Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, chronicles two runaways—one black, one white, each masquerading to claim his own life.

"...we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our 'Boatman Dance' and 'Clare de Kitchen,' assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see."    —A Free State