Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go a quarter of the mind. Unfortunately, it's
Speaker 1: a mess in here half the time. I can't find
Speaker 1: what I came for. Dewey decimals something this place could
Speaker 1: do with some kind of an organizational scheme. Also, she's
Speaker 1: it's so noisy in here. What would this crystal radio
Speaker 1: set and the old record player running would break a
Speaker 1: break about? I don't know why do you go this place?
Speaker 1: This chamber of knowledge stores the facts that matter, and
Speaker 1: matters of fact, the sounds that matter. The sign on
Speaker 1: the door reads the last archive. Step through the door
Speaker 1: and into an apartment in Harlem. For the writer, Ralph
Speaker 1: Ellison is packing a suitcase while listening to the radio.
Speaker 1: This is the mutual broadcasting system. Keep listening, Paul cliff
Speaker 1: Edwards jukulele I. The White House as an aust that
Speaker 1: we are still at war with Japan. Smoke and dust
Speaker 1: clods still roll up from what once was one of
Speaker 1: Japan's greatest cities. August tenth, nineteen forty five. The United
Speaker 1: States has just dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker 1: In New York, Ralph Ellison was packing his bags. He'd
Speaker 1: been in the Merchant Marines during the war, but sick
Speaker 1: in seven different ways, he was put on leave to
Speaker 1: get some rest. He had other plans for the time off, though,
Speaker 1: he meant to write a great American novel. I know
Speaker 1: that Ellison left New York that day. I don't know
Speaker 1: for sure that he listened to radio while he was
Speaker 1: folding his shirts and bawling his socks. Historians talk a
Speaker 1: lot about the historical imagination. You can't make things up,
Speaker 1: but you do have to try to picture things. You
Speaker 1: have to try to put yourself in the place of
Speaker 1: your subject, in the mind of your subject, as best
Speaker 1: you can. If I'm interested in a person and a
Speaker 1: person's story, I want to know that person's whole story,
Speaker 1: the evidence of anyone's story that was patchy. That's where
Speaker 1: your imagination comes in. So I don't know that Ellison
Speaker 1: was listening to the radio that August day, but I
Speaker 1: like to think he was, and I have a pretty
Speaker 1: good reason to think he was. Ellison listened. He was
Speaker 1: super interested in sound. What you can know by hearing
Speaker 1: by listening. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about
Speaker 1: how we know what we know? How we used to
Speaker 1: know things and why sometimes lately it feels as though
Speaker 1: we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This
Speaker 1: season I've been asking who killed truth. One way truth
Speaker 1: dies is when the kinds of things taken as evidence shrink.
Speaker 1: A lot of people tend not to think about novels
Speaker 1: or poetry or any kind of literature as evidence, but
Speaker 1: I think they should. This episode is about a novel.
Speaker 1: The novel Ellison was packing his bags to go off
Speaker 1: and write, and it's about how he came to write
Speaker 1: it and why. Ellison decided he needed some quiet to write,
Speaker 1: and for that he needed to get out of the city.
Speaker 1: He had some friends who owned a farm in Vermont,
Speaker 1: so later that day he added north to the little
Speaker 1: town of Waitsfield, where a friend of his, Emily Bates,
Speaker 1: had a farm. Every summer she took her kids there.
Speaker 1: She found a farm that had no electricity, no running water.
Speaker 1: We lived very naturally. The rainwater. The rainwater would come
Speaker 1: down and fill a barrel. We use that for washing dishes.
Speaker 1: That's Emily's daughter, Diana Bates. She's a great grandmother now,
Speaker 1: but back in nineteen forty five, she was seven years old.
Speaker 1: It was a front room. That was probably the dining
Speaker 1: room in this farmhouse, and there was that's where our
Speaker 1: little tables were, But that became where he was going
Speaker 1: to work. Ellison got to Vermont and settled into write.
Speaker 1: A friend shipped him four pounds of Maxwell House coffee.
Speaker 1: He was ready, But then he found out a bitter truth.
