A portrait of Brown and Frederick Douglass is at the heart of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, a new novel with an unlikely narrator: a 12-year-old Kansas Territory slave named Henry Shackleford. Brown liberates Henry after a confrontation with Henry's master. He calls the boy — who has fair, curly hair and is dressed in a potato sack — Little Onion, but he thinks Henry is a girl, and to stay safe, Henry doesn't contradict him.
McBride is also the author of The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother. He joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss Brown's and Douglass' real friendship and why he wanted Henry to be mistaken for a girl.
