in the music, in the air, in the land, and in the hearts of those of us who choose to remember.

James McBride
New York, New York
August 2007