Miracle at St. Anna

“The boy,” whose name is revealed late in the novel as Angelo Tornacelli, is a survivor of the St. Anna massacre, though he does not recall this history through the bulk of the novel. Angelo processes the traumas of war (which include losing his family) by clinging to Sam Train, whom he refers to as the “chocolate giant,” repressing memories, refusing to speak, and interacting with an imaginary friend, Arturo.

Angelo frequently dissociates from the real threats around him, instead focusing on fantastical elements. He struggles to differentiate dreams from reality, a state that is frequently exacerbated by his injuries or malnourishment. This exemplifies the way McBride uses the magical realist elements of the novel to explore trauma; this genre allows him to suggest that sometimes imbuing reality with magic (as Angelo does with Arturo) is the only way to survive. As he recovers from his wound at the beginning of the novel, however, he reveals a sweet nature that charms the other soldiers. He is additionally clever, quickly learning a method of communication with Train despite the different languages they speak.

Angelo escapes the final fight at St. Anna church, despite having been shot and killed earlier in the battle. He miraculously awakens to find the world silent, having acquired Train’s powers of invisibility. He uses these powers to escape with Arturo. In the Epilogue, Angelo is revealed to have struggled as a young man before using the lack of fear developed through his traumatic childhood to become an enormously successful businessman. He uses his wealth to help Hector escape prison after Hector kills Rodolfo and to obtain the priceless head of the Primavera. He is the essence of the novel’s bittersweet ending since he survives but carries the memories of war.

Angelo, despite having his own narrative voice in the text, operates frequently as a narrative device rather than a character with agency; the soldiers end up in Bornacchi in part because they seek help for Angelo, whom they are helping because they are following Train. Only Train, for much of the novel, cares for Angelo himself. To the soldiers, Angelo frequently becomes an emblem of something else, a condition that is emphasized by their inability to communicate with the boy. Angelo’s fractured memories throughout most of the novel further emphasize him as an emblem for the reader; his fanciful reaction to the trauma he faces, which cause his characterization to be framed by emotion rather than concrete events, establishes him as a stand-in for any child displaced by war.

Hector Negron is a soldier in the 92nd Division, where he was assigned as part of the arbitrary designation of Puerto Ricans as belonging to either “white” or “colored” divisions. Hector spends most of the novel exhausted by the sleeplessness brought on by the trauma of war. Of the three soldiers who follow Train away from camp, Hector’s motivations are least obvious. He is trained as a medic and serves as an interpreter, as he speaks Italian as well as English and Spanish. He frequently muses on his exhaustion over interpreting between the groups he encounters, which emerges in the text as an analogue to the way Puerto Rican Hector stands as an “intermediary” between white and Black soldiers (as pertains to his experience with racism in America).

Hector frequently daydreams of his childhood in San Juan, despite that childhood being plagued by poverty and an abusive father. He regularly recognizes that he wishes to be thinking of San Juan when he dies and is disgusted by the impulses towards violence (brought about by self-preservation) that regularly afflict him during wartime. Hector is careful to keep himself separate from the conflict that regularly springs up between Stamps and Bishop.

Hector is the only survivor of the final battle at St. Anna aside from Angelo. He returns to the United States with the Primavera head, which he keeps as a tangible reminder of his war experiences (which he often considers as feeling unreal, given the way Black and Latino soldiers are written out of heroic wartime narratives in the decades following the war). Hector hence represents the inaccuracy of a history record that excludes marginalized groups; this speaks, metatextually, to the aims of Miracle at St. Anna to write these stories back into the record. He works as a postal worker for decades until, in 1983, he encounters Rodolfo and shoots him in the face. He refuses to speak about his reasons for killing Rodolfo and is arrested, but he escapes with an adult Angelo’s help.

Second Lieutenant Aubrey Stamps is a Virginia-born Black soldier in the 92nd Division. Stamps frequently struggles between different demands on his conscience. He resents the many times in his life he has been treated as lesser because of his race, yet reinforces the Army rules that similarly show this prejudice. He regularly thinks of his disgust at what he calls Bishop’s “type” of Black person, whom he sees as playing into a sense of mysticism that perpetuates the racist stereotype of Black people as more primitive, and he resents the obsequiousness that Southern Black people (Stamps considers himself a Northerner) show towards white people. This epitomizes the novel’s thematic presentation of Intra-Racial Conflicts Caused by Racism. He receives inverse criticism from Bishop, who argues that Stamps tries to follow rules set forth by white men, accusing Stamps of wanting the power that white men have over others.

Stamps is the highest-ranking of the four soldiers who leave camp, and he grows frequently frustrated when the others (especially Bishop) do not follow his orders exactly. Stamps is regularly torn towards idealism and pessimism, such as that which he experiences when he fantasizes about a relationship with Renata; he imagines the cachet of being seen with a white woman, but this fantasy is quickly overtaken by the recognition of the racist violence he would face if he attempted a romance with a white woman in America. Stamps feels strong identification with the Italians he meets during the war and hopes to live in Italy after the war ends, as he feels he will experience less racist prejudice there. Stamps dies at the St. Anna battle, gunned down while attempting to blow up a German machine gun. Stamps’s death is the least represented in the text, as his death occurs during part of Bishop’s narrative but while Bishop’s attention is elsewhere. This suggests that Stamps’s trajectory is a tragic one, his death paralleling the deaths of other (anonymous) soldiers in the novel’s first chapters. Stamps, at the end, is not heroic or loving, he is merely another casualty of war.