Speaker 1: The country isn't as quiet as city people think. Dan's
Speaker 1: little sister Grace, who reminded me about that. It would
Speaker 1: have been noisier than because there was more bog life,
Speaker 1: and so you have the humming and the buzzing and
Speaker 1: the birds tweeting. And at that time there were no
Speaker 1: cars on the road. It was a dirt road, and
Speaker 1: the old man just once a day, and there's a
Speaker 1: certain time in the heat of the afternoon when the
Speaker 1: crow lets off. It's like to transport. It just transports
Speaker 1: you into another place. And I'm so oh, I don't
Speaker 1: want going to do that. I do at a home though,
Speaker 1: because they're they've taken it. That's fine, awful, beautiful, perfect,
Speaker 1: That's exactly it. Yeah, But the girls weren't really the problem.
Speaker 1: The kids were the problem. Their mother told the girls
Speaker 1: to hush, but they just couldn't Diana was irrepressible. She
Speaker 1: still is. I have to say then, I wasn't very
Speaker 1: happy about it because we had to be quiet. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so I do remember trowing. I always think of oranges,
Speaker 1: but I think it was probably something else at the
Speaker 1: door where he was writing. I don't know why I
Speaker 1: think it was oranges in my head now, but I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure it wasn't. Because she were in Vermont, and
Speaker 1: this was the early time. You know that there wasn't
Speaker 1: any orange trees around, So it might have been apples,
Speaker 1: or it might have been stones, for all I know
Speaker 1: it was. But I flung up at the door and
Speaker 1: I ran. Ellison, exasperated, moved to the barn. He put
Speaker 1: some distance between himself and that bates girls the width
Speaker 1: of the road. In the quiet, he began to write.
Speaker 1: His imagination began to soar, fly like a bird to
Speaker 1: the clouds. And then right then, right there, he heard
Speaker 1: another noise, a voice in his head, the voice of
Speaker 1: a black man from the South. He did say things
Speaker 1: is sometimes advantageous to be unseen. He tried to ignore it,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't. He couldn't shake it, so he threw
Speaker 1: away the book he'd been writing, and he started writing
Speaker 1: a different one in the voice of this man, an
Speaker 1: American man, a black man. Grace Bates read me its
Speaker 1: opening lines. I am an invisible man. No, I am
Speaker 1: not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Powe.
Speaker 1: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I
Speaker 1: am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber
Speaker 1: and liquids. And I might even be said to possess
Speaker 1: a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse
Speaker 1: to see me, like the bodiless heads you see sometimes
Speaker 1: in circus side shows. It is as though I have
Speaker 1: been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they
Speaker 1: approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves, or figments
Speaker 1: of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me that
Speaker 1: is so beautiful, That is so incredibly beautiful. The opening
Speaker 1: lines of one of the most famous novel of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, Invisible Man, a story about what it means
Speaker 1: to be unseen and unheard. Out of Ellison's imagination, came proof.
Speaker 1: Ellison had a theory of history. He once explained it
Speaker 1: to his good friend, the writer Robert Penn Warren, who
Speaker 1: is working on an oral history project called who Speaks
Speaker 1: for the Negro Ellison called Warren read what you want
Speaker 1: to talk about? Oh? I don't know. Rather if it's
Speaker 1: the bath. The irony of American history is such that
Speaker 1: we're always trying to discover ourselves. People create themselves in
Speaker 1: the spectorating himself. This is very hard for some people
Speaker 1: to crash in writing a novel. Ellison set out to
Speaker 1: discover American history, to create American history. It took him
Speaker 1: seven years, all told, to finish the book he began
Speaker 1: up in that barn in Vermont. Invisible Man is a
Speaker 1: work of extraordinary literary imagination. But it's also a work
Speaker 1: of historical imagination, and it's also a piece of history.
Speaker 1: It rests on evidence, and it is evidence. Invisible Man
Speaker 1: tells the story of a man who leaves the Jim
Speaker 1: Crow south and heads north. It's often taken as an
Speaker 1: allegory for the entire African American experience, for the entire
Speaker 1: American experience, but it also comes out of Ellison's own life.
