Song Yet Sung

"A closed face is how you survive, her uncle Hewitt told her. The heart can heal, but a closed face is a shield, he’d said.” 

Liz is a slave and like most slaves, she learned from birth how to behave in ways that would help guard her survival. Particularly when dealing with whites, Liz learned not to show her emotions, not to speak her true thoughts, not to let any part of what she felt appear in her facial expressions. Her Uncle Hewitt had taught her that even though suppressing one’s emotions and thoughts can be humiliating and damaging to the heart, keeping a closed face will ensure survival.

“Chance is an instrument of God.” 

This is the most fundamental of all the elements of the code: It does not matter what people do, since everything works according to God’s plan. Slaves, and all blacks, are subject to the capriciousness of whites, with little control over their lives. When human beings feel a lack of control over their destinies, it sets them up for despair and hopelessness. What is the point of going on if there is no hope? By believing that all events are in the hands of God, endlessly downtrodden people can continue to hope that things will improve. 

“Farmers by summer, fishermen in winter, watermen were unpredictable, pious, gritty, superstitious, and fiercely independent.” 

On Maryland’s eastern shore, there are few wealthy plantation owners and the bulk of white men eke out a substance living by farming in the summer and fishing for oysters in the winter. They regard the plantation owners with suspicion and largely ignore the politics of slavery. The watermen care about their own, as shown when a group abandons their own oystering to search for Jeff Boy, out of deference to his waterman father. They are also highly suspicious of outsiders, as seen when they object to Joe taking Amber away from the dock in Cathedral City, taking the word of a familiar black slave over that of an unknown white man.

“Denwood was standing close to him, and for the first time he got a good look at the Gimp’s face and knew then that what he’d always been told about the Gimp was true: the man was dead inside.”

Denwood, also known as the Gimp, made a good living being the best slave catcher in the area and this pursuit has damaged his psyche considerably. He knew that enabling one man’s “right” to own another human being was fundamentally wrong, so he quit after becoming a father. When he loses his son, the only person he had ever truly loved, part of him feels that this was his penance for having facilitated the continuation of enslavement. Denwood goes through a period of rage and violence, then even that is too much emotion and action for him, so he retreats to a life in which he is simply waiting to die. He is already dead inside.

“This was something new: a dream with an answer.”

Liz has been bewildered about what her dreams mean and why she is having them. They seem to be a curse that is literally tearing her insides apart. When she finds the Woolman’s son in the muskrat trap and cannot figure out how to free him, she experiences a completely different kind of dream of the future. This dream shows her futuristic machinery that visually demonstrates to her how to open up the muskrat trap. This changes Liz’s mind about her dreams, making her feel that perhaps they are not just arbitrary nightmarish visions. This dream is “sent” to her because freeing the Woolman’s son from the trap is imperative to the ultimate goal of saving the boy who will become the ancestor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Outside or inside, the white man’s got to watch you all day and night.” 

Speaking to Lums, a slave on Captain Spocott’s plantation, Denwood points out that holding slaves makes a slave owner something of a slave himself, touching on a major theme of the book: What is freedom and what is slavery? The owner is obliged to worry at all times about his slaves—whether they will run away, harm his family, or sabotage the work on his plantation. A slave owner’s life revolves around continually watching his slaves eat, work, and sleep. This negates the owner’s freedom. 

“Yet, through that new pain, or perhaps because of it, she began to feel a light-headed sense of discovery, as if every plant, every breeze, every single swish of leaf and cry of passing bird, contained a message.” 

Liz suffers from terrible headaches and other pains that arise from receiving dreams of the future. As a result, she is in tune with nature in a strange and mystical way that she has never experienced before. Liz can successfully predict what animals and plants will do and she feels like she can sense their thoughts. At this point, the animals in the forest are seeking to distract Liz from drowning herself in her despair, helping Liz in her mission. This plan, set forth by some outer force, incorporates both the human and nonhuman world.

“How can a colored be happy, her father said, if freedom is only eighty miles away?” 

The eastern shore of Maryland, where the story takes place, is only eighty miles from the Pennsylvania border and any slave who makes it across that border reaches freedom. This creates a very different set of circumstances for slavery than those in the deep South, where freedom is so much less attainable. Kathleen sees her slaves as human beings, as family even, so she puts herself into their situation and realizes how difficult it would be to remain content as a slave with freedom so near. Thinking this through, Kathleen begins to question the morality of the institution of slavery. 

“Everything, he was sure, had already been decided, so moving against it was like moving against the tide of the Chesapeake, or against the dark swirling waters of the Sinking Creek, which surrendered its treasures to him regularly and naturally. Be silent. Wait.” 

The Woolman is the embodiment of Nature and of harmony between living things and the land. He represents what can happen when man lives with complete respect and understanding of nature, as opposed to what happens when man thwarts the natural balance. The Woolman has learned the kind of patience that predators possess when they lie in wait for prey, or that of prey waiting for an opportune moment to dash away from danger. The Woolman believes life’s events must be taken as they come—what is to be has already been decided, and man is as powerless to fight against it as against a current. This is remarkably similar to the code’s concept that God has already determined what will be, and man is powerless to subvert His plan.

