Henry Shackleford, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy in the Kansas Territory of 1856, is swept out of his master's tavern in the middle of a gunfight and into the company of John Brown — who mistakes him for a girl, names him "Little Onion" after a good-luck charm, and will not be corrected. To stay alive, Onion keeps the disguise, riding with Brown's ragged army through Bleeding Kansas, meeting Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman along the road, all the way to the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. McBride tells it as an old man's tall tale — funny, profane, and grief-stricken at once. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and was later filmed as a television limited series.
Author: James McBride · Original publisher: Riverhead Books (New York), 2013