Speaker 1: Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in nineteen thirteen. Later,
Speaker 1: when he got to be famous, he talked about his
Speaker 1: early life a lot often to white interviewers like Red Warren,
Speaker 1: and even to studs Turkle, the celebrated oral historian. Where
Speaker 1: did your whatever it was that urge come from to
Speaker 1: be the right? Well? I always love to read, and
Speaker 1: my father was a great reader, although he died when
Speaker 1: I was three. I, as a young kid, dreamed a lot,
Speaker 1: loved to be told stories, and found a way of
Speaker 1: extending my environment through reading. And my mother was always
Speaker 1: bringing home books and magazines as she brought home Clasgow
Speaker 1: phonograph recordings from places where she worked. Ellison only knew
Speaker 1: his father through his words. A book of poems he
Speaker 1: left behind the letters the family kept a voice from
Speaker 1: beyond the grave. Ellison grew up working odd jobs to
Speaker 1: make ends meet, making ice cream sodas at a pharmacy,
Speaker 1: delivering newspapers. On the way to one of his jobs
Speaker 1: at a dentist's he'd pass a ku Klux Klan office.
Speaker 1: He had a vision of a life he wanted to lead.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was because of all those records his mother
Speaker 1: brought home from work, but he fell in love with music.
Speaker 1: He took up the trumpet. He loved sound. He built
Speaker 1: crystal set radios, made them out of doorbell wire, broken
Speaker 1: old telephones, and ice cream cartons. He wanted to write symphonies,
Speaker 1: a mishmash of classical and folk music, high and low,
Speaker 1: the music of everyone. He didn't have the money to
Speaker 1: go to college, but music got him there. On invitation
Speaker 1: to Tuskegee to be the first trumpeter in their orchestra
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty three, he snagged a ride on a
Speaker 1: freight train headed for Alabama, but he never finished college.
Speaker 1: He ran out of money and left. This time he
Speaker 1: headed north. Now about what point in your life had
Speaker 1: you switched some music to writing. Well, actually I switched
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven. I left college and came to New
Speaker 1: York in thirty six to earn money. I which to
Speaker 1: go back, and as I as often happened, I found
Speaker 1: my plans change. That's Ellison on the NBC radio program
Speaker 1: Favorites of the Famous. In New York, he bounced around
Speaker 1: odd jobs, the Harlem YMCA, a psychoanalysts office, factory work.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we need didn't have a job, he'd sleep in
Speaker 1: the park. It was the Great Depression, a hard time
Speaker 1: for everyone. Nineteen thirty six, the year Ellison moved to
Speaker 1: New York, was the year after, FDR founded a massive
Speaker 1: new government agency known as the Works Progress Administration. It
Speaker 1: put people who'd lost their jobs to work building roads
Speaker 1: in parks and dams, and also writing literature. The WPA
Speaker 1: included something called the Federal Writers Project and employed about
Speaker 1: seven thousand out of work writers. They wrote plays, in
Speaker 1: poems and symphonies. They collected stories oral histories from Americans
Speaker 1: all over the country. Ellison started working for the Federal
Speaker 1: Writers Project in nineteen thirty eight. His job was to
Speaker 1: collect stories about black New Yorkers. The WPA paid around
Speaker 1: twenty five bucks a week, saved his life. All of
Speaker 1: the girls would have been hopefully taking courses in business
Speaker 1: and so on, went right into into the wa and
Speaker 1: they found a place in the society. So it was
Speaker 1: a moment of optimism for us. But for instance, either
Speaker 1: game right because I could get work with the WPA,
Speaker 1: wor research and learned to practice of my crowd. The
Speaker 1: WPA was the great patron of twentieth century American literature.
Speaker 1: Saw below, Zoraneil Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright. All of
Speaker 1: them worked for the WPA, which also often equipped them
Speaker 1: with cameras and tape recorders. Big heavy machines to make
Speaker 1: a record of American culture. The WPA was gathering a
Speaker 1: whole new body of evidence about the nation's past and
Speaker 1: its people, the evidence of history, the evidence of story.
Speaker 1: It would really seem that we had finally on up
Speaker 1: with the nation. But we can spend a day recording
Speaker 1: such folklore as we have heard today. And this is
Speaker 1: only a beginning, only a beginning. Voices that can be heard,
Speaker 1: reels that can be unspooled. Here in the last archive.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties in Harlem, Ralph Ellison collected amazing
Speaker 1: oral histories. No one's ever found tape of those interviews, though,
Speaker 1: but a lot of recordings from the WPA's work do survive.
Speaker 1: They're scratchy and garbly, but they're fascinating. I think this
Speaker 1: one from Texas made with a machine that weighed one
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty pounds. It's a little difficult to decipher.
