National Book Award Winner James McBride Resuscitates "Four-Flusher"

James McBride's novel The Good Lord Bird — a retelling of the John Brown story through the eyes of a young, escaped slave boy passing as a girl — was billed by The New York Times as "a brilliant romp of a novel," and awarded the National Book Award last night. But how does it hold up from a vocabularian's perspective? Pretty well, it turns out. Right there in the opening passage, we encountered a word that sent us to the Dictionary: the rich and rare four-flusher in a description of the narrator's preacher-father.

Pa ministered mostly to lowlifes, four-flushers, slaveholders, and drunks who came along the Kansas Trail. He weren't a big man in size, but he dressed big. He favored a top hat, pants that drawed up around his ankles, high-collar shirt, and heeled boots. Most of his clothing was junk he found, or items he stole off dead white folks on the prairie killed off from dropsy or aired out on account of some dispute or other. His shirt had bullet holes in it the size of quarters. His hat was two sizes too small. His trousers come from two different colored pairs sewn together in the middle where the arse met. His hair was nappy enough to strike a match on. Most women wouldn't go near him, including my Ma, who closed her eyes in death bringing me to this life. She was said to be a gentle, high-yaller woman. "Your Ma was the only woman in the world man enough to hear my holy thoughts," Pa boasted, "for I'm a man of many parts."

Whatever them parts was, they didn't add up to much, for all full up and dressed to the nines, complete with boots and three-inch top hat, Pa only come out to 'bout four feet eight inches tall, and quite a bit of that was air.

In poker, a flush is a five-card hand where all the cards are of the same suit. Having only four cards in a suit in a five-card hand gets you nowhere except to a place of false hope. Thus, a four-flusher is someone with bad cards who is bluffing: a conman or a trickster. Although the word dates from the turn of the twentieth century (see it used in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922) and McBride's novel is set in the 1850s, four-flusher feels appropriate to the rough and tumble Kansas-is-burning atmosphere of McBride's story.

Read more about word choice in historical fiction in Vocabulary.com lexicographer Ben Zimmer's interview with Tony Kushner and subsequent post on this blog about Kushner's use of the Oxford English Dictionary in writing "Lincoln."