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.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “discovered”
During a huge rainstorm, Amber finds Liz in the hollow tree. She has not been eating and cannot stand being by herself in the dark at night. Amber must leave soon, but he feels a great urge to stay with Liz. Amber wants to help her escape, though all the code signs left by slaves in the area say to stay put.
Liz thinks she is losing her mind and that someone is watching her. She despairs, “Death would be a relief to me, after what I been through” (156), but is unable to tell Amber what that is. Finally, Amber offers to take her on the gospel train himself. Liz repeats that there is no freedom in the north: “You love the North, she said. You love a place. There ain’t nothing there to love” (158). The things that Liz tells Amber upset him and turn his ideas of the world upside down.
Liz tells Amber that she is already free in her heart. She has seen the future in her dreams and knows that being free does not bring happiness, as all the free people she sees in opulent surroundings are miserable. She does not think he is the kind of man who would love only money and possessions.
Hearing her speak of him tenderly delights Amber. When Liz quietly says that he should not worry about her because she will not live long, Amber pulls her close and kisses her. After kissing feverishly for a while, Amber suddenly draws away and weeps. When he can speak, he tells Liz that he has always wanted to know how to be a man. His father had been an obsequious slave and could not teach him.
Amber says that the people in Liz’s dreams are no different from the people alive now: “Some is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t. Color ain’t got a thing to do with it” (160). Amber says that each person must choose which way to be—but slaves don’t get to make choices.
Their reverie is shattered when Liz suddenly warns Amber to run. Patty Cannon and her men ride up to them, so Amber grabs Liz, and they jump up and lie on top of a nearby wall. Patty’s group jumps their horses over the wall, but do not see Amber and Liz. Amber leads Liz in the dark to where he tied up the bungy, narrowly avoiding capture several times.
Chapter 13 Summary: “snatched by the devil”
When the Woolman heads out towards the white man’s land to begin his war, nature warns him that his enemy is on high alert: “The Land screamed its warning, every smell, tree branch, sound, and birdcall indicating that alarm was in the air” (165).
The Woolman passes the place where Liz had been hiding. He had tracked her there but left her alone because she frightened him. The Woolman can tell there are white men nearby and sees three riders. He moves away without engaging them.
At the Sullivan farm, the Woolman plans to take the young white boy and perhaps his mother.
Jeff Boy comes out of the cabin and heads to the cornfield, so the Woolman burrows into his hole in the woods again. Jeff Boy’s dog smells the Woolman and goes to investigate. Jeff Boy sees his dog disappear down what appears to be a rabbit hole. As he approaches the hole, “the earth rose and what appeared to be a hideous piece of earth, tree, hair, and arms charged him” (169).
Wiley hears a scream, runs out to the cornfield, and continues into the thickets. Kathleen reaches the spot where the Woolman had dug his hole and sees the dog, its throat slit. She runs into the grove, hoping Wiley would cut off anyone from the other side. At the Sinking Creek, she collapses with exhaustion.
Wiley picks her up and says she should go back for help. Running through the woods, Wiley internally blames Amber for endangering them all by harboring the Dreamer. He is sure that she called a demon to kidnap whites, jeopardizing their safety: “The wrath of the white man was about to drop down on them like a hammer because of what was unfolding here” (172). Wiley catches a glimpse of the Woolman carrying Jeff Boy away; he is sure that he will be blamed for the abduction, for no white man will believe he saw a black devil take Jeff Boy away.
Though he keeps the Woolman in sight for quite a while, Wiley eventually loses him. A sudden crack of Patty Cannon’s rifle butt in his face drops him to the ground. Wiley tries to tell her that the Devil has snatched Jeff Boy, but Patty says he looks like a runaway and pulls out ankle chains and foot locks.
Chapter 14 Summary: “sounding the alarm”
Cambridge City’s deputy constable Herbie Tucker is upset to be handling several crises, since his boss Travis House left town when Patty Cannon arrived. Patty’s presence has upset the local watermen. Even though they are not slave owners, her actions will result “in lost fishing revenue, time spent on posse roundups, more taxes for more constables” (181).
