James McBride made his reputation with "The Color of Water," his eloquent memoir about growing up the son of a white mother and black father in New York City.

In this, his second novel, he writes again with delicacy about the complicated bonds and prejudices between whites and blacks, but this time he goes back to 1850 and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the land of antebellum plantations.

		"SONG YET SUNG" By James McBride Riverhead Books ($25.95)

His heroine is Liz Spocott, a beautiful runaway slave who has the gift of being able to see the future. But first she has to survive the present as someone else's property.

In the first few pages of the book, she is shot in the head and kills an attack dog with her bare hands before being nabbed by a feared trader named Patty Cannon, a rogue woman who steals and sells slaves.

Liz then leads a violent escape of 14 slaves from Cannon's clutches into the swamps of Maryland, only 80 miles from the freedom line -- so close but so far away.

Every page of this lyrical book is infused with savagery and poetry, hopelessness and dreams, deceit and decency of both blacks and whites trapped by the slave trade.

Inspiring McBride to write this historical novel was his visit to the grave of Harriet Tubman, the Maryland woman credited with taking 300 slaves north on her so-called "gospel train" using "The Code," cryptic signals between slaves.

"This book isn't about Mrs. Tubman's life," he writes in the author's notes. "It's a book that her life inspired. She was a dreamer."

In the swamp, Liz relies on The Code and her mystical power to dream the future. In one sequence:

"She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. ..."

Sound familiar? Sometimes these dream sequences, a not-so-subtle jab at modern culture, seem a little contrived. But that is one of McBride's few false notes.

Only historians will be able to ferret out where history ends and fiction begins. But McBride said the character of Cannon, the ferocious slave trader, is based on a real character.

Furious about losing 14 slaves, she's hot on Liz's tracks. Cannon is a beautiful Amazon-like woman who terrifies people with her utter lack of conscience and her calculating mind.

"Patty herself saw no value in books. She only enjoyed reading the faces of men, particularly slave men, who were the most interesting read of all. ... She had no fear of touching them, even wrestling them from time to time, offering food, shelter, camaraderie, an occasional warm caress, the sense of home."

A more complicated character is Denwood Long, a tortured soul who is called out of retirement by Liz's owner to find his slave. In the heat of the pursuit of Liz, Denwood realizes it was "he, not the coloreds, who were the real runaways. Running from himself and what he should have been."

Not everyone is out to get Liz. A young slave named Amber, who is smitten by her beauty, helps hide her, relying on The Code. Amber has his own dreams of freedom, even though he likes his master, Kathleen Sullivan.

Kathleen senses his unrest, and she knows in her gut how hard it is to keep a lid on the horror that is slavery:

"No matter what the constables said, no matter what the newspaper and politicians declared about the contented, happy slave, no matter ... how many jump-de-broom galas her rich fellow slave owners held in the big house on behalf of their beloved Sambos, Aunt Pollys and Uncle Toms, the eighty-miles-to-the-freedom-line business hung grimly over the eastern shore like a cloud, and Kathleen felt it, every drop it."

You, too, will feel every drop of it through this amazing action novel.