They’re pillars of opposition to slavery, but that objection comes from an understandable emotional objection rather than simple superhuman goodness. (It’s worth noting that Johnson, a young actor, holds the center of the series with an assurance and talent beyond his years.) Elsewhere in the series, figures familiar from history textbooks pulse with life: Harriet Tubman (Zainab Jah) and Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs) feel rounded and real in their full-throatedness. Brown’s mistaking Onion for a girl is proof, perhaps, of his insistence that he is right his giving Onion a dress to wear and seeing that he wears it is proof of his power to bend the world around him to his vision Onion’s coming to feel an unusual comfort being treated with the delicacy and grace afforded a young woman suggests a sort of curiosity about the varieties of experience available to those willing to live creatively. The show has a big-hearted embrace of the possibility within America.
it’s a smart way to situate a man who is both merciful and terrifying: Brown’s mercurial nature doesn’t always have to make sense when he’s ebbing in and out of Onion’s view. As in James McBride’s 2013 novel, on which the series is based, see Brown through Onion’s eyes. (This is an out-on-a-limb performance for an actor who often, as in his Oscar-nominated turn in “Boyhood” and in the “Before Sunrise” trilogy, radiates normalcy, and Hawke nails Brown’s passion, and his impatience with those who don’t share it.) Rage and rhetoric are one outlet for his holy and righteous mission another one is compassion, which he shows to a teenage freed slave named Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson). Ethan Hawke, who executive produces the series and co-wrote the first episode with showrunner Mark Richard, here plays Brown, a man whom we see early on foaming and spitting with his passion for freeing slaves.
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