Rewriting Slavery Through Black Bodies in James McBride’s Song Yet Sung : Folklore, Gothic, and Time Travel

This essay examines how James McBride’s Song Yet Sung rewrites slavery through Black bodies. The novel uses folklore, gothic representation, and time travel to recover the histories, knowledge, and practices of resistance carried by wounded and stigmatized bodies. Liz’s emergence as a “two-headed” seer and trickster reinterprets her wounded body as a source of prophetic knowledge and collective resistance. Woolman’s monstrous presence in the wilderness reworks gothic conventions, exposing slavery’s racialization of Black bodies as primitive, deviant, and inhuman, while his scarred body records torture, fugitivity, and survival. The novel’s embodied time travel reveals how bodily stigma, psychiatric pathologization, commodified desire, and psychic alienation converge in modern Black bodyminds. McBride thus challenges linear narratives of racial progress, asking readers to judge emancipation by whether slavery’s bodily, psychic, and material constraints have actually been dismantled.