Speaker 1: So listen, hard, lady up the mat and that what
Speaker 1: if you want to antymbastic flags? You know, bank I
Speaker 1: remember that's a woman named Harriet Smith talking to a
Speaker 1: man named John Henry Fok in her house in Texas.
Speaker 1: Fock was a white man and collecting oral histories for
Speaker 1: the government and Smith. She'd been born into slavery. It's
Speaker 1: hard to understand this tape, but she's just told him
Speaker 1: to ask her whatever he wants. Well, ain't her about
Speaker 1: how old are you? Well, I don't know, miss, we
Speaker 1: don't know my age. On the buy that the childs
Speaker 1: I'm telling me my mom died, and she she didn't
Speaker 1: know want much about idea, But the children traced back
Speaker 1: from me that they explained up the math. Well, how
Speaker 1: old you when you were? Well, I was about thirteen
Speaker 1: years old. That's the breaks you can't remembered slavery days.
Speaker 1: I remember all our white school, and all the name
Speaker 1: of all the children called everyone, the children's names. The
Speaker 1: baby's boy. Harriet Smith belonged to the baby boy. She'd
Speaker 1: been thirteen. At the breakup the Civil War, the WPA
Speaker 1: had been trying to capture a vanishing archive, the stories
Speaker 1: of people like Harriet Smith. Four million Americans had been
Speaker 1: held in slavery before emancipation, and by the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: the last of them were dying, and when they were gone,
Speaker 1: the evidence of slavery from the memory of people who
Speaker 1: endured it would disappear forever. The WPA set out to
Speaker 1: capture those memories. At first, the state offices of the
Speaker 1: Federal Writers Project oversaw the work. Then the Library of
Speaker 1: Congress took over. Interviewers would send transcripts of their interviews,
Speaker 1: more than two thousand of them, to Washington. These life histories,
Speaker 1: taken down as far as possible, in the narrator's words,
Speaker 1: constitute an invaluable body of unconscious evidence. Eventually, these interviews
Speaker 1: were published in a collection whose value is hard to describe,
Speaker 1: but the editor of the project once did a pretty
Speaker 1: good job of it. For the first time and the
Speaker 1: last time, a large number of surviving slaves, many of
Speaker 1: whom have since died, have been permitted to tell their
Speaker 1: own story in their own way. Interviewers who collected these
Speaker 1: oral histories were supposed to send tape recordings to Washington.
Speaker 1: Those reels as big as tricycle wheels. In ten cases.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they recorded with phonographs. The historical record in some
Speaker 1: cases was an actual record record how many, how many
Speaker 1: of how many slaves did he had? Man? He had
Speaker 1: my grandma and my mom. I'm always cool and them,
Speaker 1: you know, and then they've worked in the seas and everything.
Speaker 1: I remember when she used to float often, I've floud,
Speaker 1: I've thought often, my fa I'm very awful car Rolls
Speaker 1: dreammain is that right? As a historian, when I listened
Speaker 1: to Harriet Smith telling on Henry Fok about her life,
Speaker 1: I first thought is it's amazing that all this is
Speaker 1: now in the Library of Congress, because in the historical
Speaker 1: record words spoken by black people are rare. Probably that's
Speaker 1: because in the era of slavery, enslaved people couldn't ordinarily
Speaker 1: give testimony in court unless it was to testify against
Speaker 1: other slaves in cases of conspiracy, when they could give
Speaker 1: a special kind of testimony called negro evidence, but only
Speaker 1: after swearing a terrifying oath. You are brought hither as
Speaker 1: a witness, and by the direction of the law, I
Speaker 1: am to tell you, before you give your evidence, that
Speaker 1: you must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
Speaker 1: but the truth, and that if it be found hereafter
Speaker 1: that you tell a lie and give false testimony in
Speaker 1: this matter, you must, for so doing have both your
Speaker 1: ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and receive
Speaker 1: thirty nine last is on your bare back, well laid
Speaker 1: on at the common whipping post. The most notorious use
Speaker 1: of negro evidence in early America was a set of
Speaker 1: trials held in New York in seventeen forty one, when
Speaker 1: hundreds of men black men were accused of conspiring to
Speaker 1: burn down the city. I got really fascinated by this
Speaker 1: story years ago. I wrote a very long book about it.
