Miracle at St. Anna

Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, and Deacon King Kong

James McBride’s powerful memoir, The Color of Water, was a groundbreaking literary phenomenon that transcended racial and religious boundaries, garnering unprecedented acclaim and topping bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fiction—in a universal tale of courage and redemption inspired by a little-known historic event. In Miracle at St. Anna, toward the end of World War II, four Buffalo Soldiers from the Army’s Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines. Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema—in the peasants who shelter them, in the unspoken affection of an orphaned child, in a newfound faith in fellow man. And even in the face of unspeakable tragedy, they—and we—learn to see the small miracles of life.

This acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee.

Praise for The Miracle at St. Anna:

“McBride creates an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Full of miracles of friendship, of salvation and survival.” —Los Angeles Times

“Searingly, soaringly beautiful…The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love.” —The Baltimore Sun

“A haunting meditation on faith that is also a crack military thriller.” —Entertainment Weekly

“An outstanding novel about World War II inspired by the famous Buffalo Soldiers…so descriptive that I feel as though I’m an eyewitness to everything that happens emotionally on the frontline.” —The Dallas Morning News

“A miracle in its own right…McBride’s prose is stunning. His ability to bring to life an actual historical event (the massacre at St. Anna and the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division) is a gift.” —Rocky Mountain News

“Sweetly compelling… McBride combines elements of history, mythology and magical realism to make this a story about the little things like life and forgiveness and shared experience.” —Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Riveting.” —Newsday

James McBride is an accomplished musician and author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, the #1 bestselling American classic The Color of Water, and the bestsellers Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, which was turned into a film by Spike Lee. McBride is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

INTRODUCTION
With his bestselling memoir The Color of Water, James McBride created a fascinating story of growing up in the projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn and a vivid portrait of his indomitable mother. Now, in his first novel, he broadens his scope from personal history to the larger history of WWII and the little known role that black soldiers played in it.

The story begins in 1983 with the abrupt and unexplained shooting by Hector Negron, a New York City postal employee, of a man who wanted only to purchase a stamp. Why Hector has killed this man and how he came to possess the head of the statue of the Primavera, which had adorned the Santa Trinita bridge in Florence since the sixteenth century, is the mystery that Miracle at St. Anna sets out, in a most circuitous fashion, to solve.

Stepping back forty years, the novel plunges us into the world of the all-Negro 92nd Division, into the fierce fighting of WWII in the mountains of Italy, and into the hearts and minds of four unforgettable soldiers. It is a war in which the unquestioned racial attitudes of 1940s America take on life-and-death consequences on the battlefield, as white commanders willfully jeopardize their black troops. It is, as private Bishop says, “a white man’s war…. Niggers ain’t got nothing to do with it.” But when Sam Train, an illiterate giant of a soldier from North Carolina, saves a white Italian boy from the invading Germans, a journey begins that will take Sam, Bishop, Hector Negron, and Lieutenant Stamps far from their Division commanders to the remote mountain village of St. Anna di Stazzema. Here they will encounter the village witch, a beautiful young woman, partisan fighters led by the legendary “Black Butterfly,” and an Italian family that treats them with an equality they have never before experienced. More importantly, it is here, in the aftermath of a brutal Nazi massacre, that they will witness miracles and make the powerful discovery that “everybody got something to do with everything.”

With a view of the war that is both panoramic in its sweep and deeply personal in its exploration of the human spirit, Miracle at St. Anna brings to life a largely overlooked historical moment and extends the reach of James McBride’s considerable storytelling powers.

 

ABOUT JAMES MCBRIDE

James McBride is an award-winning writer and musician. He has been a staff writer for The Washington Post, People magazine, and The Boston Globe. His memoir, The Color of Water, spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list, was published worldwide, and received the prestigious Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. As a composer, McBride has won the American Music Theater Festival’s Stephen Sondheim Award for his jazz/pop musical Bobos, and has composed songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington, Jr., and Gary Burton. A jazz saxophonist, he has performed with Rachelle Farrell and with the legendary jazz performer Little Jimmy Scott. McBride lives in Pennsylvania.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Why do you think McBride chose to frame his WWII story with the post office episode that takes place in 1983? How does this narrative frame clarify or comment on the picture of the war it contains?
 

What knowledge of the African American experience in WWII did you bring to Miracle at St. Anna? How did reading the novel deepen your understanding of this aspect of the war?
 

In a fiery argument with Stamps, Bishop says, “So now the great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back home for looking at his woman wrong…. The Negro don’t have doodleysquat to do with this…this devilment, this war-to-free-the-world shit” [p. 147-9]. In what ways does the war reveal the racism and hypocrisy entrenched in American society? How are the black soldiers treated by their white commanders? How are they treated by the Italians? Is Bishop’s cynicism justified?
 

Why does Train become so attached to the young Italian boy he rescues? What does the boy offer him that he’s never had before? What does Train learn from him? Is the boy, as Train claims, “an angel”?
 

The novel is titled Miracle at St. Anna but several miracles occur in the book. Which of these is the miracle referred to in the title? What effects do these events have on those who experience them? Do you think McBride wants us to read them as divine manifestations of God’s power or simply as remarkable occurrences?
 

Why does Rudolfo betray the Italian partisan hero Peppi, the “Black Butterfly”? What are the consequences of that betrayal? How is Rudolfo’s treachery revealed?
 

Why does McBride tell the history of the statue’s head that Train carries with him throughout the war? What does this history add to the story? Is it possible to read the entire novel as a complex elaboration of that statue’s journey from a sixteenth-century marble mountain in Carrara, Italy, to late twentieth-century New York City?
 

In the Acknowledgments, McBride says that the book began when he was boy listening to his stepfather and step-uncles tell stories about the war. What struck him most forcefully was not the stories themselves but his Uncle Henry’s pride in his service. In what ways does the novel—and its stories of the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division—reflect that pride?
 

Train, Stamps, Bishop, and Hector are four distinctive and vividly drawn characters. How are they different from one another? What varying attitudes do they have about the war? What larger themes does McBride address through the conflict between Bishop and Stamps?
 

In a moment of mistrust of the Italians, Hector thinks: “He was glad he didn’t love anybody. It was easier, safer, not to love somebody, not to have children and raise kids in this crummy world where a Puerto Rican wants to kill an innocent woman for doing nothing more than trying to help him” [p. 138]. Why would Hector feel this way? In what sense is the entire novel about love and the risk of loving?

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8500 × 5.1500 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09781594483608
ISBN-10	1594483604
Author	James McBride
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC002000, FIC049040
Subjects	FIC049040, war fiction, books by black authors, based on a true story, african americans, books for women best sellers, novels for women best sellers, adventure books, war books, military fiction, National Book Award Winner, buffalo soldier, african american soldiers, World War II Italy, WWII novel, buffalo soldiers, tuskegee airmen, true story, adventure, war, african american, Italy, military, survival, national book award, FIC002000, world war 2, WW2, world war ii, action adventure, historical fiction, military books, tuscany, literary fiction