Five-Carat Soul by James McBride

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. Two years ago, our club read Deacon King Kong, and it turned out to be one of the most popular books the club has ever read. James McBride is a good writer, with a knack for turning otherwise heavy topics into humor without diminishing his themes. He finds the life force in difficult circumstances, and humanizes even his villains and losers. I decided to nominate this book for our club, both because of how much we enjoyed James McBride last time, and because I love short stories. 

 Five-Carat Soul is a diverse collection of stories that captures the range in which McBride can write. Several are “historical” stories, set in times ranging from the Civil War to the 1970s, and involving historical figures. However, McBride never plays his history straight. (His best known book, The Good Lord Bird, is a comedy - a comedy - about John Brown’s failed abolitionist uprising, and recently got made into a TV series. Which, of course, made the wait list for the book astronomically long.) In this case, there are two stories involving Abraham Lincoln, one that involves Robert E. Lee, and one that is a tribute of sorts to Muhammed Ali. Count Basie and his orchestra appear in another, and there are passing references to other figures here and there. 

 

McBride doesn’t so much ignore historical accuracy, he deliberately takes liberties in ways that tell an essential - but not literal - truth. So, while it isn’t a “fact” that Robert E. Lee bought his son a custom made locomotive, which was then smuggled into a century of hiding by a black enslaved person making his or her escape, the story tells a whole series of metaphorical truths about Lee and others. We probably will never know exactly what inspired the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation, but McBride isn’t wrong - in the truest sense - in attributing his powerful words to inspiration from both the enslaved and some transcendent reality. 

 

One could also say that while most of the stories are “realistic” in some sense, others embrace the supernatural - or perhaps mythology. 

 

As I had hoped, the book sparked a great discussion at our club, and I think a few members gained a better appreciation for the short story form, particularly the way a great author can build a world in a small space. I have always loved short stories, and devoured the works of Saki, O Henry, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy Sayers, Poe, and others during my teen years. To me, the short story is the artistic equal of the novel or the play or the essay. It is its own form of art, and one that is devilishly difficult to master. 

 

I figure I can mention each of the stories in this book, since a few are pretty long and consist of multiple chapters. They are not quite novela length, but somewhere in between. 

 

“The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set” opens the collection, and is told from the point of view of a Jewish dealer in antique toys. He finds the ones worth a lot, and brokers the sale to wealthy collectors. In this story, he is on the trail of the eponymous train set. Now, the idea of these custom trains is based in fact, although this particular one is imaginary. In the story, it was purchased by Robert E. Lee for his son, who died before he could play with it. It then disappeared during the war, and now shows up in the kitchen of this kind of weird preacher dude who seems to have zero interest in the money offered - he is willing to give the item away in fact - but is equally unwilling to tell the story of how he (and his ancestors) got it. 

 

I think there are a lot of interesting layers to this story. It is fun to read, of course, and the twist at the end is a discussion in itself. Even the title is clearly intended to be a nod to the Underground Railroad. Indeed, the train “escapes” enslavement along with a formerly enslaved person. The reticence of the possessor of the train seems to me to also be a metaphor for resistance to the attempt of others to appropriate one’s story. This is something too many white folk tend to do - to make the story about them. Likewise, the idea that the train had some technology that Lee thought would enable him to win the war is fascinating. This is why I think a lot in this story is metaphorical, and to get too involved in the facts is to miss the point. I very much enjoyed this one. 

 

“The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band” is a collection of four related stories, kind of sort of about the band - a group of kids who make rock and roll in a room above the store owned by Mr. Woo, an immigrant who ends up killing a teenage robber who assaults him with a knife in the first story. Okay, that kind of gives an idea that this set is about a lot of things. The first story, “Buck Boy,” is about that death. Despite the fact that the late Buck Boy was disliked by all his neighbors - only his sister seems sad about his death - the vultures from out of town, led by a grifting preacher (probably patterned after Al Sharpton) decide to start a massive protest. Poor Mr. Woo is targeted as an example of Asians hating blacks, and pretty much has to hunker down to avoid getting lynched. Only later do we find out that Mr. Woo actually paid for the funeral, while Buck Boy’s mom pocketed the funds raised for that purpose. This story is a great example of McBride’s craft in making an utter shitshow and heavy topics somehow humorous. And he does it without being flippant at all. It is hard to explain if you haven’t read his books. I liked a couple of lines from this one. 

