Songbird by Lisa Samson

First published: New York: Warner Books, 2003

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Literary fiction

Core issue(s): African Americans; faith; forgiveness; grace; healing; marriage; preaching

Principal characters

• Myrtle Charmaine Whitehead Hopewell, the protagonist
• Harlan Hopewell, Myrtle’s husband
• Isla Whitehead, Myrtle’s mother who abandoned her
• Hope Hopewell, Myrtle’s adopted daughter
• Minerva Whitehead, Myrtle’s grandmother

Overview

Growing up in Lynchburg, Virginia, living modestly in a boarding house with her mother, Isla, a waitress who is given to bouts of drinking during which she curses her daughter for ruining her life, Myrtle Charmaine Whitehead learns early on the risk of trusting in the permanence of anything. At eleven, she comes home from school to find a letter from her mother with cash and a promise to return in two weeks. Abandoned, the girl eventually seeks help from her Sunday school teacher, a compassionate woman who had already noticed the girl’s singing talent. Myrtle is taken into the woman’s home and just begins to accept that family’s love when the woman is killed in a car accident.

Dispatched into the foster care system, Charmaine (as she begins to call herself) moves through a series of loveless homes until at age fifteen she runs away with a college boy with whom she is infatuated. On her own again, she is taken in by a loving husband and wife who run a bowling alley/coin laundry in Baltimore. (Charmaine had bought a bus ticket to Baltimore as that was as far as her money would take her.) Hired as a snack-counter worker, Charmaine is given a chance to sing pop tunes for the customers, a gig that leads her to Atlantic City, where she sings in a Supremes-style trio in a sleazy casino bar.

Although she had undergone a religious conversion in an unexpected moment of expansive enlightenment in Baltimore, Charmaine never confronts the implications of her religious awakening until, on impulse, she wanders into a rescue mission off the Atlantic City boardwalk and hears the powerful preaching of Harlan Hopewell. She feels the confidence in his message. She knows now that her voice should be put to its fullest service by glorifying God. Within weeks, Charmaine and Harlan are married (although he is nearly twice her age). Charmaine joins his itinerant crusade as a singer. She tells him that her parents are both dead. The lie haunts her. She begins to be troubled by bouts of depression and insomnia.

The dynamics of her marriage alter when Charmaine is asked to care for the granddaughter of the Sunday school teacher who long ago had taken her in. She accepts the child, a beautiful girl named Hope. Then she becomes the de facto caregiver of Leo, an African American boy, when his mother, a drug addict who is part of Charmaine’s singing troupe, must undergo drug rehabilitation and subsequently abandons the child. Unable to conceive (although there is no medical reason why), Charmaine evidences again and again her conviction that Christianity means extending care to others without expectation of return. As her own gospel singing career begins to blossom, Charmaine starts to take prescription medication (Tofranil) to combat her depression even as her husband gains fame for preaching against psychiatry and prescription drugs and counsels his followers to trust in Jesus.

When their crusade takes them near the town where her mother grew up, Charmaine resolves to introduce herself to her grandmother, Minerva Whitehead, a grade school teacher. The reunion is joyous. Minerva eventually agrees to move in with Charmaine after Harlan accepts a preaching position in rural North Carolina. After Charmaine finally tells Harlan the truth about her mother, she and Minerva hire a private detective to locate Isla. What follows is a difficult reunion: Isla, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has been confined to a state-run Maryland mental facility. She has stopped responding to treatment and spends her days tending a small garden. With money from her record sales, Charmaine relocates her mother to a first-class facility in North Carolina.

With regular national exposure on a cable evangelical program that is part of the burgeoning growth of Christian television during the mid-1980’s, Charmaine and Harlan are caught up in the wave of scandals that rock that industry. Amid the media frenzy for exposés on any evangelist, Charmaine, shaken by newspaper inquisitions into her medical treatments as well as into the circumstances surrounding how she came to raise Leo, goes on television and admits her own program of medication and her family’s history of mental illness. When Leo’s birth mother reclaims the boy, Charmaine is devastated.