“That was the problem with the Dreamer’s vision: Trouble in his own time he could handle. Trouble in tomorrow, however, he could not.” 

Amber is extremely troubled by Liz’s insistence that there is no point in running to the North for freedom, for there is no true freedom there. Liz’s dreams of the future produce the depressing prospect that even though blacks in the future are ostensibly free, they are enslaved to material goods and activities that rob them of their happiness and dignity. Therefore, to Liz, no true freedom for black people is possible. This confounds Amber, who has lived on his dream of fleeing North all his life. Since a person’s aspirations keep them going through hard times, Amber’s dreams of gaining freedom have buoyed him through his years of servitude. Amber needs the prospect of a better future for himself and his family to continue living; if that is proven false, it leaves him with nothing to live for.

“A lie would not do for a man who risked his neck every day on the possibility of freedom, though God knew if the man understood what that was. Freedom to die on the bay tonging oysters? Or farming yourself to death?” 

Denwood spars verbally with the blacksmith, trying to convince him to reveal Liz’s whereabouts. Denwood realizes that this blacksmith is an operative on the gospel train and considers himself to be a freedom fighter, one who risks his life so that others can be free. Yet Denwood believes that black people have no concept of true freedom, since simply not being owned by another does not make a man free. Denwood has lived among destitute whites who are exploited in myriad ways by wealthy white plantation owners, so for him, while poor whites are technically “free,” they suffer in ways similar to slaves. Denwood’s argument concerning social advantage is class-based, rather than race-based.

“She’s a slave like us, Liz said. Slave to an idea.”

Liz has a deep-seated hatred for white people, who she thinks have built the world on their hatred of blacks. Amber does not believe this entirely, since Kathleen does not hate him. Liz finds this irrelevant: Kathleen’s personal feelings for her slaves do not change the fact that she is their owner, enslaved to the idea that it is right for people to own other people; that by virtue of their color, whites are superior to blacks and can therefore treat them as property. When Amber protests that Kathleen cannot afford to set him free because she needs help on the farm, Liz asks why Kathleen does not marry Amber in that case. Amber is shocked by this “crazy” idea, having bought into the idea that blacks and whites are fundamentally different. It is not surprising that Amber has never thought in the terms Liz describes, since institutions depend on the attitude of “it is this way because it has always been this way” in order to continue.

“Chains of gold. They cry for their chains. They even kill for them.” 

Liz is trying to convince Amber that freedom is not a state of being but a state of mind. She tells Amber that he is in love with the North, but that it is just a place, and being there will not make him free. Her visions of the future have shown her this reality. This passage draws a parallel between slavery to material goods and physical slavery. Slave owners use actual chains to hold slaves in bondage, enslave them, keep them from moving, and constrain them in ways that people would wild animals. When people envision being free, they see themselves as breaking free of their chains. Yet Liz has dreamed of free black people so coveting chains of gold (material possessions) that they will kill for them. Black people in the future are not truly free, for they purposefully enslave themselves with lucre.

“The Woolman had never met a Negro who was not afraid of him. That was something his mother had taught him long ago. They can’t stand freedom, she said. It blinds their eyes.”

The Woolman is so huge and wild-looking that any person who sees him is startled by his appearance. He blends in so perfectly with his surroundings that sightings of him are always abrupt, frightening, and shocking. His own interpretation of this reaction is very different, however. His mother escaped slavery with him and allowed him to live in true freedom, in harmony with nature. She, and her son, consider the fear of his intimidating figure to be a fear of freedom itself—fear of seeing what a human being living up to his true, powerful potential actually looks like.

“The old Jew felt his heart breaking as he felt the boy’s pencil-thin arms, lifting the child’s head and feeding him as the boy lay on the cold cell floor, breathing laboriously, while Herbie, frustrated, stood over him, thanking Franz and cursing the child.”

Though he is a bystander in racial dynamics of slaves and their owners, Franz the grocer is a differently persecuted minority. Because he is Jewish and has likely fled pogroms or forced conversion in Europe, he wishes to remain neutral in America in order to stay safe. However, when he sees how starved and ill the Woolman’s son and the runaway woman are due to Herbie’s neglect, it is more than he can bear, and he must help them. His deep empathy triggers his desire to treat the black people he encounters with decency. Franz represents an outside view to the events of the story, highlighting the injustice suffered by enslaved people, and hearkening to the key role future generation of Jewish people would play in the civil rights movement.

“When you’re born as another man’s property, you’re raised to that. And whatever you think of yourself, you always come back to how the white man sees you.” 

Amber feels that he cannot truly be a man while another person owns him. Having been raised since birth to consider what a white man thinks of him as more important than what he thinks of himself, Amber is saying that he cannot live his life and be who he wants to be, or even conceive of what that might be, until he is no longer owned. This is what freedom means to him: No matter how much “freedom” Kathleen gives him and how much lip service she pays to him being a part of her family, Amber is still constrained by what white men expect of him. He seeks the ability to self-conceptualize—to do that, he thinks he must be in the North.

