Publisher's Synopsis
Charles Cash is addicted to the mayo-drips and brown buns of a Big Mac, so he undergoes a colonoscopy. Under anesthesia he dreams about his advanced high school history class (three African American super stars) and the sometimes-salacious diary they're reading from the Civil War. The diary concerns Charles's own ancestors, specifically the picaresque adventures of Cato Cincinnatus Cash ("CC"), med school failure and dope addict, and his paramour, Lulu Hartmann, German bi-sexual chanteuse. Charles's three students fall in love with CC and Lulu and their troupe, including Little Bug, a black boy about eleven who carries a frog leg around his neck that from time to time, turns into a wise counselor who keeps the little man from getting depressed. Isabell Feinberg, school art teacher and Charles's fiancé, points out that his students love him, but he has only shown them white people in the war. What they really want is to learn about slavery. What was it like? How did the slaves survive?
Charles, a white man, is convinced even he can't teach them that...until he is himself transformed in his dream into a black slave and is hauled away to a rice plantation on the Pedee River to serve as a secretary for a masked, brutal plantation owner. Little Bug and Mr. Jam save him and bring him back to his classroom where his three black students are ecstatic. In his dream CC and Lulu are married and Charles and Isabelle are married. During Charles's ceremony, a trumpet sounds. The walls of the chapel fall away, and from all over the south, graves open and the dead of both north and south rise. They're grinning and they all march forward toward Charles. He's stunned and relieved and a burden is lifted from his heart.
When Charles wakes up from his colonoscopy, (which took 30 minutes), he proposes to the real Isabelle and tells her he has been granted a vision. He's a lackluster Episcopalian, who doesn't normally believe in visions, but this one he believes. He is free from the Civil War, his ancestor CC, and his parents. He proposes marriage. The end.
