McBride’s fictive Black witness allows him to rewrite Brown’s final, righteous exertions as tragicomedy. military arsenal to hasten the holy war on the peculiar institution. Henry (the Onion) Shackleford, born into slavery, recounts how, as a child, he came under the wing of the “old coot” John Brown and his ragtag army as they planned to take over a strategic U.S. The novel is an idiosyncratic critique of history-making, an account of the prelude to emancipation told from the point of view of an eccentric, elderly man who likes to wear dresses. Diggs’s Douglass is a playboy dandy flushed with Cognac, nesting on a couch at his Rochester mansion between his Black wife, Anna, and his German mistress, Ottilie.Ĭredit for the series’ mischief is due to James McBride, whose 2013 novel of the same name has been adapted with deep, sometimes stubborn fidelity by Mark Richard and Hawke, who are both, along with McBride, executive producers on the show. “The Good Lord Bird,” though, is not concerned with supplanting the mess and the mystery of history with upbeat coherence.
Among its finest moments of cultural sacrilege is a sex farce starring Frederick Douglass, whom Brown ( Ethan Hawke) insists on calling “the King of the Negroes.” Douglass, in a canny bit of casting, is played by Daveed Diggs, who originated the roles of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway phenomenon, “ Hamilton,” a retelling of American history that marked the apex of Obama-era artistic liberal agitprop. Mercifully, the new Showtime miniseries “The Good Lord Bird,” a reimagining of the militant abolitionist John Brown’s doomed ride to Harpers Ferry, is not “woke.” Instead, it has an impish spirit of contrivance that is largely missing from contemporary antebellum historical fictions.
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