57 pages • 1 hour read
James McBrideMiracle at St. Anna
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: James McBride
James McBride is an American author, musician, and screenwriter. His first book, a 1995 memoir called The Color of Water, discussed his Brooklyn upbringing in a poor, Black family led by a white mother. The Color of Water won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Miracle at St. Anna (2001) is his debut novel. McBride has five further novels: Song Yet Sung (2008), The Good Lord Bird (2013), Five-Carat Soul (2017), Deacon King Kong (2020), and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023). The Good Lord Bird won the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, and Deacon King Kong won the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
McBride also authored the nonfiction Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (2016) and contributed to a collection entitled Hard Listening, authored by the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of bestselling authors (including Stephen King and Mitch Albom) who also perform together as a musical group. McBride is a noted musician and composer whose works have appeared internationally. He has written three film scripts, two of which were based on his books (Miracle at St. Anna and Good Lord Bird); the third, Red Hook Summer (2012), he co-wrote with director Spike Lee. There are multiple cinematic elements in Miracle at St. Anna that lend themselves to film adaptation, including the prominence of setting (mountains, churches, and war-torn towns), the emphasis on dialogue rather than interiority, and the action-heavy war passages. In 2015, he was granted the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America” (“Biography.” James McBride).
McBride’s father was a Black reverend, his mother a Jewish immigrant from Poland (though his mother converted to Christianity, McBride has referred to himself in interviews as being Jewish due to his ancestry); the relationship between Black and Jewish communities in the mid-20th century is a central theme in his 2023 novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which received critical acclaim and was named as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2023” (“100 Notable Books of 2023.” The New York Times, 2024). Being Black in America and Abroad is a central theme in Miracle at St. Anna.
Historical Context: The “Buffalo Soldiers”
The “Buffalo Soldiers” were United States Army regiments primarily composed of Black soldiers, who fought in various conflicts in the late-19th through mid-20th centuries. The term was initially assigned to the 10th Calvary Regiment in 1886, supposedly by Indigenous Americans who fought against the 10th Regiment during the American Indian Wars. Though there is some historical debate regarding the origin of the term “Buffalo Soldier,” a commonly held view contends that the name (which would quickly expand to include all primarily Black Army regiments) arose due to the resemblance between the Black soldiers’ hair and bison.
The Buffalo Soldier regiments existed from 1866 until the US Army desegregated in 1948, after the end of World War II. The regiments initially consisted of Black enlisted soldiers commanded by white commissioned officers and Black noncommissioned officers (or officers who earn their rank through promotion rather than entering an officer position directly from a military academy or other training avenue). In Miracle at St. Anna, the Black soldiers often have an antagonistic relationship with their incompetent white officers; in Chapter 6, Stamps fantasizes about killing one. Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, would become the first Black commissioned officer to lead the Buffalo Soldiers in 1877. Buffalo Soldiers fought in the American Indian Wars, the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, World War I, and World War II.
The 92nd Infantry Division, portrayed in Miracle at St. Anna, was the only majority-Black (its official designation used the term “colored”) infantry division that participated in combat in Europe during World War II; this division, which took as its insignia a buffalo-themed shoulder patch, fought in the Italian Campaign beginning in 1944. Contemporary reports were critical of the performance of the 92nd Division, though historical accounts gathered in the late-20th century contend that these criticisms were based in racism rather than accurate assessments of the Buffalo Soldiers’ performance. The division’s only two recipients of the Medal of Honor (John R. Fox and Vernon J. Baker) were not granted their medals until 1997. During the Korean War, the division was desegregated before ultimately being disbanded in 1953. The last living Buffalo Soldier, Mark Matthews, died in September 2005 at age 111.
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