And yet McBride’s books do not do away with seriousness so much as isolate it: by showing what can be made funny, which turns out to be most things, McBride’s work also reveals what cannot - war, loss, hopelessness, the waste of human potential that is racism - and makes us feel such tragedy that much more sharply.

To sample the irrepressibility of McBride’s jokes, look no further than the fully realized comic possibilities of the main character of The Good Lord Bird, a male fugitive slave who passes as a girl if it’s irreverence you want, that same novel portrays the venerable ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass as a lecherous gasbag. Anna (2002), set during World War II and made into a 2008 film by Spike Lee two novels that explore slavery, Song Yet Sung (2008) and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird (2013) Kill ’Em and Leave (2016), a biography of the soul singer James Brown and the 2017 story collection Five-Carat Soul. McBride’s subsequent books include the novel Miracle at St. When his eye landed on Mommy, he’d nod as if to say, “Oh, it’s just Sister Jordan” then he’d slip back into his spiritual trance. He’d coolly run the eye in a circle, gazing around at the congregation of forty-odd parishioners to see where the whirring noise was coming from. One eye would pop open with a jolt, as if someone had just poured cold water down his back. He’d sit behind his pulpit in a spiritual trance, his eyes closed, clad in a long blue robe with a white scarf and billowed sleeves, as if he were prepared to float away to heaven himself, until one of Mommy’s clunker notes roused him. Owens, our minister, would get up from his seat and stop the song. It sounded so horrible that I often thought Rev. Up, up, and away she went, her shrill voice climbing higher and higher, reminding us of Curly of the Three Stooges. Here in The Color of Water is McBride describing the way that the most important person in his life, his mother, sang in their house of worship: A MAJOR FEATURE of the African-American writer James McBride’s books - beginning with the memoir The Color of Water (1995), a tribute to his white mother - is the large dose of humor injected into subjects that are, on the face of things, deadly serious if not sacred.

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