presence of the Holy Spirit and sounding
like old Nick Nolte trying to get through
an angry monologue while being fed into
a wood chipper.
Of course, Brown is also, to quote one
of the characters, “nuttier than a squirrel
turd.” That’s not a diagnosis or evidence
of Brown being wrong on the merits. It’s
a personal observation that happens to be
accurate. But to its credit, the seven-part
Showtime miniseries about Brown and his
followers never reduces him to a medical
binary. It treats his unhinging from white
America’s norms as a break from moral
abnormality, and it leaves room for the
possibility that, as more than one account
has suggested, John Brown simply woke
up one morning hearing the voice of God
exhorting him to free the slaves—even if it
meant killing any man or woman who sup-
ported slavery—perhaps because the entire
country had been mad for centuries, and
terrorizing it was the only way to bring it to
its senses. Brown led a makeshift army into
a guerrilla war for America’s soul (in this
telling, the racially mixed group includes
his own adult sons, numerous freed slaves,
a Native American, and a Jew), and by the
time he raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, the
entire country had figured out that a peace-
ful resolution was impossible.
Charismatic, terrifying, and weird as he
is, Brown is a glorified supporting charac-
ter in The Good Lord Bird—and that’s a
big part of what prevents the series from
becoming an especially bloody and dour
version of a white-savior narrative. The
story is told through the eyes of anedu-
cated teenage slave (Joshua CalebJohn-
son), who dresses like a girl at Brown’s
request (for his own protection, suppos-
edly) and is given the nicknameOnion.
Onion’s voice-over narration isat once
innocent and knowing. It depicts thepre-
lude to the Civil War, and the physicaland
emotional experiences of servitudeand
oppression, from a faintly hopefulbut
mostly cynical-to-resigned perspective
drawn from generations of evidencethat
no matter what craziness whitefolksget
themselves up to, daily life for Blackfolks
won’t change too much, so you’dbetter
take your joy where you can get it.
The effect is a bit like a timemachine,
a portal to fuller understanding:notjust
what happened but where it ledandwhat
else it helped create. More so thanother
fictionalized retellings of Brown’scru-
sade—including the novels Cloudsplitter
and Raising Holy Hell—The GoodLord
Bird, book and series, seems to speakboth
of and for the present and to viewtheBlack
and the white characters as equalpartici-
pants in history, even though onegroup
legally had absolute power over theother.
Faithfully adapted by executive produc-
ers Hawke and poet-novelist Mark Rich-
ard from James McBride’s National Book
Award–winning 2013 novel, the series
draws equally on two schools of storytell-
ing: the raunchy, nasty, picaresque comic
epic and the meandering, pot-scented
Western. The show’s screenwriters and
directors (including Albert Hughes, Dar-
nell Martin, and Kevin Hooks) paint a sav-
age, often corrosively funny portrait of the
battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces
in so-called Bleeding Kansas in the years
before the Civil War, with everyone who
hasn’t picked a side and taken up arms
getting torn up by history’s thresher.
Onion meets Brown in the opening
scene of the series, a violent confrontation
between Brown and a slaver (David Morse)
that ends with Onion being orphaned and
folded into the abolitionist’s traveling mili-
tia. Brown presents himself to Onion as a
Angry Man (as per the title of a 1932 novel
about Brown by Leonard Ehrlich). But
while The Good Lord Bird teases the possi-
bility that God is indeed on his side, or ani-
mating his rage, it has a Coen-esque sense
of when to stop giving out clues and err on
the side of mystery. There are moments in
early episodes when Brown is saved from
death not by any innate skill but because
his foes are not as smart as they think or
have missed a crucial piece of informa-
tion that might have prevented them
from dying stupidly. “God’s Lucky Man”
might have been just as apt a description,
though the end of Brown’s life cuts against
that adjective. He’s certainly moreblessed
than Black abolitionists would be under
similar (armed) circumstances. When
Lieutenant Colonel J.E.B. Stuart(Wyatt
Russell), a future Civil War legend, comes
to him alone to warn him to leaveKansas
or be killed, it’s hard to imagine John’s idol,
Ethan Hawke and Joshua Caleb Johnson.
PHOTOGRAPH: WILLIAM GRAY/SHOWTIME
mentor and father figure, but that’s like
finding out Captain Ahab wants to adopt
you. Traumatized and cowed as he is,
Onion finds Brown amusing and pathetic
as often as he finds him horrifying and
thrilling. By the second episode—which
lets us spend time with Onion on his own
as he takes a job in a brothel and secretly
teaches the Black madam how to read—
Onion starts to mature quickly, developing
a bleaker outlook and a survival sense that
flirts with nihilism.
Brown’s followers and sons aren’t gung
ho about him all the time either. As Onion
informs us, Brown’s acolytes come and
go, their ranks changing out almost every
few months, because they get tired of the
bloodshed, start feeling homesick, or fig-
ure they’d better cut out at some point,
otherwise Brown will get them killed. Also,
Brown’s speeches go on for hours.
Brown was sometimes known as God’s
the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass
(played by Daveed Diggs in full-throated
preacher mode), being treated with simi-
lar care and understanding if he had worn
revolvers on his hips. The series isn’t just
aware of the irony; it stages its scenes in
a way that leads us to connect what hap-
pened back then with what’s happening on
American streets right now.
The soundtrack, which includes a num-
ber of 20th- and 21st-century recordings of
blues, gospel, rhythm-and-blues, and soul
songs, helps a great deal in establishing a
historical through line. To some degree, all
of the represented genres are rooted in the
lived experience of inequality and the diffi-
culty (and necessity) of trying to either rise
above that or momentarily escape it through
sin as well as salvation. When music and
imagery join forces, The Good Lord Bird
speaks to the present as well as the past.
This is a historical epic of real vision. ■
october 12–25, 2020 | new york 93