 

“Is the march tomorrow?” a newslady holler out. She’s a blond lady. I seen her on TV before. She look so good on television you want to kiss her, but in person she got so much powder on her face she look like a dustbag from a vacuum cleaner. On TV she looks young, but in person she look like she was born in the year of only God know. If she was two faced, I think she could’ve used the other one. 

 

And, of course, the pithy observation about Buck Boy:

 

Not too many people from The Bottom who knew Buck Boy would march for him.

 

The other stories are also pretty heavy in themes, but also well told stories that you want to finish. One of the boys finds his father’s collection of pornographic photos. A gentle and slow boy gets caught up in a crime. And a discovery of incest shocks a teacher trying to prove sports eligibility. 

 

In the last of those, the whole scene where the teacher comes to the run-down home of Goat, and his mother thinks she is a salesperson or a social worker or something. 

 

“So you are his mother, then?” Miss McIntyre said.

“If it look like buzzard and smell like buzzard, miss, it ain’t catfish.”

 

More seriously in this story is the problem of dealing with bureaucracy. The naive Miss McIntyre explains the process for getting a birth certificate, and implies that it is pretty easy. The joke is on her, of course, because her explanation of the process shows just how complicated it really is, particularly if you are largely illiterate and don’t have transportation. This is why, in my own legal practice, I find a lot of what I do is walk people through filling out forms to deal with bureaucracies governmental and corporate. McBride also nails it when it comes to the way that illiterate people are treated in our society. 

 

“Father Abe” is the shortest of the stories, I believe, and is not much more than a vignette. A bunch of black orphans or potential orphans are being housed in an old gun factory near the end of the Civil War, cared for by some nuns. One of these is Abe Lincoln - named after, well, you know. But he also has been told and believes that the real Abe Lincoln is his father. From there, the story ends up asking the question about what freedom really is. It’s hard to explain. However, one description is so good, I want to quote it here.

 

That night, a lone owl stood guard atop the peak of the shelled-out roof of the destroyed north wing of the abandoned Tregador Gun Factory. Beneath a twilight sky and shattered rooftop, Sister Cole’s orphans lay on makeshift straw mattresses serving as beds, underneath tables that once held lathes, tools, and machine presses and now served as roofs during the rain, inside a factor workshop that had once powered a might nation to war against itself. Their hissing, chattering voices lifted into the night air, through the gaping roof and up into the night as they discussed matters of life, their whispers carried aloft by the wind into the sky, where every dream seemed possible and the echoes of past pain and lost parents vanished into the promise of tomorrow’s coming. 

 

That’s some great writing there. The way he keeps using prepositional phrases stacked and stacked and stacked again to create the picture, making one feel like one is zooming in from the outside down to the details, from missing roof to makeshift furnishings, to voices, to dreams and pain. 

 

I also love the passage where the black soldiers talk about how the history books will probably forget them, in favor of the white “heroes” of the story. And they are not wrong, although in more recent years, there has been an effort to correct this intentional whitewashing. 

 

“The white folks’ll know theirs, won’t they? They’ll write songs for ‘em and raise flags for ‘em, and put ‘em up in books the way they know how. But ain’t nobody but God gonna give more than a handful of feed to the ones of us who died out here fighting for our freedom. And what is that anyway? This child here knows more about it than I do.”

 

This is something to think about when it comes to the manufactured issue of “Critical Race Theory.” The real problem is that a LOT of white folks are uncomfortable with any version of history which does not allow them to take on the role of heroes, coming in and saving the brown and black folk. To own our role as villains in many cases, collaborators in others, and indifferent in the case of most is not easy. And McBride makes a great point here. Even those “good guys” like Lincoln were just finally coming around to the side of justice - to fight alongside the enslaved wasn’t to be the hero, but merely finally choosing to help those fighting for their freedom. It is a shift in perspective most of us need to have, both about the past and the present. We can be allies - and we damn well should be - but the oppressed are the real heroes, fighting for their freedom. 