Speaker 1: It's called New York Burning. Ralph Elson in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: when he was working for the WPA, he got fascinated
Speaker 1: by this story too. He tracked it down. He found
Speaker 1: out all about negro evidence during those trials. In seventeen
Speaker 1: forty one, a New York judge complained that it was
Speaker 1: impossible to take negro evidence seriously. Many of them have
Speaker 1: a great deal of craft. Their unintelligible jargon stands them
Speaker 1: in great state to conceal their meaning. The law of
Speaker 1: negro evidence lasted a long time. Nearly a century later,
Speaker 1: when Frederick Douglas was growing up in Maryland and some
Speaker 1: white men beat him up, an assault witnessed by dozens
Speaker 1: of slaves. Douglas's owner tried to get a magistrate to
Speaker 1: press charges, but the magistrate said he couldn't do anything
Speaker 1: unless there'd been a white witness. Douglas later wrote about
Speaker 1: this in his autobiography. If I had been killed in
Speaker 1: the presence of a thousand colored people, their testimony combined
Speaker 1: would have been insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers.
Speaker 1: And over a century after that, in nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: John Henry Fox asked Harriet Smith to serve as an
Speaker 1: eyewitness to her own life and yours blade remains same time.
Speaker 1: What would to preach a bridge about then? To say,
Speaker 1: now that you go recordings like these, they seem at
Speaker 1: first to upend centuries of evidentiary and justice. But then
Speaker 1: listening to this rasping record, he started to have questions,
Speaker 1: what really is going on here? Well, then the traits
Speaker 1: that you might helped to treat you good bye, They
Speaker 1: was good to us. Really it isn't just her and
Speaker 1: a bunch of these recordings. People interviewed say basically the
Speaker 1: same thing. Hey, slavery wasn't that bad, But that testimony
Speaker 1: contradicts just about every other possible type of evidence that survives.
Speaker 1: There are a few explanations for this discrepancy. Most of
Speaker 1: the people interviewed for this project were in their eighties.
Speaker 1: There were children before slavery ended. Maybe they'd been spared
Speaker 1: the worst of its miseries. But there was something else
Speaker 1: going on too. A couple of years back, the writer
Speaker 1: Debbie Nathan went sleothing and figured out that John Henry
Speaker 1: Fox and Harriet Smith were neighbors. Fox family lived only
Speaker 1: four blocks from Smith's. She'd known him since he was
Speaker 1: a baby. On the recordings, he calls her aunt Harriet,
Speaker 1: she calls him mister Falk. He was in his twenties,
Speaker 1: she was in her eighties. Falk, like Ellison, was interested
Speaker 1: in sound. Later he became a successful radio broadcaster. He
Speaker 1: was also a prominent liberal. He joined the NAACP and
Speaker 1: fought for civil rights. He was a famous storyteller. He
Speaker 1: used to tell a Christmas story that NPR broadcast every year.
Speaker 1: He's not the bad guy here, but he's not an
Speaker 1: innocent bystander either. Debby Nathan went through Fox files at
Speaker 1: UT Austin's Briscoe Center. One day she noticed an MP
Speaker 1: three mark Harriet Smith. Somehow John Fox had forgotten to
Speaker 1: submit that one recording to the Library of Congress any
Speaker 1: Us John Good High School, Slahama Cab Did you hear it?
Speaker 1: He asked her. Some folks were awful good to their slaves.
Speaker 1: Weren't they. Of course, that's what's known as a leading question.
Speaker 1: This wasn't just a personal dynamic between Harriet Smith and
Speaker 1: John Fog, though, between Aunt Harriet and mister Fogg, the
Speaker 1: problems with these interviews were often a lot worse. Some
Speaker 1: of the people asking the questions were actually descended from
Speaker 1: the owners of the people they were interviewing. Use your
Speaker 1: historical imagination sit on that porch. Harriet Smith wasn't going
Speaker 1: to give John Henry Fock real answers to his questions
Speaker 1: about slavery. He was a white man in Texas in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one, lynching Texas. She told him some things.
Speaker 1: She didn't tell him everything. Mainly, she told him what
Speaker 1: she thought he wanted to hear. But Ralph Ellison, back
Speaker 1: in New York, he wasn't John Henry Fowk. He was
Speaker 1: a black man interviewing black people, a lot of whom
Speaker 1: had only lately come north from the Jim Crow South.
