Is Anne Rice "on it'? You bet. What I enjoy about her characters is that she gives them many dimensions. Her characters are flawed but then who wouldn't be in antebellum New Orleans?

When Rice wrote the Feast of All Saints, twenty years ago, I was intrigued by her description of free people of color. The book was published not long after the "Roots" phonemonen. Only enslaved persons were "noble" and free people (of whatever color) were viewed with suspicion.

Can a white fiction author write about people of color? If we could ask Frank Yerby I believe that he would respond with a '"yes". As an African-American, he wrote about southern whites during the same New Orleans period. His most famous was "The Foxes of Harrow".