Ballad of a Burnt Cork Man

Los Angeles, 1914. D. W. Griffith is shooting the picture that will remake American movies and revive the Klan, and the Black characters in it are being played by white men in burnt cork. A Black man is putting it on them.

Lucien Tate is light enough to pass, and on Griffith's lot he is "Ashby," a soft-spoken white makeup man with an immaculate kit and a gift for turning any face into the one the camera wants. He is very good at it. Three years earlier he was Sunny Tate, half of Tate & Hollis, a minstrel act that packed the Jefferson Theatre in Birmingham, until the night he walked out of the act, out of the city, and out of his own name.

Fifty yards from his makeup table, running the cook wagon, is Jubal Hollis. He was the other half of the act. He has not said its name since, and Lucien has not said a word to him at all.

Over one hot, strange season, Ballad of a Burnt Cork Man follows the two men through the making of a lie that will outlive everyone on the lot: the wranglers and grips and extras, a poor Alabama boy who signs on to ride in a white robe for five dollars a day, a runner named Pete who wants only to be in the pictures, and the studio men who need Lucien to be nobody. Then Griffith asks for a face the old mask can't make, and Lucien has to decide what his craft is for.

The story moves between 1914 and the Birmingham stage, and through a ruined house that Lucien keeps wandering in his sleep, where something small waits on a high shelf and says the word. Griffith and the other historical figures appear in their documented roles. The men at the center are invented.

Forty chapters of long, winding, memory-bent Southern Gothic prose, in which the past arrives in the middle of a sentence and the truth comes by way of delay. For readers of literary historical fiction about race, performance, and the stories America tells about itself.