McBride Retells John Brown Legend in ‘Good Lord Bird’
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In 1942, on his way to reaching the age of 111, Henry “Onion” Shackleford tells a friend of his adventures in the 1850s with John Brown and how he survived the raid on Harpers Ferry.
James McBride’s loosely historical novel “The Good Lord Bird” begins three years before the 1859 raid that helped ignite the Civil War. Brown liberates the 12-year-old slave Onion during a saloon fight and makes him a kind of mascot for his gang of frontier abolitionists.