Harriet Tubman

Starred review from November 18, 2024
Bob the Drag Queen, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, debuts with a vivacious narrative that sees Harriet Tubman magically brought back to life. Revived in the present day along with a handful of other famous historical figures (Cleopatra has reinvented herself as an Instagram model), Harriet teams up with the narrator, legendary hip-hop producer Darnell Williams, to connect Black people to their ancestry through music. She introduces Darnell to her band, the Freemans, made up of people she freed from slavery. Among them are Odessa, who has a talent for singing and rapping; Buck, a strong and silent guitarist with an intelligent mind; DJ Quakes, so nicknamed because of his Quaker beliefs; and Moses the drummer, who’s Harriet’s younger brother. Darnell helps finish their album, and in turn, Harriet helps Darnell find self-acceptance, having fallen into obscurity after been outed as gay in 2010. Darnell’s reverence for Harriet, “America’s first Black superhero,” makes her feel alive on the page (“She sings as if Dr. Dre and Ella Fitzgerald had a daughter. Angry, strong, and smooth all at once,” Darnell thinks) and the pair’s dialogue provides a nuanced and quick-witted tour of Black history (discussing Black peoples’ complex attitudes toward Frederick Douglass in his lifetime, Harriet says, “I didn’t say ‘hate.’ You up here adding stuff. Everybody respected Frederick Douglass. Even racist white folk”). It’s a knockout. Agent: Tom Flannery, Vigliano Assoc.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
Darnell, a Black, gay, intermittently successful music producer, has received the commission of a lifetime: a gig producing an album by his idol, America's first Black superhero, Harriet Tubman. Due to a (wisely) unexplained phenomenon called the Return, numerous historical figures have reappeared. Harriet, accompanied by her brother Moses and an entourage of abolitionists and the formerly enslaved, plans to bring her liberatory message to a new generation of Black Americans by blending traditional spirituals and hip-hop. Darnell accompanies the band, Harriet and the Freemans, touring their former plantation, listening to their stories, despairing over his ignorance of Black history, and basking in the wonder that is Harriet. Sensing his discomfort with being gay, Harriet is determined to set Darnell on the path to true freedom, even if she has to pull a pistol on him to make her point. Strewn with numerous anecdotes about John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and William Dorsey Swann (the ex-slave who became America's first drag queen), the first novel from TV host and RuPaul's Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen vibes with energy and humor but never wavers in its focus on the resilience and power of Black Americans, "made out of something stronger than steel and diamonds combined," and the universal passion for liberation.

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March 1, 2025
The famous abolitionist plots her comeback with the help of a hip-hop producer. The literary debut by Bob the Drag Queen--Instagram star, Madonna concert emcee, and winner ofRuPaul's Drag Race--imagines a host of famous figures returning to life: Cleopatra is a fashion influencer, John D. Rockefeller is a robber baron all over again, and Harriet Tubman, a key figure in the Underground Railroad, wants to share her story via aHamilton-style album. To assist, she's assembled a backing band called the Freemans as well as the narrator, Darnell, a producer who's down on his luck for reasons revealed later in the novel. For the moment, though, the project is an opportunity for him to "reconcile what it means to be Black, queer, and American all at once." Bob doesn't explain why Tubman's resurrection has occurred, or why Tubman is, of all things, a musical talent--the novel is mainly a thought exercise about what Tubman's ferocity and determination might mean in our current moment. Conceptually, that's intriguing, but eliding the whys and wherefores would be more forgivable if Bob's treatment of the conceit wasn't so simplistic. Insights into the horrors of slavery or pioneering drag figures like William Dorsey Swann are whittled down to observations slight even by the standard of Insta captions. ("I can't even imagine the patience it must take to wait your turn for freedom. Hell, I don't even like to sit through commercials on YouTube.") The role of Quakers in the abolition movement is reduced to a blunt-smoking little person working as Tubman's DJ. Some imagined lyrics are included, but descriptions of the creative process are shallow. ("She had written a song and wanted me to take a look at it, to see if it was any good. It was great.") Bob is seemingly concerned that Tubman's labors aren't considered relevant to the current moment, but the novel exchanges sepia for cardboard. A well-intentioned but ill-executed speculative work.

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