Speaker 1: They were part of something called the Great Migration, when
Speaker 1: millions of African Americans left the South. Ellison was part
Speaker 1: of that migration too. Black people who left the South
Speaker 1: went most off into cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Isabel Wilkerson appealed surprize winning reporter wrote about
Speaker 1: the Great Migration in a book called The Warmth of
Speaker 1: other Sons. Her book is beautiful and the way she
Speaker 1: put it together is incredible. She became a one woman WPA.
Speaker 1: She began working on the book in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: when she realized that those people who'd made the Great Migration,
Speaker 1: they weren't going to be around for much longer. So
Speaker 1: she began interviewing them as many as she could, you know,
Speaker 1: just the passage of time. And I was really running,
Speaker 1: racing against the clock. You took to like a thousand
Speaker 1: people or so when you were first doing you know,
Speaker 1: just finding people, hundreds and hundreds of people I did.
Speaker 1: I can never say that I'm going to take the
Speaker 1: easy route towards something, and this was a case in point.
Speaker 1: I went to Senior Citizens centers, I went to AARP meetings,
Speaker 1: I went to pensioners reunions and meetings that they have,
Speaker 1: the postal workers and the you know, the CTA bus drivers.
Speaker 1: I mean all of this. How conscious were you of
Speaker 1: the legacy of the you know, the Federal Writers Project
Speaker 1: At the WPA work of tracking down people who lived
Speaker 1: under slavery before they all passed on in the nineteen thirties. No.
Speaker 1: I absolutely felt that I was in a position to
Speaker 1: get testimony, you might say, from the surviving people of
Speaker 1: an entire era that was passing away, with each one
Speaker 1: of them going. It was like a mission I was on,
Speaker 1: and I was determined and felt that this was the
Speaker 1: last chance to get to hear from some of the people.
Speaker 1: And those stories just hadn't been written down. They hadn't
Speaker 1: been recorded at all. Really. No Wilkerson structured her book
Speaker 1: like a novel, writing together the stories of three lives.
Speaker 1: She'd started interviewing more than twelve hundred people, and then
Speaker 1: she narrowed them down to three. One of these three
Speaker 1: people was item A Brandon. She'd been born in Mississippi
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirteen and grew up picking cotton and hating it.
Speaker 1: When she was about six, two white boys grabbed her
Speaker 1: and held her by her ankles over a well, just
Speaker 1: to watch her squirm. She went to school only to
Speaker 1: eighth grade, you couldn't go any higher. When she was thirteen,
Speaker 1: two black boys she knew talk back to some white
Speaker 1: lady and they were lynched and so. In nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: after some end with guns came to their house in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night looking for someone who stole
Speaker 1: some turkeys, Idemy and her husband, a man named Gladney,
Speaker 1: packed up everything. They went first to Milwaukee. They ended
Speaker 1: up in Chicago. Idem Brandon Gladney was eighty three when
Speaker 1: she spoke with Isabel Wilkerson. There's a moment in the
Speaker 1: book when she's sitting in a chair gazing out a window.
Speaker 1: She says, a half ain't been told. Ralph Ellison he
Speaker 1: was born the same year as Idemy, and I think
Speaker 1: he must have felt that same way too. For all
Speaker 1: the things we think we know, they are all these
Speaker 1: people whose voices are silenced, whose half hasn't been told.
Speaker 1: If that's true, how much do we know really? Ellison
Speaker 1: looked for people to interview the same way Wilkerson did.
Speaker 1: He went to street corners and bars and apartment buildings.
Speaker 1: He knocked on doors One day and night thirty eight,
Speaker 1: on the corner of one hundred and Lenox Avenue, he
Speaker 1: met a man named Leo Gurley, who come to New
Speaker 1: York from South Carolina. I hope to God to kill
Speaker 1: me if this ain't the truth. All you got to
Speaker 1: do is go down flooring South Carolada and ask most
Speaker 1: anybody you meet, and they'd tell you it's the truth.
Speaker 1: Currently told Ullus in a story about a man named
Speaker 1: Sweet that he'd known back home. His name was Sweet
Speaker 1: the Monkey. I don't forget his real name. I can't remember,
Speaker 1: but that was what everybody called him. He wasn't no
Speaker 1: big guy. He was just bad. My mother and grandmother
Speaker 1: used to say he was wicked. He was bad, all right.
