In an interview, McBride recalled the feeling that came upon him at that moment. “My imagination took over. I was fascinated by the beauty of the land and by the kindness and hospitality of the people that I came across … a lot of America’s treasures are in places like that.”

Harriet Tubman guided slaves escaping from the south as they passed through Maryland along that eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. This is the setting for “Song Yet Sung.” The central character is Liz the Dreamer, a runaway slave who has suffered a blow to the head that causes her to see visions of the future.

Based in part on Tubman, Liz is being pursued by Patty Cannon, a slave hunter who is also based on a real historical figure. McBride explained that “every character has to have some ambiguity and some kind of multidimensional element. Although Patty Cannon is a kind of reprehensible character, in her mind she wasn’t”

“She dealt with an unsavory element. The slave traders were never very popular … she was someone who gave that particular industry an even more unsavory reputation. As a writer, she was wonderful to work with because she had a lot of evil and even though she was evil she was funny.”

The wild card in this slave chase is an escaped slave called Woolman who can vanish into the swamps in the blink of an eye. “He represents that wild, uncontrollable element that everyone is afraid of and no one can quite predict what he’ll do. That’s a great thing to have kicking around in a novel,” McBride says

McBride’s memoir, “The Color of Water,” traced his upbringing in a biracial family. The election of Barack Obama was a revelation for McBride. He told me that “you can’t make this stuff up … the election shows what I’ve always believed and known; that Americans always try to do the right thing. We may not always do it, but we try to. In fact we pride ourselves on our willingness to try to do the right thing. I’m glad in this case that fact is stranger than fiction.”

Even Liz the Dreamer never dreamed up a black president. I observed that Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday was coming up soon. McBride responded: “If there’s a heaven and I’m sure there is, when I get there that’s the first hand I want to shake.”