Recruited in 1918 to work for the NAACP, Walter White--a lightskinned African-American man who can pass for white--is sent undercover to investigate a lynching, all the while confronted with
personal issues of identity. From the author of the award-winning novel Play for a Kingdom comes a masterful story inspired by the early life of Walter White, a dynamic but now
all-but-forgotten figure in the history of civil rights. Thetwenty- four-year- old White was recruited in 1918 to work for the NAACP. Just weeks after he began, a horrible lynching took place
in a small town in Tennessee and White was sent there to pose as a traveling salesman. His mission was to stay as long as it took to pry the secrets out of the town. Dyja paints a complex
portrait of shifting identity as White, a blonde, blue-eyed, and very light-skinned African-American, moves back and forth between white and black, working his way into both the good-old-boy
network of the town and the besieged African-American community. Forced to rethink his assumptions about what really happened in the town of Sibley Springs the night of the lynching, he
struggles to establish guilt and innocence in a foreign landscape, confronting as well his own questions of identity. When another lynching looms, White must decide if he will risk everything
to save a black life and the white souls of Sibley Springs.