However, it is Lisa Samson’s message that God—and trust in his presence—always has the last word. In a soaring epilogue, Harlan and Charmaine (now forty-two) have regained their Gospel television program, a modest preaching-centered ministry that now grounds its message in the traditional embrace of God’s saving love; Charmaine’s depression is monitored by both medication and her faith in God; Isla has begun to respond to Charmaine’s loving attention; and most joyously Harlan and Charmaine are expecting a child of their own, a daughter whom they appropriately name Victoria. It is a crowning moment that affirms the presence of a loving God, who answers prayers despite the cynics who conceive of a world directed by the whims of contingency, whose omnipotence is manifested in what appears to be accidents, and whose love continues to sustain those who trust.

Christian Themes

Unlike much contemporary Christian literature with saintly heroes and cartoon villains, Songbird, which won the Christy Award for best contemporary Christian fiction, reflects Samson’s background as a writer of historical romances and her admiration for realist writers—such as Anne Tyler, Larry McMurtry, and Somerset Maugham—who probe the complicated nuances of imperfect characters. Samson refuses simplistic characterization: Her Christians are noble and flawed (for instance, Harlan Hopewell, the charismatic preacher who provides Charmaine spiritual guidance, is a consummate egoist who sports a toupee and finds irresistible the siren call of televising his prayer meetings; the televangelist couple whose lavish lifestyles become the subject of the scandal that rocks Charmaine’s world are the first to recognize Charmaine’s gifts and give her national exposure to begin her ministry.)

That sense of authenticity is underscored by Samson’s thematic use of the parable of the woman at the well (John 4:4-42). In it, Jesus stops at a well in Samaria and meets a woman, a pariah married four times and now living with a man. Jesus nevertheless offers the woman the uncomplicated gift of his healing through the symbolic offer of water, an emphatic reminder of how the lowliest sinner is significant within the dynamic of Christian forgiveness. That is crucial to Samson’s Christian vision: the willingness to extend compassion to others, a reaching out that reflects God’s outreach to sinners. Charmaine alters the lyrics to the familiar pop tune: People who love people are the luckiest people in the world. Samson argues that God, allowed into the emotional mayhem that defines the lives of her characters, will provide saving direction, the confirmation of his intrusive love. Samson dismisses coping mechanisms indulged in by those unwilling to ask God for help: drugs, alcohol, promiscuous sex, riches, and the busyness of friends and family. Satisfactions on the horizontal plane can never sustain happiness; it can be sustained only by the vertical vision, embracing God as the centering authority of life’s unfolding narrative. Samson affirms the compelling viability of trusting in God without the distracting drama of doubt—when the lavish televangelist empire begins to collapse, Charmaine goes to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention and sings an unadorned rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Sources for Further Study

Buss, Dale. “Lisa Samson: Writing at the Restaurant.” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 37 (September 15, 2003): S9. A brief profile of the writer that sheds light on her personal life as it relates to her writing.

Higgs, Lisa Curtis. Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn from Them. Colorado Springs, Colo.: WaterBrook Press, 1999. Accessible readings of several morally imperfect biblical women and how they serve to promote the lessons of faith, trust, and God’s directing grace. Influential text cited by Samson.

Kennedy, Douglas. “Selling Rapture.” The Guardian, July 9, 2005, p.4. An essay on trends in Christian literature that mentions Songbird in passing but sheds light on the genre.

Samson, Lisa. The Church Ladies. Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah, 2001. Set in the North Carolina, the narrative reflects Samson’s interest in Christians handling profound emotional catastrophes. Provides an early look at Charmaine as she is involved with two families struggling to cope with moral crises involving children and child raising.

Samson, Lisa. http://www.lisasamson.com. Web site run by Samson featuring biographical background, inspirational messages, publication updates, reviews, interviews, and contact information.