Sometime in the late 1850’s Henry Sims, a run away slave from Virginia arrives in Philadelphia. With the assistance of a secret network he has escaped from the Stephens plantation where the master, we are told, is his father. Henry was not a field worker; he was favored with lighter duty around the house and carpentry shop. Henry is a virtuoso banjo player and performer who is called often to perform for his master and guest at balls and social gatherings. Despite circumstances far less oppressive than the field hands, Henry is acutely sensitive to the degradation permeating his status as a slave.

Henry plays his banjo on the streets of Philadelphia for small change. He is heard by James Douglass. Douglass is a performer in, and the manager of, a successful minstrel troupe that has a regular venue in a Philadelphia theater. Douglass is a sort of run away also, having left the harsh life on a small farmer run by his older brothers. He ran off with a circus eventually learning the minstrel routine very popular at the time.

Douglass is astounded by Sims’s artistry. He has been looking to perk up his company’s act, it having become flat and seen a decline in attendance and ticket revenue. There’s one major problem, though. The laws at the time would not permit a Negro to perform on stage. Douglass concocts a scheme to get around this. Sims, the son of a white man and black woman, is light-complexioned with green eyes. Douglass suspects that Sims might be a run away slave. The laws on fugitive slaves will put him and his company in legal jeopardy if he is discovered to be harboring Sims. Nonetheless, Douglass thinks he can convince his fellow minstrels that Sims is Mexican (Sims can speak a pigeon-type nonsense Spanish he picked up on the plantation.) By using the burnt cork black face employed by the performers, Douglass thinks he can fool his fellow performers and the audience. Though aware of the deeply demeaning portrayal of blacks Sims is driven to perform his musical talent, as well as being destitute of money. When he appears on stage he is a sensation and his performance draws full houses again to the shows.

Douglass is infatuated with Rose, a seamstress who makes the troupe's costumes. Rose has spurned Douglass in favor of a fellow cast member, but in vague ways she seems to have developed a relationship with Henry.

Master Stephens contracts with Tull, a notorious slave hunter to find Sims and return him. Tull is a vicious character who would as soon return escaped slaves dead as alive. He tracks Sims to Philadelphia where he soon discovers him performing in the show. Tull subdues Sims and binds him for the trip back to Virginia, but Douglass assaults Tull enabling Sims to get free. The entire episode undermines the performing company and they break up. Douglass has realized that minstrelsy is an utterly degrading depiction of Negros and their conditions of servitude and abandons this as a profession.

In an interesting twist, the story shifts to the Auburn, NY home of Senator William Seward. Seward is an abolitionist at heart although politically cautious about how he expresses this. The time must be around 1859 because Seward reveals his ambition to get the presidential nomination (that went to Lincoln the next year). Seward’s wife Addie is an active supporter of the Underground Railroad and has made their home’s basement a way station for slaves looking to make their way to Canada. Sims arrives and the Seward’s soon discover Sim’s remarkable talent and discern that he is highly intelligent (a devotee of the works of Dickens). Seward entertains the idea that he will get Sims to Rochester where he can fall in with Frederick Douglass. But, a stranger loitering around Seward’s house turns out to be Tull, still in pursuit of Sims. Seward chases Tull off, but when he looks for Sims to tell him of his narrow escape from capture, he finds that he has vanished. We are not told where Sims has gone, perhaps on to Canada or just further on the Freedom Trail.

This short but powerful novel uses biting irony to examine concepts of racial identity extant in antebellum America. For the amusement of white audiences, white men posed as blacks in theatrical performances; performances that were abominably degrading to Negros. Black-face minstrelsy was popular until well into the 20th century and even after the minstrel motif faded motion pictures of the 1930’s and 40’s gave us humiliating caricatures of black men and women. Today we find such portrayals repulsive. Sims who had stellar musical talent and a keen intellect disguised his racial identity by posing as a Mexican who used black face to convert his false identity to an even falser one – a black man who convinced the audience he was white by portraying his stage persona as black. Americans of that era held deep-seated misapprehensions about race in our society, damaging notions that lie at the root of our racism. Nineteenth century (white) society made rules for demarcating racial lines, often based on absurd linkages to distant relatives who were non-white. Hence, such nonsensical but hurtful distinctions such as mulatto, octoroon, etc. Obsession with race lingered, of course, in powerful ways long after the 19th century. Consider that only recently on official census forms have we abandoned strict racial categories, suggesting (finally) that racial identity can be murky and, we can only hope, more and more meaningless. Nonetheless, in the long history of our racism, race mixing was held overtly to be a horrible thing by white society, except where, of course, (or perhaps because) white males exploited Negro women. The need to sublimate white hypocrisy led, as we know, to despicable violence toward blacks. Piazza intrigues us by hinting that the child Rose is carrying is the result of a liaison between her and Henry, that the child will be of mixed race.

In addition to its powerful and provocative themes about race, Piazza describes mid-19th century Philadelphia with color and vividness that helps the story succeed so well. ( )

3.5 Philadelphia, 1855, a young black man appears on street corners, playing the banjar. He amazing playing is noticed by James Douglass, leader of the Virginia Harmonists, a minstrel show whose audience is slowly dwindling. James is meant to be working the farm with his brothers and Joseph, the black man actually belongs on a plantation, the property of his father and master. He is hunted by Tull, a cruel and sadistic slave, runaway hunter.

I have read in a few books, but just mentions, of the minstrel shows, the curious acts where white men put on blackface and performed as negroes, their songs, their speech. This is the first time I have read a book where these shows were a big part of the plot. The underground railroad, the right of a man to be free and the moral dilemma that will eventually ensnare James. The music, the freedom that music can provide even in less than ideal settings. I loved the characters in this book, well except for a few, they were very unusual and went against the known stereotypes of that time. Tull was a psychopath and chose a path that let him give full rage to his work.

This quote, while appropriate back then, still applies to many circumstances now, actually way too many which begs the question, How far have we really advanced?

"If one has the upper hand in a situation, and uses it to exploit another to that others detriment, one cannot call oneself civilized. By the measure, perhaps, none of us can call himself fully civilized. Yet one may strive for that ideal at least. Otherwise one's career as a decent human being is at an end." ( )