"Song Yet Sung" a story of the slave experience

In the year 1850, when Liz Spocott dreams of the future, she sees some scenes that disconcertingly resemble our present: "black men in garish costumes playing sport games for more money than any white man could imagine," "Negro girls trading their black eyes in for blue ones," and "black children who ... walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes."

Liz is the young heroine of "Song Yet Sung" (Riverhead, 353 pp., $25.95), a gripping new novel from African-American writer James McBride that manages to indict some aspects of contemporary black culture even as it weaves a story of the slave experience in the antebellum South, and of the varied attitudes and complicities of white folk.

Liz has run away from her sexually abusive master. A gang of slave-catchers, led by the beautiful and ruthless Patty Cannon, has caught up with her less than a hundred miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the recapture Liz takes a musket ball to the head.

Shackled to other runaways in a suffocating attic, Liz experiences terrible hallucinations as she clings to life. Eventually she recovers somewhat, and confides her dreams to the old woman she is chained to. Prophesizing that Liz will save them, the woman teaches Liz pieces of the Code, an assortment of cryptic communications and signals used along the Underground Railroad.

Indeed, Liz is in another one of her deliriums when an opportunity arises to make a break. Almost without being aware of what she is doing, she instigates the violent action that gives her fellow captives — 14, all told — another chance to escape. They scatter every which way, and Liz is left to make her own way through the dense and wild waterways of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

When Cannon learns of their escape, she is furious not only at the loss of her valuable commodities, but also at the harm caused to her reputation. She vows revenge.

Meanwhile, back on the plantation where Liz grew up, her master has engaged the services of wily slave-catcher Denwood Long to track down his nubile young slave and bring her back to him.

Both slave-catchers are aware of their competition. Neither one likes the other, and neither one likes the circumstances of this hunt, either — the eastern shore is a place of treacherous tides, unpredictable weather and complicated relationships.

Liz, meanwhile, stumbles upon a loose network of free blacks and slaves who are cautiously willing to help her, provided she display some knowledge of the Code.

But her pursuers are close behind, and they're willing to use any manner of tactic, from sweet talk to brutality, to beat one another to their quarry.

This harrowing cat-and-mouse hunt is further confounded by the disappearance of two children, one black and one white, and by a sighting of the Woolman, a feared wild man who long had been rumored to dwell in the backwaters.

McBride borrows liberally from actual historical events and figures to fabricate this engrossing tale, and then emphasizes the implications of past actions by interspersing them with Liz's recurring nightmares of the future. His vivid descriptions of the tangled lands and waterscapes of the eastern shore create a claustrophobic sense of place — readers will extrapolate the need for a moral compass, as well as a literal one.

And from the magnificent villainy of Cannon, to the corrosive ambiguities of Liz, Long and the rest, McBride's characters evoke an extraordinary time that spawned ghosts that haunt us still, with the message that if we fail to take responsibility for our actions, we will be permanently mired in despair.