A black woman from the farm next to Kathleen’s runs into the jail, shouting that the Devil jumped out of a hole from hell and snatched the Sullivan boy. The woman says that Miss Kathleen needs help and that Wiley was snatched also.
Herbie worries that the Sullivan boy drowned while playing in the river. He writes a note for Beauford Locke and tells the woman to take it to the general store and give it to the proprietor, Franz Mucheimmer. When she tells Franz that the deputy has written Locke a note, Franz, an immigrant from Bavaria, fears that his English is not good enough to understand what the woman is saying. His assistant Clarence hears the woman say that the Devil snatched Jeff Boy.
Clarence knows that Locke sometimes works for the constable’s office, but since this is an emergency and since Locke is a generally unavailable drunk, Franz, who is also the postmaster, should read the note himself.
Nervously Franz decides to ask the deputy about the contents of the note. Inside the jailhouse, the deputy is dealing with an imprisoned runaway slave, who is howling with hunger, and a young black boy with a bandaged leg. Herbie has neglected to feed either prisoner for two days, so Franz runs to his store for food and medicine, fearful that the child might die. Finally, he asks the deputy about the note. When Herbie dismissively says it’s nothing, Franz returns to his store and places the note in Locke’s mailbox, where the next day it still hasn’t been picked up.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
These chapters further examine the ramifications of slavery and how it impacts people’s lives. Amber has spent his entire life in a state of suspended animation, forgoing love and self-actualization while he is a slave because he feels powerless. He has clung to the notion that making it to the north would mean freedom: He would no longer be owned by another person and able to make his own choices about the kind of man he wants to be. Liz disabuses him of this idea. The images of black people in her dreams prove to her that while these future people are free, they are plagued by the same ills people of her time face: greed, anger, materialism, envy, and pride. She argues that the kind of person he is does not rely on freedom or slavery, black or white: “Being decent ain’t got nothing to do with today or tomorrow. It’s either in you or it ain’t” (160). Amber had assumed that until he was free, any personal growth was impossible.
Unlike Amber, Liz has gone through almost too much self-actualization. Though Liz does not set into motion the Woolman’s war (though she does release his son from the trap), Wiley believes that she must have somehow been the cause of it. Wiley blames her for the ruination of his family’s lives, seeing her as a witch or otherwise supernatural due to her dreams: “The Dreamer had called the Devil into Amber’s head, and now they’d all suffer” (172). Wiley recognizes that black people are prime targets for scapegoating and worries that he will be the easiest to blame for an offense as serious as the abduction of a white child. Ironically, he is enacting the same kind of scapegoating when he decides that Liz is singlehandedly to blame for the situation with Woolman and Jeff Boy.
For deputy constable Herbie Tucker, slaves aren’t human beings, but a nuisance that interrupts his gambling, either when he has to deal with Patty Cannon’s pursuit of the runaway slaves or when he remembers to feed and care for the captured runaways at the jailhouse.
Continuing the theme of eastern shore white hierarchies, we see that slavery is not much of an issue in Cambridge City, which is mostly inhabited by watermen who are engaged in a daily struggle to survive. They do not own slaves and only care if slaves owned by others run away when pursuit threatens their comfort: “They did not mind the Negro problem being an underground problem. But Patty’s presence brought it out into the open” (180-181). The watermen’s low socioeconomic status means that they can be forced to form search parties, which takes them away from oystering and disrupts their lives.
These chapters also introduce the character of Franz Mucheimmer, the Jewish owner of the general store in Cambridge City, who is an outsider separated from both blacks and whites by religion and language: “He and his wife were the only Jews on the eastern shore between Baltimore and Ocean City” (188). Franz is trying to remain neutral in the collision between blacks and whites that swirls all around him but gets involved when Herbie will not help the young black woman who brings the news of the abductions. Franz did not grow up with slavery, so he sees the boy and the runaway prisoner, as well as the woman who came seeking help, as human beings. Franz’s empathy puts him in immediate risk as he frantically tries to save the Woolman’s son’s life: “He was breaking the most valuable lesson his father had ever taught him about survival as a Jew in America or anywhere else for that matter: Race, religion, and politics? Shhh!” (190-191).
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By James McBride
