Miracle at St. Anna

The movie of this book was messy, awkward and occasionally downright nonsensical (though nicely filmed) so it's a bit of a wonder that I picked up the book, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I'm happy to report that the book is pretty good. James McBride is trying to do a lot in this book about black soldiers in Italy during WWII. He's covering Buffalo soldiers, race relations (at home and in the army), Italian regionalism, Italian partisans, art...Hmm...What else? Oh yes, religion and miracles. It's pretty messy, but I liked it well enough.

I wasn't always sure how much to trust of what McBride wrote, but it seems well-researched. In The Miracle of St Anna, four black American soldiers get separated from their unit in their attempt to save the life of a little Italian boy. They end up in a small village high in the hills and there they struggle with their role in the fighting, their clueless (and often racist) commanders in absentia, their relationship with the villagers, with one another, with the "enemy"--both known and unknown--and with the little boy who is part of the "miracle" in the title. (That's not really a spoiler).

This being a war novel, there are some fairly graphic descriptions of wounds, but this is essentially a novel of the living (not that everyone lives--yes, that's a spoiler). It's also primarily a window into the experiences of black soldiers in the newly "intergrated" American army. According to McBride, black units--or Buffalo soldiers--were sent mostly to Italy because it was considered a less important arena than the other areas of fighting. Of course, that was an underestimation and the terrain alone was often as difficult as the battles. He writes: "But in central Italy, the war was fought out of the public eye, at night, in winter, in cold, chaotic blackness, by Gurkhas, Italians, Brazilians, British, Africans, even Russian defectors, and most of all, by American Negroes, who were convinced that the white man was trying to kill them, in mountainous terran where icy winter rains and high winds lashed the trees and bushes with hurricane force, pushing aside sanity and loosing all the ghosts and goblins of Italy's past."

The contrast in the treatment, experience, and responsibilities of the black soldeiers with what they experience back home is often heartbreaking and the characters are all a bit ambivalent towards America even while they long for its comforts.

The four main characters--Train, Stamps, Hector, and Bishop--are pretty well drawn and I found them interesting in their contrasts and their relationship to one another, but McBride makes a really weird choice about who survives in the end, and the framing device is even weirder (though not as weird as in the movie). I do like that we're led to believe in various miracles throughout the book, but that most of them fall through in the end in one way or another. I wouldn't say there's a great sense of closure although McBride tries for it. I guess that's a bit like life--we want things neat and tidy and for everything to work out for everyone, to the point that we may even read miracles or signs in everything, when really, not everything connects or even makes sense.

Don't bother with the movie, but try the book.