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.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
It has been a hard winter on Maryland’s eastern shore. In Johnson’s Crossing, Joe Johnson’s tavern is empty. Locals gossip about Patty’s downfall. No one wants to buy Joe’s tavern. The garden behind it is the only place that yields any crops in the area that spring, but it is a bounty that no one in town will touch, thinking the site cursed and haunted.
No one notices one day when a boat pulls up to the bank, and Kathleen, Amber, and the Woolman’s son get out. They lift Liz and gently lay her on the ground.
Kathleen asks why this is the chosen place and Amber answers that this is where Liz wants to be since a "[f]riend of hers met the Lord here,” (351-52), referring to the Woman with No Name. Kathleen asks if Amber wants her to wait, but he answers that he will be fine with the passes she wrote for him. They say goodbye. Kathleen reaches out her hand to Liz, who is too weak to speak.
Kathleen sails the boat back towards home. She had sold part of her property, the place where the Woolman had lived, and made enough for Amber to have his freedom and to buy the Woolman’s son from the county. Amber will take the boy to Philadelphia because he is “convinced that the boy had some kind of special power, something the Dreamer had told him about, some kind of ability to dream” (352). Kathleen thinks this is superstition, but a lovely tale, nonetheless. She worries whether Amber will ever be able to love again, but she now believes that anything is possible with God’s grace.
Kathleen watches Amber as she sails away, wondering what he is feeling since “she knew she would never understand what it felt like to say good-bye to the one you loved by the bank of a creek, watching the sun rise, holding hands, dying unencumbered, beholden to no one, without even a name” (353).
Epilogue Analysis
The reader finds some resolution in the epilogue to this novel. Amber has gained his freedom. Kathleen has found financial security by selling the land that had held the Woolman’s sanctuary, and in turn, she has secured the safety of the Woolman’s son. By raising him, Amber will ensure that the Woolman’s son, who carries his father’s ability to dream in magical ways, will fulfill his destiny as the ancestor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kathleen does not understand this mysterious sequence of events and thinks the story of Liz’s dreams is mere superstition, but she sees the outcome as part of God’s plan, echoing Clarence’s determinist belief.
Patty is remembered as a devil who got what she deserved, and Joe’s Tavern is shunned as a house of horrors by the locals. It is implied that the bounty that grows in the backyard is fertilized by the many tortured souls who were surreptitiously buried there.
Liz has fulfilled her purpose, which was to ensure the survival of the Woolman’s son, so that he could be the progenitor of the future Dreamer. The safety of this one wild boy comes at the sacrifice of several lives, including Liz’s own. Liz does not know why she was transformed into a magical being, but Amber understands that it is because she is a giving soul, a person who helps others without thinking.
Liz dies in the place where her mission to save the Woolman’s son, and by extension the future Dreamer, began. This was the place she had her disturbing dreams of the future, and where she met the Woman with No Name who introduced her to the code and proclaimed her the two-headed Dreamer. Liz did all she was meant to do, aided by both the natural and supernatural world, and now it is time for her to take her ultimate rest. Being a prophet has used her up, but she is content. She and Amber wish they had more time to be together, but they do get to be together, safe and free, in Liz’s last moments.
The novel ends with a quote from another traditional spiritual:
I got shoes, you got shoes
All God’s chillun got shoes
When I get to heaven I’m goin’ to put on my shoes
I’m goin’ to walk all over God’s Heaven (353).
This is a song about the promise of a better future. For people who are too poor to have shoes in their earthly life, the idea of reward in heaven, of finding comfort (shoes), can sustain and motivate. Shoes denote protection and the ability to go forward. Thus, the story finishes on a hopeful note.
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By James McBride
