Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded african American performers directly before and after the civil war up to...Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded african American performers directly before and after the civil war up to World War I. Is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.