Animal Instinct Book

I was very satisfied with the emotional and mental ride of this tale about a runaway woman slave in eastern Maryland. It features a nice ensemble of interesting characters with intersecting agendas and dreams, and it highlights the strange social circumstances in a slave state bordering non-slave states and the creative efforts of people who supported the "Underground Railroad" for runaways to reach safety in the northern states or Canada. The first two lines reveal a critical magical realism element of the story, the ability of the lead character to see scenes from the future in her dreams:

On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant. She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes.

Liz wakes up in an attic chained to other runaways in the clutches of a disreputable merchant in caught or stolen slaves named Patty Cannon. Liz is recovering from a musket shot to the head, which makes her dreams even more powerful than when she first developed the talent (or curse) when whacked as a child. A fellow prisoner known as The Woman with No Name tunes her into mysteries of the coded communications she can use to find people who help runaways should she get loose again:

Scratch a line in the dirt to make a friend. Always a crooked line, 'cause evil travels in straight lines. Use double wedding rings when you marry. Tie the wedding knot five times. And remember, it's not the song but the singer of it. You got to sing the second part twice'if you know it. Don't nobody know it yet, by the way. … And it ain't the song, it's the singer of it. It's got to be sung twice, y'know, the song. That's the song yet sung.

And loose she gets again, as she is very desperate not to the sent back. She has run away from a plantation owner in Virginia, the "Captain", who has raped her and wants her for an easy concubine.
Besides Patty and her gang of thugs, an expert slave catcher, Denwood, has been hired to track her down too, lured from his current profession as an oysterman by money. He has growing moral reservations about such work and is in a detached state from grief over loss of a son. Liz is helped by several fascinating characters, including a teenaged slave boy named Amber who serves a kindly widow, a white blacksmith, and a very large and mysterious black man called the Woolman, who has hidden deep in the swamps for years with his son. The initially simple story of escape becomes a rich and complex drama when the Woolman's son becomes seriously injured and ends up in the hands of authorities, and he takes some drastic actions in response.

I feel McBride is masterful in the way he makes his main characters evolve. Each is challenged by fate and choice. Freedom is revealed as more than the circumstances of being born a slave or not. Liz herself struggles over the hatred she feels for whites as a whole ("his children, his dreams, his lies, his world"; "they are raised to evil"), but her uncle has counseled her that their conception of blacks as inferior makes their hatred understandable and that she must rise above that:

That's why you got to leave yourself to God's will. Chance belong to God. It's an instrument of God. …Captain ain't got nothing to do with that. He can't touch it.

Later an old man who helps her casts some light on the dark future her visions portend for her race:

They ain't no different than the folks around here. Some is up to the job of being decent, and some ain't. …It don't matter whether it's now or a hundred years from now, or a hundred years past. Whatever it is, you got to live in a place where you can at least make a choice in them things.

In addition to the great drama and overlay of ideas in this story, McBride does well to evoke a keen sense of place and the power of connection to the natural environment:

Several times she stared at the water of the inlet and considered drowning herself in it. But each time she considered it, something attracted her attention. The ticking of a belted kingfisher . The scow call of a green heron. The odd coloring of a marsh hibiscus. She had the strangest feeling ever since leaving Patty Cannon's attic, a kind of awareness that seems to lay new discoveries at her feet at the oddest moments. Her head, which had acquainted a familiar dull throb since she'd been wounded, had developed a different kind of pain, an inner one, as if something had come unsprung. She felt as if air were blowing through an open window in her head somewhere. It hurt surely. Yet, because of that new pain, or perhaps because of it, she began to feel a light-headed sense of discovery, as if every plant, every breeze, every single swish of leaf and cry of passing bird, contained a message.

This book holds up well amid what seems to be a plethora of recent books that focus on the careers of slaves (for me they include novels by Edward Jones, David Fuller, and Toni Morrison). As with great books that encompass the subject of war, the "purpose" of such books and benefits of their reading has less to do with their conveying of history than using the extreme circumstances as a lens to explore the best and worst in human nature. After great enjoyment of this novel and McBride's memoir, "The Color of Water", I look forward to his recent "The Good Lord Bird".