77 pages • 2 hours read
James McBrideSong Yet Sung
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “the woolman”
Following the escape from the attic, Liz tries to follow Linus, but he moves too swiftly into the marsh for her to keep up. Exhausted from pushing through the sharp, high grass and weak from recuperating from her head wound, Liz sits down and falls asleep. She dreams of huge fat black people gorging themselves on more food than she has ever seen in one place. Despite the massive amounts of food children eat, they are still starving and weeping bitterly.
Liz wakes from the dream and realizes that she herself is starving. She hurries through the marsh, looking for something to eat. All of her senses seem heightened and she feels compelled to move forward by some outside force: “The earthly things that floated into her vision […] seemed to point her in a specific direction, as if to say, Here, this way” (41). Liz cannot understand what she is feeling and thinks she must be delirious.
Liz reaches a river, but a sudden gale of wind raises waves that make it impossible to cross, so she has to turn back. She lies down to rest in a thicket and hears a child moaning. At first, Liz thinks this must be a dream or some deranged fantasy, so she tries to ignore the sound. Soon, however, she “felt, rather than saw, the image in her mind of someone deeply troubled” (42).
Liz crawls through the branches and finds a young black boy with his foot caught in a muskrat trap. He is about seven years old, wearing only a calico sack, his hair wild and matted. Liz wants to leave him but feels forced to try to free him. The trap is too strong for her to pull open. She closes her eyes, exhausted, and dreams of the future. This time, her dream is of incredible machines that could perform unbelievable feats of strength and ingenuity.
Liz wakes and suddenly understands how to use branches to lever the trap open. The boy shrieks with pain as his foot is released and it seems like the whole swamp roars with him. Liz calms the boy, who does not speak.
Liz senses a threatening presence as the Woolman, an enormous black man, slowly emerges from the thicket. He has a huge mass of wild hair and moves as if he were part of the forest. Liz can tell that he is likely the boy’s father. The man seems to gradually disappear, turning back into leaves and vines.
Alarmed, Liz runs until she collapses and falls asleep, dreaming. When she wakes, she finds a sack of provisions tied with a rope with five knots.
Chapter 5 Summary: “big linus”
As Linus, the escaped slave, stands across a cove from an isolated cabin, Louie, the slave who lives in the cabin, mistakes Linus for the Woolman. Louie asks his wife Sarah if she has been feeding some of the oysters they catch to the Woolman. Sarah says she has not.
Sarah sends their son Gilbert to a bungy—a tiny oyster boat—docked at the pier and tells him to roll up his left pant leg. Without drawing attention, she ties five knots into the oyster net and slips several oysters into the bottom of the boat, making them look like they had fallen there—all meant as code for any slave hiding in the woods. Then she shows her son how to tie five knots in the rope that secures the boat to the pier and explains: “North, south, east, west, and free. Button your collar and keep God on your shoulder. Your God shoulder’s your right one. Loop your rope from left to right means you facing northward” (55). Linus watches the woman and her son go into the house.
Linus has been on the run from slave catchers and their dogs. He feels unprotected because the old Woman with No Name is dead, and he can no longer hear her voice in his head. Linus mourns the old Woman, who had been kinder to him than anyone else in his entire life. She had taught him patience and explained the code: “Five knots, wrapped with a collar at the bottom looped towards the setting sun. That meant go. If wrapped the other way, against the setting sun, it meant the coast wasn’t clear and to hold tight. Left leg trousers rolled up. Everything to the left, left, left and in fives” (56).
Because he had been taught to be afraid of beautiful, fragile things, Linus had been afraid of the Dreamer. He now regrets having left her behind. Linus sneaks to the bungy and begins to eat the oysters hidden for him. Linus hears a dog barking and panics, afraid of pursuit. He struggles to read the rope knots, then remembers what they mean, unmoors the bungy, and paddles away.
Linus loses his bearings after a while and makes his way to shore, where he meets Patty Cannon and her men. As the men attempt to tie him up, Linus goes into a frenzy and grabs Ogdin, crushing him in the bottom of their boat. Patty shoots Linus in the side of the head and instructs her men to sail away.
Chapter 6 Summary: “lums”
Denwood arrives at the Spocott plantation. He looks so ragged that the slaves do not believe that he is the Gimp. One slave, Lums, recognizes Denwood and tells his wife that he is dangerous. When they meet, Captain Spocott is put off by Denwood’s rudeness and poor appearance, but when Denwood looks in his face, the Captain is frightened and knows Denwood is the man for the job.
