W. E. B. Du Bois begins his 1909 life of Brown with a stern and subtle warning: “The view-point adopted in this book is that of the little known but vastly important inner development of the Negro American.” Only a narrative could fully substantiate this viewpoint, but Du Bois sets out his position as starkly as possible at the outset: Brown is the real thing, a well-informed race traitor, not that false thing, a self-regarding white savior. “John Brown worked not simply for Black Men—he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.” For Du Bois, Brown’s friendships with Black leaders and others, and his sympathetic study of Black radical history in the Americas, meant that his thoughts and actions were part of the “inner” story of Black American consciousness.
Many depictions of Brown have followed Du Bois’s lead, not only in substance but in form, by prefacing the story with a declaration of principle. For example, the 2020 Showtime miniseries based on James McBride’s 2013 comic novel The Good Lord Bird begins with a voiceover:
Most folks never heard of John Brown. If they have, all they know is he was hung for being a traitor and stirring up all kinds of trouble and starting the Civil War. Some Black folks love him, ’cause they think trouble needed to be stirred. But some Black folks hate him for thinking he was some sort of bullshit white savior. Me? I knew him. I loved the man.
These words do not appear in the novel, but they do sketch its overall plot: a Black teenager gets pulled into the historical mayhem churning in Brown’s wake and narrates the transformation of his skepticism into “love.” Onion (the narrator) gradually decides that he loves Brown despite his violent religiosity, seeing it as a kind of sanity raised to the level of insanity: “He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker.” The novel’s humor comes from how Brown’s religiosity eclipses his historical judgment, while he muddles through even so—or, to use Onion’s metaphor, “roll[s] into history,” down some inner slope of sublime morality. Being “outdoor people,” the Browns “didn’t think like normal folks. They thunk more like animals, driven by ideas of purity. I reckon that’s why they thought the colored man was equal to the white man.”
The problem with The Good Lord Bird’s humor isn’t that it dovetails with radical pessimism about American racism—as good a theme for literature as any other—but that its perception of Brown conforms to the Beecherite “burning fragment” model. Brown only comes alive once we begin to narrate his religiousness as part of his rationality, not in opposition to it.