Speaker 1: He was one sucker who didn't give a damn about
Speaker 1: these crackers. Fact is they got sold. They stayed out.
Speaker 1: His wife. I can't ever remember here telling them crackers
Speaker 1: balling that guy. He used to give him trouble all
Speaker 1: over the place, and all they could do about it
Speaker 1: was to give the rest of us hell. Girly must
Speaker 1: have told Ellison a lot of stories. This one particular
Speaker 1: story about Sweet, though, is the one that Ellison wrote down,
Speaker 1: the one that's in the Library of Congress. It was
Speaker 1: this way Sweet could make himself invisible. You don't believe me,
Speaker 1: Well here's how we've done it. Sweet the Monkey cut
Speaker 1: open a black cat and took out his heart. The
Speaker 1: White boats started trying to catch Sweet. Well, they didn't
Speaker 1: have no look. Police will come up and say come on, Sweet,
Speaker 1: and he say, y'all want me, And they put the
Speaker 1: handcuffs on him and started leading them away. He'd go
Speaker 1: with a little piece show like he was going. Then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden he would turn himself invisible and disappear.
Speaker 1: The police wouldn't have nothing but the handcuffs. They couldn't
Speaker 1: do a thing without Sweet the Monkey. Evidence like this
Speaker 1: a folk tale that gets written down. That's rare as
Speaker 1: Hen's teeth and what stuck with Ellison most in girl's
Speaker 1: tall tail. Sweet could turn himself invisible. Once they found
Speaker 1: a place he looted with footprints leading away from it,
Speaker 1: and they decided to try and trap them. This was
Speaker 1: about sun up, and they followed his footprints all that day.
Speaker 1: They followed him till sundown. When he come partly visible,
Speaker 1: it was red and the sun was shining on the trees,
Speaker 1: and they waited till they saw his shadow. That was
Speaker 1: the last or the Sweet the Monkey. I like to
Speaker 1: think it was Sweet who came back to Ellison a
Speaker 1: few years later up in Vermont, in that barn, the
Speaker 1: sunshining voice rising let the voices that echo along the
Speaker 1: narrow corridors of the mind. When Invisible Man was published
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty two, Ralph Ellison became a celebrity. Here
Speaker 1: he is again on the show Favorites of the Famous,
Speaker 1: And may I add my congratulations on the National Book Award.
Speaker 1: Quite an honor from first novelism. Yes, it's quite an
Speaker 1: honor and quite a frightening You know, you keep wondering, Well, now,
Speaker 1: guess what went wrong? Everyone wanted a piece of Ellison.
Speaker 1: Photographer Gordon Parks collaborated with Ellison on a series of
Speaker 1: photographs for Life magazine, depicting the most important moments in
Speaker 1: the book. The photos are haunting, surreal, black and white
Speaker 1: and shot wide. In the most famous picture, a black
Speaker 1: man emerges from a manhole. You can see the blur
Speaker 1: of the street in the background. Only the top of
Speaker 1: his head is in focus. So remember Diana and Grace
Speaker 1: Bates who was little Girls through Oranges at Ellison while
Speaker 1: he was writing, or maybe they were rocks. Anyway, they
Speaker 1: knew that guy in these photographs. Yeah, that's our dad.
Speaker 1: Daddy would have been friends with Allison and Gordon Parks.
Speaker 1: They would have all known each other. So when they
Speaker 1: were doing this photo shoot, I mean he was a
Speaker 1: natural model for that, you know, his handsomeness. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: just amazed that this image is becomes so iconic, you know,
Speaker 1: it's all It hung outside the MoMA in New York
Speaker 1: City for a season, a huge poster of our father. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it brings me great delight to see that. Ellison, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: was everywhere interviews in the Paris Review, lectures and visiting professorships,
Speaker 1: cocktail parties, chit chat with the president. He became much
Speaker 1: more than a literary celebrity. It was as if he
Speaker 1: were the great seer of the black experience. It was
Speaker 1: as if he were a radio playing the voice of
Speaker 1: every black person in the country, as if he alone
Speaker 1: were Negro evidence. If you listen for it, you can
Speaker 1: hear it. His self consciousness about being asked to speak
Speaker 1: for the negro Sir, Ellison, how do you feel about
Speaker 1: being interviewed? Well, naturally, you feel quite mixed about it.
