Song Yet Sung

Denwood is a retired slave catcher who was once renowned as the best in his profession. He was born into poverty, the son of an oysterman who physically abused him. Denwood rebelled against his father by abandoning his morals and conscience to make money hunting people. After he married and had a son, Denwood was ashamed to tell his son what he did for a living, so he retired. He retained his arrogant, belligerent nature, however, and paid a dear price. When a preacher dared him to place his son in a basket with a six-legged dog, Denwood did so to prove that he did not believe in superstition. When the boy then died of a fever a few days later, Denwood went mad with grief and guilt. He threw himself into a destructive rampage of violence and drinking, hoping for death. When the novel opens, he is known as the Gimp because of his limp and is damaged in both mind and body.

Denwood reluctantly returns to slave catching, seduced by the large sum Captain Spocott promises him for Liz’s return. After pursuing her for a few days, Denwood is confronted again by disgust that enabling the abomination of slavery carries with it.

Denwood is an extremely complex character. He perpetuates the evil of slavery by bringing runaways back to their masters, but he does so without brutality. Slaves should despise him, but he often commands their grudging respect. The blacksmith says that even Mingo, a slave that Denwood famously tracked all the way to Canada before returning him to his owner, considers Denwood to be an honorable man Mingo would gladly work for. Denwood does not befriend black people, but he does not routinely cheat, abuse, or berate them the way most white people do.

Denwood suffers from a dangerous temper, one that fills him with a calm, cold white noise inside his head that leads him to do things he later regrets. In the end, Denwood finds his redemption by saving a little boy, much like his own lost little boy. He is too far gone to build a new life and have another family, as he briefly hopes to when he meets Kathleen Sullivan, but being able to save her son brings Denwood peace. As part of his redemption, Denwood feels that awful cloud of hate and fear subside, and he dies thankful to be free of it.

Amber is a slave belonging to Kathleen Sullivan. He is the brother of Mary Sullivan and the uncle of Wiley Sullivan. Amber loves his family and feels a great sense of responsibility for their welfare, particularly after his brother-in-law Nate and his owner Boyd Sullivan disappear while oystering. Amber also has a very close relationship with the oldest Sullivan child, Jeff Boy.

Amber had planned to escape for years, but his loyalty to his family prevented it. First Amber had planned to wait till Wiley was old enough to run with him, as he had worried that the boy would try to follow him unsuccessfully. Then his owner and brother-in-law disappeared, making him delay his flight again.

Amber has purposefully kept people at a distance, refusing to marry or self-actualize while enslaved, to avoid emotional encumbrances preventing him from running for freedom. Just as the time to flee is right, Liz comes into Amber’s life and makes everything else seem unimportant. Amber falls in love with Liz while helping her hide, taken by both her beauty and her innate goodness, though her argumentative nature exasperates him. He wants to protect her in any way he can.

When Jeff Boy is abducted while Amber is away securing Liz’s safety, Amber plans to take the blame, sacrificing himself to save his loved ones. In the end, Kathleen buys Amber’s freedom so he can raise the Woolman’s son in the North. First, though, he brings his love Liz to the spot where she wishes to die. It is because he opens his heart to Liz and helps her fulfill her journey that Amber fulfills his potential and can make the most of his freedom.

The Woolman is a mysterious escaped slave, nicknamed for his long wooly pelt of hair. He is a legend, sometimes assumed to be a myth— most people have never seen him, for he blends in and moves as if one with the swamp and the forest. The Woolman’s mother brought him to the swamp for protection when he was a child. There he grew up surrounded by nature and became so in tune with the seasons, weather, plants, and animals that he has become one with it. Later, he found a runaway woman in the swamp and they had a son together before the woman succumbed to a fever. Huge, powerful, and resourceful, the Woolman thinks of the land as a living thing that belongs to him as he belongs to it.

When the novel opens, the Woolman’s son has been injured in a trap. The Woolman regrets not having taken his woman to the white doctor when she asked, so he takes his son to Cathedral City for help. When the white men there chase him away and imprison his son, the Woolman declares war and abducts Jeff Boy in retaliation. He wants to exchange the white boy for his own son.

The boy cannot fulfill that destiny while he lived with his father in the wild, so the Woolman is sacrificed.

Liz kills the Woolman as part of her mission to make sure that his son lives. Before this happens, however, Liz has a vision that like her, the Woolman is a Dreamer of the future. As a small child, he suffered great punishment for the dreams he had; his mother seemingly ran away to keep him safe from their master. Liz and the Woolman share a meaningful, if short-lived connection: Although the Woolman does not speak, he seems to whisper to Liz right before he dies. She knows that the Woolman’s son is also a Dreamer, part of a genetic line that will include the true Dreamer—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Patty Cannon, who is on a historical figure, is a notorious “trader of souls,” or slave stealer. Patty is beautiful, charming, and deadly. To prove herself as strong as any man, she wrestles. Patty does not dislike black people; in fact, she feels that they are more trustworthy and kinder than whites because their mental inferiority makes them easy to train. Patty thinks that she understands her black slaves’ thoughts and feelings, and considers them much more loyal, honest, and protective of her, than her white employees.

Patty is ruthless with the slaves and freedmen that captures, seeing them purely in terms of the money she will earn from their sale. Her crew includes her son-in-law, the weak-willed Joe Johnson, whose tavern she takes over to house her stolen slaves.

Patty is completely self-centered and is concerned only with her own needs. Her failure to recapture Liz blinds her with rage, causing her to make poor decisions. She dies after being shot by Kathleen whose young son Jeff Boy Patty was about to murder. 

