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.
Themes
Freedom and Slavery
A major theme of the story is the way the institution of slavery functions as a lens to explore the best and worst in human nature. Additionally, although the novel focuses primarily on American slavery, McBride also considers the ways slavery and freedom are mental and emotional states as well as legal and physical states.
Denwood is a slave catcher by trade, yet he recognizes that he himself is a slave to the inner demons brought on by denying freedom to the runaways he catches. He knows that what he does is evil and that his money is blood money, and this knowledge corrodes his psyche. Denwood realizes that like the slaves he pursues, he is also a runaway, in that he has been running away from the life he should have led—that of a poor but decent oysterman. At the end of the story, Denwood frees himself from the shackles of his mind by an act of selflessness.
Owning people acts as a mental trap for slave owners. Fear of uprisings and runaways forces slaveowners to obsess about their slaves and make them a central point around which their lives revolve. As Denwood says, slave owners cannot sleep until their slaves sleep, cannot stop working until their slaves stop, get up in the morning when their slaves do. They are slaves to their fear, which Denwood says will be their undoing.
For enslaved people, being owned by “kind” owners isn’t enough to make slavery palatable, because of its damaging psychic effects. Amber has spent his whole life deferring self-knowledge and love until he is able to run from his owner to freedom in the North. Slavery has taken away his ability to self-determination, to decide what kind of man he will be. Each man must choose whether to be decent, but Amber cannot do this while enslaved, since he is bound by the external judgements of his owner about what kind of person he may be. For Amber, slavery is a state of mind as well as a state of existence, and he cannot become self-actualized while he remains a slave. When Liz tells Amber that running North is pointless, since there is no true freedom there, Amber is deeply distressed. Slowly, however, he comes around to her idea that he does not need to wait to fall in love nor to avoid deciding whether to be a good person—accepting the validity of his inner life is true freedom.
Kathleen may be kind, but as a slave owner she is also a slave to an idea: the notion that it is right and proper for one human being to own another. For Liz, this means that Kathleen will never be able to truly see Amber as a man rather than her slave. In the novel, readers watch Kathleen struggle to resolve her way of life with the dawning realization that owning slaves wrong. Kathleen frees herself partially from this contradiction by giving Amber his freedom.
The Woolman, who is the character least connected with the institution of slavery, has the greatest degree of freedom in the novel. He exists in harmony with nature and he experiences a kind of inner peace and happiness not shown in any of the other characters. This otherworldly quality inspires fear and disgust in those who catch a glimpse of him.
Determinism
There is a strong thread throughout the story that causes external to human will ultimately determine all events, an idea embodied by the code fragment “Chance is an instrument of God.”
Clarence believes that it does not matter what Liz chooses to do, because whatever she does will be part of God’s plan. Liz, meanwhile, often feels that an external force is using the natural world to bring her to the places she needs to be in order to fulfill her mission: to bring the Woolman’s son and Amber together, so that the boy could become the ancestor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Because of his prophetic dreams, The Woolman also believes that nature rather than human will determines what will be—he accepts without reservation that everything in life is preordained and pre-decided.
The title of book itself reflects a sense of determinism as well. Importantly, McBride refers to the song “yet” sung, not the song “not yet” sung, a phrasing that carries two interpretational possibilities. On the one hand, the word “yet” means “up to now” or “so far,” implying something has not happened, but will occur in the future. This interpretation references the song that Liz heard from the old Woman and continues to think—a song that will happen in the future. On the other hand, “yet” also means “continuously up to a specific time.” In this meaning, the novel’s title references the “song” of the future Dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a song of freedom that is part of a timeline of events that have been predetermined. This song is already being sung in Liz’s time and will “yet” continue, through the Woolman’s son and future generations, until Dr. King gives his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In this version of the title’s “yet,” the message of Dr. King’s words, including the words of the song, continues to reverberate.
Religion
Belief in and rejection of God comes up repeatedly in the story.
Eager to demonstrate his contempt for religious belief, Denwood took an itinerant preacher up on a dare to put his newborn son next to a six-legged dog, which the preacher had declared to be a sign that God was ending the world soon. When his son died soon after, the community considered this retribution for Denwood’s lack of faith, declaring that Denwood paid a harsh price for thumbing his nose at God.
Bitter after this tragedy, Denwood finds religious belief incomprehensible and unreasonable. He is angry that black people exhibit such devotion to God in light of how much injustice they suffer and finds that the religious plantation owners are hypocrites. Amber turns Denwood’s anti-God convictions on their ear by arguing that it does not matter if Denwood believes in God, since God believes in him. By inverting the idea of religious devotion in this way, Amber shows Denwood how to stop having a personal vendetta with God, and instead to consider life as pre-determined. In Amber’s determinist worldview, whether you work for God’s plan or against it, the plan will always continue. In the end, Denwood prays to God to help him holding off Patty Cannon from killing Jeff Boy; when he succeeds, Denwood dies feeling that he has redeemed himself.
Similarly, Liz tells Clarence that she longer believes in God, in light of all the terrible things she has seen. Clarence echoes Amber’s statement to Denwood, saying that it does not matter if Liz believes in God—He believes in her. Clarence, as a champion of the code, which he calls his Bible, and a leader along the gospel train, has dedicated his life to doing God’s work. His faith that his race is God’s chosen people, and that they all will find true freedom after death, is unshakable. This makes suffering in life easier to bear. Like Amber, Clarence believes that God washes all of man’s suffering away, fills each person with goodness, and he wants to be part of the effort to free God’s people.
Sacrifice
The mission at the heart of the story requires much sacrifice to ensure the outcome. Liz sacrifices her health and her life so that the Woolman’s son will survive and go on to be the ancestor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She also sacrifices the life of the Woolman for this reason as well—as long as he lived, his son could not fulfill this destiny. Denwood sacrifices himself to save Kathleen’s son. Amber risks the safety of himself and his family in order to help Liz. Mary risks her life by entreating Denwood to find Wiley and Jeff Boy without implicating Amber.
There are also other examples of personal sacrifice apart from the main body of the plot. Clarence has sacrificed his own chance to go North to freedom in order to help others. The blacksmith has done this as well, in addition to sacrificing his family’s security by engaging in activities with the gospel train that could endanger them at any time. The concept of self-sacrifice in the cause of a greater good fills the story with hope in the face of slavery, often portrayed as a hopeless situation.
Loyalty
In the novel’s complex world, bonds of loyalty do not break down along racial lines. Instead, what drives loyalty are family groupings, which can be composed even of slaves and their owners. For example, in the Sullivan household, Kathleen considers her slaves almost blood relations. Likewise, the bonds of loyalty that Amber’s family feels towards each other are strong and extend to Kathleen and her children.
In contrast, Patty’s crew, driven entirely by materialism rather than their familial connections, work together but feel no loyalty towards each other. All in the gang are quick to suspect treachery, with good reason. Blacks like Little George work to keep other blacks enslaved. Hodge abandons Patty without a second thought when the Woolman kills Odgin. Even though Joe is her son-in-law, Patty does not bother to bury his body when she finds him. Patty does not think twice about killing Stanton when he becomes an inconvenience.
Most complex is loyalty that is predicated on honor. Denwood is angry when Amber does not come to his rescue when the Woolman attacks—Denwood feels entitled to Amber’s loyalty because he has tried to show black people kindness and decency in the past. Denwood doesn’t understand earning grudging respect is not the same as earning loyalty: To feel loyal, one must first be treated as a human being.
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By James McBride
