Versatile music historian and recipient of the State Library of Louisiana 2015 Writer Award, Tom Piazza is perhaps as much known for his work as a writer for HBO's Treme as he is for his essays about literature and music in Devil Sent the Rain (2011) and his novel City of Refuge (2008). Set in the years before the Civil War, when Abolitionist sentiment was growing in the North and the South was clinging stubbornly to its social and economic dependency on slavery, A Free State is the story of two young men. James Douglass is white, from Pennsylvania, and joined the circus to escape a mean Scotch-Irish father. Henry Sims is a light-skinned Negro fleeing a Virginia plantation and its master (who is also his father) for freedom on the streets of Philadelphia. Douglass is the founder and "bones" player of the blackface minstrel troupe "The Original Virginia Harmonists--Purveyors of Ethiopian Airs, Plantation Jigs and Every Variety of Negro Jollity." Sims is a naturally adept banjo player with a theatrical flair for comedy. Their common love of music and entertainment draws them together on stage, where Sims "blacks up" his face to blend in with the other members of the group and hide from the sadistic slave bounty hunter hired by his father.
With lively characters and a well-paced hide-and-seek plot, A Free State is also a meditation on an uneasy American blend of race, freedom, music, violence and the ways we hide behind our many masks. Piazza deftly blends his numerous interests into a solid little historical novel that exposes many uncomfortable truths still prevalent today. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.