James McBride retells the John Brown story

GUEST: JAMES MCBRIDE

“I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.” These are the words of “Onion” Shackleford, JAMES MCBRIDE’s latest protagonist, looking back on his years running with the ardent and often violent abolitionist John Brown and his ragged ‘freed’ slaves in the Kansas Territory in the late 1850s. Brown’s failed 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) is imprinted in history books, with no former slaves as survivors. But McBride uses the kidnapped Shackelford, disguised as a girl, as a fictitious lens to look back at our country’s ugly and rich history. McBride’s returns to Radio Times to discuss his new novel, “The Good Lord Bird.”