Kathleen is the owner of Amber and his family. After her husband went missing while oystering, she refused to sell her slaves and land and move back to Ocean City with her father; instead, she has been managing the farm and raising three boys on her own. She enjoys the freedom of not being controlled by a man—but this sense of freedom doesn’t inform her understanding of what her slaves feel about their captivity. Rather, Kathleen thinks of her slaves as family, though she also worries that they will run away to freedom. She increasingly believes that slavery is innately wrong, though she does not know how to reconcile this with the fact that she and her neighbors own slaves.

When her son Jeff Boy is abducted, Kathleen is devastated. At first, she turns to Denwood, the only man she thinks capable of finding her boy. Ultimately, Kathleen takes it upon herself to search for Jeff Boy, and she is there in time to save him by killing Patty Cannon. In the epilogue, the reader learns that Kathleen earns financial independence and, because she can now afford to, buys freedom for Amber and for the Woolman’s son.

Joe is Patty Cannon’s widowed son-in-law whose tavern is the secret holding cell for slaves and freemen Patty catches and sells. Weak-willed and indecisive, Joe found himself falling under the control of his mother-in-law and becoming part of her crew after his wife died. Joe vaguely wants to be a good person and tries to smooth out some of Patty’s harsher inclinations, but slave catching has eroded his humanity and has allowed his materialism to drive his actions. He views runaway slaves as income, calling what he does “catching money” to avoid thinking of black people as human beings. Eventually, his single mindedness results in his death—he refuses to let Denwood return Amber to his owner, threatening Denwood until the ferocious slave catcher kills Joe.

Almost everything about the blacksmith is a mystery, and in the novel, he functions almost as a living representation of the cryptic code that Liz and other characters must unravel.

His appearance belies his profession and his moniker is more title than name: The blacksmith’s “genteel and settled” appearance makes him look like a preacher, does not go by a given name, as he considers everything given to him by whites to have been a lie.

The blacksmith has several methods of communication that use ciphers. First, because his coded hammer rings send messages over a considerable distance, he is a major operator of the gospel train and a primary source of information. Second, people who seek his help avoid looking at the blacksmith and speak into a pot rather than directly to him, so that if caught, they can truthfully say that they never laid eyes on him.

When Amber brings Liz to the shop, the blacksmith agrees to hide her in the secret hiding place beneath his floor where runaways can temporarily evade detection. Although this ruse helps her get by Stanton, the blacksmith is later forced to tell Denwood that Amber helped Liz in order to ensure his own family’s safety. 

Clarence works in the general store in Cathedral City. He acts old, stooped, and dull in order to seem unimportant—and thus become invisible to white people—so that he can assist the gospel train. Clarence is actually extremely strong-minded and considers himself a soldier of God whom he obeys by strictly following the rules of the code. He helps Liz escape from town, but while he is taking her to a checkpoint on the gospel train, she convinces him to bend his adherence to the code by telling him of her dream of the future Dreamer, whose ancestor’s life Liz is destined to protect.

Wiley is the teenage son of Mary and the nephew of Amber who finds Liz on the road and brings her to the hiding place in the Indian burial ground. Wiley dreams of freedom, but fears that he will be blamed for Jeff Boy’s abduction because no one will believe Wiley’s story that the devil stole Kathleen’s young son. Patty’s crew captures Wiley, but he escapes when the Woolman attacks them. Wiley returns to the Sullivan farm and tells Kathleen what happened to Jeff Boy.

The Woman with No Name is a quasi-mythical figure like the blacksmith. Like him, she does not use the name given to her by whites and is also intricately connected to the code that Liz has to parse in order to fulfill her mission. Chained to Liz in Patty’s attic, the Woman recognizes that Liz is a “two-headed” prophet and begins to teach her about the code. Many of the confusing and cryptic code fragments the Woman tells Liz eventually help Liz navigate the gospel train, the swamps, and even her own visions. After imparting all of her wisdom, including the first part of the song that will unlock the meaning of Liz’s dreams, the old Woman directs the other captives in the attic to escape, and then because she herself is too ill to run, she calmly lies down on the riverbank to die.

Mary is the sister of Amber and the mother of Wiley. Her husband disappeared while oystering with Kathleen’s husband. Mary has concealed from Amber that she knows the code and that she understands that he and Wiley plan to run. Because her willingness to die for her family triggers an empathetic response in Denwood, Mary convinces Denwood to find Wiley and not to reveal that Amber was the one who harbored Liz. Through the slave network, Mary finds out where Joe took Amber, allowing the novel’s climactic resolution to take place.

Stanton is a member of Patty’s crew. He is a newcomer to the crew and neither Patty nor Joe trusts him. Stanton is unhappy to have gotten involved in the pursuit of Liz and all of the complications this has caused. Patty murders Stanton at the end of the novel so that there will be no white witnesses to her killing Denwood.

Big Linus is a gigantic slave held captive in Patty’s attic whose owner is Kathleen’s neighbor. Big Linus helps the slaves in the attic break out. The old Woman with No Name had tried to teach him the code while in the attic, but after Linus escapes, he forgets how to use the code to evade detection. Big Linus comes out of hiding before it is not yet safe in order to eat the oysters Mary left for him. At that moment, Patty and her crew confront and kill him.

Jeff Boy is Kathleen’s oldest son. He is close to Amber and the two do farm work together. The Woolman abducts Jeff Boy and holds him captive in his hut, hoping to use the young boy as a bargaining chip in getting back his own son. Liz finds and releases Jeff Boy after Kathleen kills Patty Cannon to keep her from shooting the little boy.