Based on interviews with the late black photographer, James Van DerZee, whose oeuvre of aesthetic portraits and documents of Harlem life in the 1920's and 1930s "discovered" when he was 83 years old, 

Son of an aristocratic white plantation owner and a mulatto slave, P. B. S. Pinchback, the frist black governor of Louisiana, was a natural swashbuckler, whose free-wheeling gambling and love life entangled him in several gunfights, six formal duels, and...