James McBride: 'Miles Davis flew, but I'm still taking the subway'

Musician, memoirist, novelist, James McBride now hears the voice of war. Graham Caveney met him in Manhattan

When James McBride was growing up in Brooklyn, New York he would sit on the stoop of his stepfather's brownstone and listen to him and his brothers fling "tall tales around like a ricocheting bullet". His favourite character was his uncle Henry, a Second World War veteran, who would "grab me affectionately by the ear, and holler 'Boy ... back in the war, the Italians, they loved us! And the French ... ooh, la, la! We was kings over there."

To a nine-year-old kid these were, of course, stories of unadulterated heroism from a mythic realm of individual triumph, collective stoicism and irrefutable pride. This was, after all, the Good War, a moral absolute, an unambiguous crusade against Nazi evil. Unlike the tragic futility of the First World War, or the guilt-ridden conflicts in Vietnam, here was a slice of history that could be painted in the broad strokes of good guys and bad. The American cavalry came to the rescue, and McBride's uncle was leading the charge.

Over 30 years later, he is sitting in a bar on the corner of 43rd Street and 10th Avenue, a spit and a stride from the now squeaky-clean Times Square. He has moved his family out to Pennsylvania: "My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside – I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to." He drives into Manhattan every day, where he writes and rehearses with his band.

This is very much his neighbourhood. In the course of our interview he breaks off to speak to local cops, a mad woman on roller-blades and every waitress the bar has to offer. In his pork-pie hat, linen suit, sipping iced tea and bumming my cigarettes, he is every bit the tale-teller that his uncle was.

Except that he writes the tales down, with such aching honesty that at least one and a half million people have paid to read them. His first book, The Color of Water, was a memoir about his mixed-race parentage and the conflicts of growing up under such taboos. As the title suggests, he captured the ebbs and flows of a fluid heritage, how identity is formed by flowing both with and against America's racial currents.

Unlike the current vogue for a confessional victim-lit of abuse, alcoholism or addiction, McBride's writing side-stepped the first-person narrative. Whereas his contemporaries insisted on imposing a linearity on lives – narratives of progress, redemption and enlightenment – McBride offered us meanderings into the consciousness of his (white) mother, counter-factual riffs of what might have been, meditations on specific experience.

When the paperback hit the New York Times bestseller list, it stayed there for two years, inviting the inevitable comparisons with James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. McBride remains equally bemused and delighted with his success. "I pinch myself everyday," he laughs, "It's like winning the lottery. Not that I mean it was purely luck, but there are so many great writers and great books out there that for me to be seen on the same street ... was like asking God for a favour, and him dropping in on me when I wasn't looking."

Much of the lyricism of McBride's writing is drawn from his experience as a professional jazz musician. As a saxophonist, he has performed with legends such as Rachelle Farrell and Little Jimmy Scott, while his compositions include songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington and an award-winning musical, Bobos. Here then is a beat, but without the embarrassment: a corrective to Mailer's "White Negro". While Kerouac & co were using jazz to find their spontaneous break with consciousness, McBride shows the discipline and structure required to hit those notes. He says that "the starting-point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination – the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway."

His next stop takes him back to his uncle's tales of Old Glory. The novel Miracle at Sant'Anna (Sceptre, £14.99) follows the famed 92nd Division – a battalion mainly consisting of Afro-American soldiers – as they stumble across a village high in the Tuscan mountains. A massacre has taken place, with over 500 Partisans butchered, and the remainder torn between paralysed terror and bloodied vengeance. An Italian boy witnessed the horror and is rescued by a black soldier ("a huge giant made of chocolate"). Their relationship becomes the pivot around which the dynamics of these "buffalo soldiers" begin to revolve.

"I came across this particular story – which actually happened – when I was in Italy," explains McBride, "and it seemed to me an opportunity to explore 'heroism' in a context where all societal rules where suspended." It was only when he began that he realised that this was not a blank slate. Indeed, what emerges is a portrait intensely "coloured" in every register of the word. "Talking to and corresponding with the men who were there," he continues, "I realised that this was the first time in their lives that they had really had to confront their loyalties, identities and, of course, the chasm of their differences."

The novel unfurls as a study in baffled patriotism and conflicted allegiance. Were the white officers supposed to put their racism on hold for their country? How were they to sustain their prejudices in the face of life-and-death evidence that directly contradicted them? For the black soldiers, a new set of questions began to emerge. As one character succinctly puts it: "So now the great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back in America for looking at his woman wrong?" Yet McBride never shrinks from acknowledging that this was a war that had to be fought. What intrigues him are the shifts in human consciousness that allows it to be done so effectively.

He inhales more tobacco: "Don't forget you had a situation here where Army policy dictated that only Southern officers were qualified to lead 'coloured' men. Now given the legacy of the South – and there were black men fighting there whose grandparents were slaves – that leaves you with a whole set of fireworks... Then there's literacy: 40 per cent of the 92nd were illiterate, and this included some of the whites. Imagine being a white soldier and relying on a black man to decode certain messages for you."

More iced tea, more nicotine: "This could quite easily have been the first time that black people encountered whites – the Italian peasants – who were poorer than they were. Add to all this that the white soldiers witnessed black men having sex with white – or non-black – women and you must have had internal problems that were as complex as the war itself. So, no, this isn't a novel about war heroes; it's a novel about a whole series of heroic struggles that went on inside people because they found themselves in a war situation."

McBride suggests the war foreshadowed the civil rights movement, with hints at how the 92nd set the tone for the introductions America would make with itself a decade later. The pro/epilogues work as devastating reminders that the past is not a foreign country; that we are forced to live in it instead. In an age dripping with irony, McBride offers us a world of unapologetic humanism. His conversation is peppered with references to God and "the universal language of love", yet there is a solidity and integrity to his vision which makes it difficult to resist. Even while addressing what's still the dominant issue in America – race – his writing maintains a poetic simplicity, an insistence on remaining true to its perceptions. E