After two excruciating days holed up in an Eastern Shore hotel, struggling to resuscitate the ailing draft of a new novel, author James McBride gave it up for dead, pointed his 1991 Volvo toward Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and headed home.

But a few missed turns sent him wandering the back roads of Dorchester County on that cool October morning five years ago. In a field a few miles outside of Cambridge, he happened upon a small sign noting that Harriet Tubman, the Moses of the Underground Railroad, was born somewhere in the general vicinity. 

“I was a little surprised at the marker for Mrs. Tubman,” he remembers thinking. “It was kind of humble. Is that all there is?”

But the marker got McBride wondering about the institution of slavery, how it’s viewed today, and the complexity of relationships among free blacks, slaves, and their owners.

He found in the Eastern Shore a complexity that was just as intriguing.

“It has a certain sadness and a certain magic to it,” he says. “The place reeks of history, and I was also impressed by the resilience of the folks I met there.”
Rural Dorchester County was two hundred miles and a world away from the all-black housing projects in Brooklyn, New York, where McBride grew up, the son of a black preacher and a white Jewish mother, who passed for black. She even hid the truth from her twelve children until most of them had
finished college, a story famously told in McBride’s 1996 best-selling memoir, The Color of Water.

That day on the Shore—and the demise of the novel he couldn’t save—was all it took for McBride to begin work on what would become Song Yet Sung, the story of a beautiful, young, escaped slave woman whose futuristic visions of freedom throw the county into turmoil in the tense years before the Civil War. The book was released in 2008 and will be reprinted in paperback this spring.

Recently, McBride, fifty-one, returned to Dorchester County, and we met over eggs and grits at the Cambridge Grill to talk about his newest book, and how its setting on the Shore delineated the novel’s characters. 

“In my research I didn’t talk much to local folks. I knew what I wanted,” he says, methodically buttering his toast. “My best source was the land and its defining elements and from them the characters took shape and controlled the story.”

Some of those characters are based on life, such as the notorious slave catcher Patty Cannon. Others, including the protagonist, runaway slave Liz Spocott, developed from McBride’s year-and-a-half of research.

“Time stops past Annapolis,” McBride says with a trace of New York accent. “I must have come down here twenty to thirty times and rode around Dorchester County looking for characters, geography, and bits of information to build characters.”

He kept a low profile, dressed down, drove his aging Volvo, and absorbed the area’s history, customs, and vernacular. He spent hours in the history room of the county library, more hours following the trail of the Underground Railroad, and more with a couple traditional boat builders. He went to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels and read the works of local authors, including Frederick Tilp, who wrote the classic This Was Potomac River in 1978. He walked the shoreline and through cemeteries. He searched slave and manumission records, discovering that many local slaves were freed in the years just prior to the war.

“I’m interested in slavery, but more interested in people,” McBride says. “There’s a residual grapple in white people with slavery—it’s in the air, you can smell it.”

The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was born in the neighboring Talbot County, and the Underground Railroad was active across Maryland. The Chesapeake Bay, and the rivers leading to it, was a main conduit to the north for escaped slaves.

Beginning around 1850, Tubman led dozens of other slaves along the Eastern Shore and into Delaware on their way to freedom. Appropriately, the small café we’re eating in sits across from the Harriet Tubman Coalition’s headquarters and museum on Race Street, the street where some of the city’s most violent civil rights confrontations occurred little more than forty years ago.

Jane Turner, manager of the grill, goes table to table, chatting up her customers until she reaches ours.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?” she pauses to ask McBride, whose jeans,  sport jacket, and scarf flung around his neck stand out among the after-church crowd dressed in their Sunday best. “You look like a movie star.”

“Look me up on the Internet and let me know if I am,” McBride teases back, then introduces himself as an author, not an actor. The closest he’s come to the big screen is his recent screenwriter gig for the Spike Lee film production of Miracle at St. Anna, which debuted before Christmas.

“Spike’s wife read my book,” he says, remembering that he thought Lee’s call was a friend’s prank until the director reassured him that it was no joke.

In Song Yet Sung McBride’s Spocott has visions—like Tubman—and suffers from what today might be called narcolepsy, falling into a deep sleep quickly and unexpectedly. Her visions of the future—of young black men wearing chains of gold instead of iron, mysterious boxes that blare music and pictures, and self-propelled carriages—leave her confused and distraught but earn her a guarded respect from other slaves who call her “The Dreamer.” 

There were no secrets in the Eastern Shore slave community. When Spocott’s owner hires a waterman/retired slave catcher to find her, the hunt embroils other slaves, free blacks, slave owners, and other slave catchers, eventually involving the entire community.

Watermen, of course, play a large role in Song Yet Sung as the majority of the Underground Railroad in Maryland traversed open water or marshy creeks. It was a risky business. Whites could be jailed for helping runaways, and blacks were sold South, but the watermen, McBride says, were beyond governing. “The watermen, mostly black and some white, were the soldiers of the Underground Railroad,” he says. “Watermen were like cowboys, only more rugged, physically stronger, and tougher and wouldn’t hesitate to pull a pistol if they needed to.”

Throughout the novel there is a sense that the watermen, black, white, and ever watchful, are aware of everything that happens on land as well as on the water. A few help Spocott, including one old black waterman who hides her in his workboat as she flees Cambridge. 

