Series shows the necessity of John Brown
“The Good Lord Bird” has not received what you could call kidglove treatment from Showtime. It was announced for Feb. 16 but pulled, then rescheduled for Aug. 9 and pulled again. It will finally premiere, without much fanfare, tonight. It’s curious treatment for a prestige miniseries based on a National Book Award-winning novel that was spearheaded by and stars one of America’s most accomplished actors.
And it’s a shame, because “The Good Lord Bird” — a seven-episode adaptation of James Mcbride’s 2013 novel — is fine entertainment, capturing some measure of Mcbride’s jaunty, irreverent humor and featuring an absorbing performance by Ethan Hawke, who created the series (with the writer Mark Richard) and plays the central role of the messianic abolitionist John
Brown.
We can only speculate about the reasons for the delays (the show was certainly ready before the coronavirus hit). Maybe there was some nervousness about the story’s sometimes irreverent approach in its depictions of slavery and of the attitudes and actions of Black people, in pre- Civil War America. Perhaps, as the tumultuous events of 2020 played out, there was also some nervousness about presenting such a story in a series developed by two white men from a Black writer’s novel.
If there were any such concerns, we can see now that they were misplaced. Working with a directing and writing team that included established Black artists like Albert Hughes, Darnell Martin, Kevin Hooks and Erika L. Johnson (and with Mcbride as an executive producer), Hawke and Richard have, if anything, been too respectful of the book’s themes and plot. “The Good Lord Bird” has some dull patches in its later episodes, which probably could have been avoided if someone had been more ruthless and inventive in remaking the story for the screen.
Mcbride’s novel is nominally an account of the last years of Brown, the zealous crusader whose ill-fated attack on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 is the comi-tragic climax of the series. But it’s told through the eyes of a young slave — named Henry, mistakenly renamed Henrietta but mostly known as Onion — who is accidentally freed and then informally adopted by Brown.
Brown, as depicted in “The Good Lord Bird,” has great sympathy for the human race but isn’t all that attentive to its individual members, and it’s symptomatic that after mishearing Henry’s name, he is unshakably convinced that the bright young boy is a girl and instructs him to wear a dress.
The confusion is a practical inconvenience but also a lifesaver, as being a girl helps Henry (played by the newcomer Joshua Caleb Johnson) survive one potentially deadly situation after another.
The story is structured around Henry’s picaresque, Huck Finnlike journey, which begins in his bleak Kansas home and encompasses a lively sojourn with Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs) in upstate New York, an encounter with Harriet Tubman (Zainab Jah) on a trip to recruit fighters in Canada, and the crushing but historically pivotal debacle at Harpers Ferry, which helped bring about the Civil War.