 

The other Lincoln story is one I already alluded to. In essence, Lincoln sneaks out of the capitol to get some solitude in the stables, and overhears a conversation that haunts him forever. His coachman berates a stable hand and his son, using the N-word. This is ironic because everyone involved is black. But the coachman was “born free” so he considers himself “almost white.” After this, the father tells his son the family story about “the fish man angel” (the title of the story) who appeared to the son’s late mother. Even though the story has been told a thousand times, the father wants his son to know it by heart. Included in this story is a list of words: “here…thenceforward…forever-more…free.” These words, of course, are the iconic ones used in the Emancipation Proclamation, where Lincoln freed the enslaved in the Confederate states. The thing is, by doing this, Lincoln finally - FINALLY - acknowledged what the leaders of the Confederacy had been saying all along: that the Civil War was about slavery. Full. Stop. The “rights” of white men to enslave, and spread slavery around the world. (Seriously, everyone should read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ amazing article in The Atlantic about this.) I think this is ultimately McBride’s point in this story. 

 

I’ll briefly mention “The Moaning Bench,” which is a supernatural story about the Devil and Hell, and, well, Muhammed Ali. Both because of my age and because I have never really been into boxing (mine was the era of Mike Tyson, who went…off some end or another, hence the “Tyson Zone”) I think I missed a number of the references in this story. Some older members of our group particularly liked this one, so I may have to re-read it and see if I can figure out more of it. 

 

Next up was “The Christmas Dance,” another historically based story. It references the 92nd Division, an African American unit which fought in Italy during World War Two. The battle mentioned really happened, but the details are fictional. The story is both about that battle and a modern black grad student who is researching the history of the Division, and interviewing the surviving members. By the end, the author reveals the touching secret that the survivors are reluctant to reveal. This was one of the favorite stories of our club, and for good reason. It is heartwarming, sad, poignant, and illuminating. 

 

The final story in the collection was actually the first written, entitled “Mr. P and the Wind.” McBride says in his afterward that he wrote the story after taking his nephews to the zoo, where they were appalled by the poor conditions. Admittedly, things are now better than in the 1980s, and there is the legitimate question as to the role of zoos in conservation and raising public awareness of environmental causes. But I too spent a lot of time at the zoo as a child, and there is the problem of caging wild things. 

 

This story consists of five chapters, making it almost a novella. The narrative continues from the start to the finish, so it is not episodic like the other multi-part story in this book. In that amount of time, McBride creates an entire mythology of reincarnation that applies to the “higher order” creatures - that is, the animals. This is in contrast with “the smellies” - the humans - for whom their god is just another version of themselves. Mr. P is a zookeeper who has learned to communicate with the animals through their “thought speech,” and becomes their friend. Except he, like most humans, finds nemesis in his own hubris, and tries to learn to speak with the wind. This leads to a series of tragic events, but a satisfying and unexpected ending. 

 

This was probably the most unusual story, and didn’t fit entirely with the others in style, but it very much examined the same themes of freedom and justice and living in an imperfect world. There were some interesting lines in this one as well. 

 

Sitting around bullshitting ain’t no problem for Man, who can ignore his own heart and treat his own with all kinds of trickerations and cruelty to twist the truth so he can get what he wants, shutting off parts of his mind to let evil run things. 

 

And this observation, from Mr. P, about mankind.

 

For by then Mr. P explained to us that only a fool would fight Man. Man, he said, remembers every wrong you done to him, whereas a Higher Order, well, if it don’t involve food and you got to run around to revenge your neighbor for what they done to you in the past, why, we’d just as soon forget all about it and take a nap. Animals ain’t never organized. Smelly Ones, Mr. P said, they write their little hates down on a piece of paper and pass the paper around. They leave them papers for their little ones and the little ones that follow their little ones, so they can all remember the hate from long ago. 

 

I definitely enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading more of James McBride. I love his writing style, and the way he takes unexpected approaches to his topics. He makes you think while making you laugh, which is a talent indeed.