The green accordion travels from hand to hand over a hundred-year period, plays the music of many different ethnic groups. Necessarily, historic personages mingle and converse with invented characters. In some cases invented characters have been placed in real events; in others, real events have been slightly or greatly fictionalized. The story of the fictional accordion maker is set into a fictionalized account, based on March 1891 articles in the New Orleans paper the Daily Picayune, of the real 1891 lynchings of eleven Italians in New Orleans. Throughout the book appear real newspaper advertisements, radio spiels, posters, song titles, scraps of verse, labels on common objects and lists of organizations; mixed in with them are fictional and invented advertisements, spiels, posters, song titles, verses, labels, objects and lists. No characters are based on living, real-life persons. The accordions are what you might expect.