“A Free State” is a lively adventure

Publication date: September 2015

Retail price: $25.99 US

FICTION

Tom Piazza’s “A Free State” is about the rough ball of American promise, fired from a slingshot, zinging through the bush: one hardly knows whether to duck, accept the inevitable, or skedaddle across the Canadian border.

This trim historical fiction, set in 1855, has all the components of a thrilling pursuit adventure. But the action of “A Free State” conceals a deeper purpose, which is to probe, through the medium of 19th Century minstrelsy, elaborate contradictions in the antebellum psyche.

Henry Sims is a 19-year-old runaway slave, a banjo virtuoso with a rising reward on his head. He has “no particular plan beyond getting to a free state,” which, in this case, is Pennsylvania.

He steps off a packet ship into the roiling streets of Philadelphia, a city “full of trap doors and tunnels,” not unlike the maze of Henry’s “banjar” picking style. The river port is a crucial depot on the Underground Railroad; free blacks, Quakers, abolitionists, and “papal Irish ” mill about under the “great, blind, presiding eye of the City Hall tower.”

With the help of Philadelphia’s anti-slavery radicals, Henry hides himself in the Negro section of town, which Piazza likens to a spider web: “touch it in one place and the whole thing vibrated.”

Closing on his trail is the vicious slave catcher, Tull Burton, whose penchant for torture marks him as one of the great villains in modern fiction. Burton has but one determination: bring Henry back to his Virginia owner, dead or alive. “Tull’s specialty,” observes the author, “was foreclosing possibility.”

To the contrary, possibility is precisely what the banjo offers Henry.

It’s somewhat the same for his white counterpart, James Douglass, a minstrel impresario with the Virginia Harmonists. Douglass grows up on a farm near Gettysburg, and he detests its stifling routine. He runs away, joins a circus and acquires the managerial and showman skills that will elevate his blackface troupe to “the acme of entertainment in Philadelphia.”

But by the time Douglass spots Henry playing on a street corner, minstrels have become commonplace. He recognizes Henry’s potential to reinvigorate the Harmonists and invites him to audition.

More profoundly, Douglass senses that Henry “had found some freedom for himself not only onstage but in life itself, and that spark brought out something in me.” For both men, the banjo becomes a magnetized talisman, a trance-inducing engine that offers the limitless vista of a free state.

On the run, out of necessity, Henry has changed his name several times. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it illegal to “shelter property,” even in Pennsylvania; neither black nor white entertainers could perform together in the same venue. Ergo, Douglass’s ruse of introducing Henry to the Harmonists as “Juan Garcia,” a Mexican who speaks a “pidgin Spanish” that is a kind of “iridescent gibberish.” As well, Henry will perform under the name “Demosthenes Jones.”

The burnt cork used for “blacking up” allows the Harmonists “protective coloration,” so they are free to inhabit alternate slave personas. To Henry, however, “You were free as long as you chose your own mask. The more masks, the better.”

Against the Northern belief in industrial progress, Piazza writes, “In the South, a different myth was under construction — of some fancied Golden Age…A stage setting, behind which you could hear the groans of the dark-skinned men and women who labored without pay to keep the illusion inflated.”

In actuality, this “stage setting” materializes in the Virginia Harmonists’ theatrical design. When he reveals to Henry the painted scene of “Darkies cavorting in a plantation backdrop,” Douglass confides, “An utterly unexpected embarrassment began to rise in me. I wasn’t sure why.”

Thus, the illumination of James Douglass begins.

A jazz pianist who learned to play the banjo in preparation for this book, Tom Piazza is one of the few music writers with a serious interest in literary matters. (He has written for the HBO series “Treme” and is the author of a prior novel, “City of Refuge.”) A self-assured, creative author, Piazza shifts points of view with increasing frequency to accelerate the blast of mayhem that becomes the epic confrontation with Tull Burton.

In his essay collection, “Devil Sent the Rain,” Piazza writes, “Everybody pieces together their own America in the brain, whether they want to or not. In making a harmony of such apparent discord, it reminds us that freedom is a curse and a blessing at exactly the same moment.”

It is within this dialectic that the meaning of “A Free State” unfolds. Henry’s liberation from servitude and Douglass’s deliverance from agrarian tedium merge into a more complex expression, a place beyond the easy paydays of pure entertainment.

For most of “A Free State,” Douglass seems unaware of the moment’s violent political circumstance. If he can say, after the dissolution of the Virginia Harmonists, “We were innocents, and yet were complicit in a monstrous evil,” the banjo’s epiphanies can still reduce him to tears, even as he comes to view the audience for minstrelsy with contempt.

Of course, the Civil War is looming; there’s little justification for optimism. Yet, the more Douglass identifies himself with Henry, the more he succumbs to the pressures of an emerging consciousness, one that suggests a baby tooth, or spar, that seeks, of its own accord, to rupture the surface as a new formation of American understanding.