“They were small people, and what she dreamed of was big, another world beyond imagination that reached far, far beyond the world they all knew, or even dreamed of…And all of it held in a song she had not yet heard and might never hear.” 

Unlike everyone around her, whose minds are full of issues of personal importance without universal relevancy, Liz sees the big picture in a way she cannot fully understand. Liz does not know the details of events to come, but she knows that they will be of enormous import to the future of the world. It seems unimaginable to her that she and the others she has met on this journey are at the center of this tremendous development. Who would think that a few poor slaves on the eastern shore of Maryland would have such responsibility? Yet Liz can sense that in just a few days, everything that has been driving her journey will come to some great culmination, with great wonder and sorrow, and that somehow the mystery of the song yet sung will be at its center. Liz has faith that her suffering, and the suffering of those who have helped her, has been for a purpose. 

“He realized with a bit of shock […] that their lives were exact mirrors of his, filled with silent, roaring, desperate human fury and humiliation. He realized at that moment that he despised them even as he admired them.” 

Denwood, a complex character who benefited from the institution of slavery and yet has been destroyed by it as well, has long realized that the most dangerous black person is one who has nothing left to lose, who has suffered so much that death would only be a relief. As he sees this in Mary, Denwood has a shocking realization his suffering has similarly hollowed him out. Slavery has brought all of them a way of life suffused with humiliation and suppressed anger. Denwood despises slaves, because he despises himself, but he also loves them, because he understands where their pain comes from. 

“As they grunted to the blacksmith to shoe their horses or sharpen their tools, she sensed horrible fright beneath their impatient orders, as if they were bluffing and, despite being white, if only someone would call their bluff, they would surrender their inferiority and say, I’m only joshing.” 

As Liz hides in the back of the blacksmith’s shop, she feels a strange clarity, as if she is privy to every sound in the world. She can sense the inner thoughts and feelings of the people who visit the shop, particularly the white patrons. She is frightened by what she sees in their hearts: their extreme, everyday fear of maintaining a veneer of superiority simply by virtue of being white. These white men know deep down that being white does not impart some natural supremacy and their fear of being exposed as imposters is enormous. To cover this fear and bolster their belief in themselves, white men treat blacks as inferiors, hoping that behaving in a superior fashion will make them so. This fills Liz with terror, because there are few things more dangerous than an insecure person trying to prove the rationale of his dominance.

“White and colored, they held hands and hollered at him to go on, and when the colored preacher heard them yelling, that drove him to an even greater fury and he became even more excited, and as the crowd hollered at him, he grew so excited, he reached into the past and shouted a song from our own time! A song not yet sung.” 

This is the culmination of the clues and hints about Liz’s mission. In Liz’s dream, the reader recognizes that the true Dreamer is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, he spoke of his dream that one day people of all colors and creeds would hold hands and “sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” That old Negro spiritual is the song that the old Woman sang as Liz emerged from her coma, the song that has stuck with Liz, propelling her. The energy and intensity of the crowd urging Dr. King to continue his speech will be so great that it will open a portal to the past, where he will be able to pluck the exactly right words from the time of slavery, delivering the message that will change the world. 

“Noticing Amber standing terrified on the other side of his horse, watching him and Joe play this death game, his life in the balance, Denwood suddenly realized that it was he, not the coloreds, who was the real runaway.” 

As Denwood calmly wishes for Joe to shoot him in the back, he suddenly sees himself as a true runaway—like the escaping slaves he had chased down. For years, Denwood has been running from his past, from the life of a poor oysterman like his father, and from his fateful decision to abandon his morals and make a living in the slave trade. He runs from the fact that he might still have his wife and son if he had not taken the wrong path. As these realizations run through Denwood’s head, he is suddenly tired of running. He is ready to pay for his crimes against his better self and is ready to die. Instead, he lives long enough to find his redemption.

“He appeared in full view of the moon, which ducked behind the clouds, but as she crawled towards him, she saw his eyes and realized that he was not who they said he was. You should have told your master your dream, she said. Even if it was a lie, you should have told it to him.” 

Liz discovers when she looks in the Woolman’s eyes that he is also a dreamer like her. Moreover, he is a person who has the true Dreamer “in his tomorrows”—who would become the ancestor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When he was a young child, the Woolman’s dreams that forced his mother to run away, to protect him from his master. But the Woolman cannot survive in the world of men, nor would he ever allow his son to be taken from him, so he must die so that his son can have a life guaranteeing Dr. King’s eventual birth. 

“He felt a great power lift his hand up. Felt his arm, deadened by the Woolman’s knife, rise and grab the hot barrel of Patty’s pistol even as Patty cursed and swung the pistol towards his chest.” 

In his last moments, Denwood, a man who has renounced God and has openly sneered at those who believe, prays to God to let him make his hands work. Miraculously, Denwood is able to lift his arm and stay Patty’s gun long enough for Kathleen to shoot her dead. Denwood finds faith not just in God, but also in the power, purity, and sanctity of a mother’s love for her son. The purest emotion Denwood has ever felt was his love for his son, which he can now honor by repaying his debt for his son’s death by saving another boy. It is a redemption that Denwood had thought lost to him and one that he earns honestly.