The Captain complains that he showed Liz every kindness, but Denwood realizes that Liz ran away because Spocott was sexually abusing her. This also explains why the Captain wants her back so badly. Denwood tells Captain Spocott that he wants to speak to the slaves around the house, and when the Captain objects, Denwood calmly tells him, “Only way to catch a colored is through a colored” (68).
The Captain knows that the Gimp was the area’s best slave catcher, having pursued a famously evasive slave named Mingo all the way to Canada. He tells Denwood that Liz was raised by a slave named Hewitt after her mother died and her father was sold.
Denwood questions Lums in the smokehouse, confusing him with seemingly irrelevant questions, which Lums tries to answer in neutral tones. Denwood asks what Hewitt told the children he raised, and whether Lums knows a code that Hewitt may have taught Liz. Lum denies knowing anything about a code. When Denwood finally asks why Liz ran away, Lums replies that Captain Spocott was going to put her in a cabin by herself. Denwood asks if she might have been running to a black suitor, but Lums tells him that black men are afraid of her because she dreams strange dreams. Denwood scoffs that this, and Lums explains that ever since being struck in the head as a child by a white man who was aiming a flatiron at Hewitt, Liz has had strange visions. There was speculation that Hewitt had planned for the white man to strike Liz, the fifth child Hewitt raised, so she could become a conjuror.
Denwood leaves, saying that Lums should watch out for Patty Cannon. Lums replies that he carries a knife. Denwood answers that a knife “won’t do you no good if Patty comes around raising hell” (76), but Lums answers that he is already in hell.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The supernatural nature of Liz’s experience increases as she struggles through the marsh. For one thing, she is gaining powers of perception: “She was changing inside in some kind of way, she was certain. She was not sure if that was a good thing, but despite an aching, pounding pain in her head, she seemed to be able to hear better, to see better, to smell more” (41). For another, the very plants and animals of the swamp appear to lead her to the place where she finds the child caught in the muskrat trap. When she cannot free him, she falls asleep and dreams of a futuristic mechanism, which provides her with a visual guide for how to open the trap.
Liz isn’t the only person imbued with otherworldly power. The Woolman, a wild escaped slave who lives deep in the swamp, is also a quasi-mythical figure whom some people consider to be an imaginary legend. When Liz meets him, he disappears from her sight like a ghost melting back into the swamp as though he were one with the vines and mud.
Both Liz and the Woolman commune with the natural world around them. The Woolman has abandoned civilization altogether; Liz, meanwhile bonds with the forest in her dreamscapes, which reveal the inner thoughts of the woods and clarify for Liz that she is indeed “two-headed,” as the old Woman with No Name called her. Part of her mind exists in her present, while part sees the future.
The motif of the code comes up again, this time with an emphasis on its connection to destiny. Liz realizes that she is moving towards some purpose. Rather than running from slavery for her own benefit, she is part of something bigger—something to do with the old Woman’s prediction that it “ain’t the song, but the singer of it” (50). Liz needs to find out who the singer is, but right now she doesn’t have the key to this puzzle.
The slave population frequently uses the code the Woman with No Name described to Liz. Sarah passes her knowledge of it to her son Gilbert so that he can eventually run toward freedom, reading the navigation instructions embedded in the code as he moves in order to remain safe. Conversely, Sarah’s husband Louie fears the code because of the danger interacting with escaped slaves could bring to himself and his family. Sarah aids the slave network in secret, leaving food for Big Linus and tying knots in the bungy ropes that show the safe way to escape the area. The problem is that the code is so convoluted that slaves like Linus, whose size and temperament made others afraid of him and who never absorbed the code in childhood finds it hard to remember how to read it. As long as Linus sticks to the code, he makes good progress, but as soon as he deviates from Sarah’s rope knot directions, Patty Cannon captures him.
A different kind of code appears when Lums is answering Denwood’s questions—the complex puzzle of how to hide the truth while appearing cooperative. Although Lums does this skillfully, keeping his responses measured and his expression blank, Denwood is very good at deciphering slave facial expressions. He sees that Lums reacts slightly when asked whether Hewitt taught Liz a code. Lums does his best to cover, denying knowing anything about a code, as it is imperative the code secret so that it can continue to keep slaves and runaways safe.
This chapter explores further the socioeconomic and cultural differences in Maryland’s eastern shore. White people are far from a homogenous group. Denwood shows his distaste for wealthy plantation owner Captain Spocott, one of the exploitative and “[a]rrogant upper islanders, dredging the poor man’s oysters, driving down the selling price so that only big volumes could be sold and therefore they got a better percentage, leaving the solitary waterman who oystered on his own high and dry, scuffling for peelers and small crabs” (68). Denwood will work for Captain Spocott, but he feels nothing but contempt.
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By James McBride