The character of Denwood Long, the white waterman and former slave catcher from Hooper’s Island, embodies the watermen’s courage, strength, and savvy as he’s lured out of retirement to find Spocott. Until he visited Dorchester County, McBride says he knew nothing about watermen but his admiration grew as he learned about them—“working in ten- to fifteen-foot boats, handling oyster tongs, and watching the horizon constantly for whatever was blowing up behind them.”

Ironically, McBride has a deep fear of the water, so he never set foot in a boat. But he walked rugged Hooper’s Island—and he read. 

“There are plenty of local writers whose descriptions and accounts of watermen were enough to work with, including Frederick Douglass, who to the very end of his life, was proud to be an Eastern Shore waterman,” he says.

In Song Yet Sung, McBride’s characters use codes—the angle of a quilt hung on a line or the rhythm of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil—to alert each other of danger. “There may not have been a national system, but I’m sure the signals were understood in a regional sense and included black songs and phrases like ÔGospel Train,’ which referred to the Underground Railroad,” he says. “Music had a tremendous amount to do with the codes—a system of signs to warn slaves throughout Dorchester County and understood by slaves and slave catchers as well.”

Codes of different types play a central role in his novel, as well: The quilts that Clementine, the colored woman over at the Gables farm, aired out on the porch each day were screaming, “Hold tight.” The black watermen who tacked up the Chesapeake ran their sails to leeward, wrapping them from right to left instead of left to right. That meant “Hold. Trouble was about.”

After breakfast we head a few miles outside of Cambridge to a restored tenant house, home of a former slave, Adeline Wheatley, near the Spocott Windmill, a reconstruction of an eighteenth-century, post-type Dutch windmill used to grind grain. The windmill, circa-1800 cabin, and other buildings are maintained by the Spocott Foundation, headed by George Radcliffe, descendent of the Spocott plantation master who freed his slaves in 1855. Now the property is open to visitors. McBride borrowed the name for his heroine, as well as the book’s fictitious plantation and slave owner. “This is the real thing, bare wood walls with holes open to outside,” McBride says as we enter the small cabin. 

He spent hours here, he says, “dumping myself into the fictional world.”

McBride plops into a weathered, straight wooden chair and surveys the downstairs room of the rough but tidy cabin. Sparsely furnished, the room, perhaps twelve feet-by-twelve feet, seems almost spacious. A colorful rag rug warms the bare board floor and a narrow, worn corner staircase leads to a sloped ceiling room upstairs. “It put me back in the time,” he says. “And helped set up the framework of the book.”
In the second-floor bedroom, there’s an old scrapbook, filled with yellowed birthday cards from “Harry,” “Sadie,” “Mildred,” and others, friends or maybe family, of whomever saved them, along with faded early twentieth-century news clippings of local events. McBride’s as excited as I’ve seen him as he pages through the mementos, wondering if they may have been Wheatley’s. “This is a gold mine, like walking into a person’s soul,” he says, marveling that the anonymous, ragtag collection is still intact. 

As we walk toward the windmill, McBride surveys the creeks bordering the property. “It was rough living with not a lot of hope in the area,” McBride says of the land, which provided inspiration for the “Neck District,” a setting in his book. “If you didn’t get your oysters, you had to eat whatever vegetables you grew during the rest of the year.

“The elements are fierce, and you sense how trapped even the normal white person was,” he says. “And you can understand the complications of people trapped by the times.”

The watermen, white and black, survived at the whim of the elements. Even the most knowledgeable and careful could fall victim to weather as well as hot-tempered rivals. McBride portrays the risks in the book’s Sullivan family, watermen and small farmers who kept four slaves: Each day, Kathleen Sullivan, a short, dark-haired, bright slip of a woman, stood at the edge of the creek near her modest cabin at Blackwater Creek, nine miles west of Cambridge at the end of Joya’s Neck, staring out over the water. Her husband, Boyd, had been on the bay oystering for six months. He had been given up for lost yet each day she found herself standing at the bank’s edge staring at the wide expanse of bay beyond Blackwater Creek looking in vain for the sail of his dory boat, hoping it would appear, knowing it would not.”

McBride intended the novel to capture the fabric of pre-war Maryland. He created the slave Liz Spocott as an ambivalent character, who, like many of the other characters, questions her destiny. Should she run? Should she hide? Where should she go?

The waterman’s wife, Kathleen Sullivan, is equally conflicted. Although certain that slavery is wrong, she cannot imagine survival without her slaves.

McBride’s vision of the future of the Eastern Shore is also complex. “The Eastern Shore is the forgotten America, a hard place to be with a large divide between the haves and have-nots” he says, adding that as more wealthy vacationers come to play golf, fish, and eat crab cakes, more local color and history is lost.

“But I love the area, it’s a great American secret,” he says. “Few people seem to appreciate the essence of it.”

It’s an easy place to transport oneself back into history, he says, and it remains a land of treasures in that regard.

Although his next book isn’t set on the Eastern Shore, that’s where he plans to flee, he says, to settle anonymously in a room without a view at a hotel he’d rather not mention. And write.

Phyllis Speidell freelances from her home in Hampton Roads, Va.