Speaker 1: Later on, Elson was called to testify before the Senate
Speaker 1: on the subject of social conditions in Harlem. But really
Speaker 1: he was asked to explain what black people thought of
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act In the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five Voting Rights Act. How did the Northern Negro
Speaker 1: or the Negro at Harlem and regard these laws? Well,
Speaker 1: I was paid for one myself. The senators kept pressing him,
Speaker 1: asking him questions about Harlem, but also asking him in
Speaker 1: a way, how can a black man talk like that?
Speaker 1: Would you get your voice? You're so articulate? How did
Speaker 1: you get to be you? Oh? What was life like
Speaker 1: for you as a boy growing up in Oklahoma City? Well,
Speaker 1: it was a life of the average poor family. Ellison
Speaker 1: was most often in demand when things were worse for
Speaker 1: black people. Robert Penn Warren allegedly said Ellison was every
Speaker 1: white man's favorite black man, but he wasn't every black
Speaker 1: man's favorite black man. Ellison's biographer once told the story
Speaker 1: of a man who went to the library of a
Speaker 1: black studies program and asked for a copy of Invisible Man,
Speaker 1: only to be told they didn't have one because Ellison
Speaker 1: wasn't a black writer. He kept trying to write another novel.
Speaker 1: It was always close, just around the corner, but he
Speaker 1: never finished it. He explained it a few ways. He
Speaker 1: lost some of it in a fire or a history
Speaker 1: moved too fast for him to comment on it, But
Speaker 1: I think he was also daunted, daunted by having become evidence.
Speaker 1: At one point during his congressional testimony, the senator asked
Speaker 1: him about his upbringing. My mother had some sense of
Speaker 1: the advisers of excellence, and she used to say that
Speaker 1: she didn't care what I'd became, as long as I
Speaker 1: tried to become one of the best. He'd been the best.
Speaker 1: Maybe he came to the end of his imagination. What
Speaker 1: could he possibly do next? People started talking about him
Speaker 1: as if he were a failure. He kept trying to
Speaker 1: write that novel. He'd read passages into a teape recorder
Speaker 1: and then listen back to them. They cut out our tongues.
Speaker 1: They left the speechness. They cut out our tongues. Lord,
Speaker 1: they left us without words. Amen. He died in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, author of a slew of brilliant essays, one
Speaker 1: published novel, and more than two thousand unpublished pages of
Speaker 1: another one. So far as I know, he never went
Speaker 1: back to that barn in Waitsfield, Vermont. I do know
Speaker 1: that one of the obligations of being an American has
Speaker 1: changed to me is that you get to know other Americans,
Speaker 1: and one of the massassdiasm that we should not be afraid.
Speaker 1: Ralph Ellison and the WPA opened a door, a door
Speaker 1: to an entire archive. But somehow that door keeps slamming
Speaker 1: shut and getting locked again, and still people keep trying
Speaker 1: to pry it open and record the evidence. In twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: a century after Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma, George
Speaker 1: Zimmerman was acquitted for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin,
Speaker 1: and Black Lives Matter began. It's the next chapter and
Speaker 1: the long history of Negro evidence. Black Lives Matter is
Speaker 1: about justice, but it's also profoundly about evidence. The capturing
Speaker 1: of video and sound recording showing what to whites had
Speaker 1: been unseen, hearing what had been unheard, knowing what had
Speaker 1: been unknown, bodycam, dashcam, iPhone, periscope, Facebook live record, play listen.
Speaker 1: More voices means more disagreement, and that can make it
Speaker 1: harder to know what's true. But that's okay, because hard
Speaker 1: has to be okay. At the end of Invisible Man,
Speaker 1: the Invisible Man is hiding out in a basement, siphoning electricity,
Speaker 1: listening to Louis Armstrom records, talking about what he knows,
Speaker 1: straight to the reader unseen but heard. I love the
Speaker 1: book's last line, so we thought it was only right
Speaker 1: to ask debait sisters to read it out loud. Who
Speaker 1: knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you,
Speaker 1: some truths still can't be spoken. Some frequencies haven't yet
Speaker 1: been heard, but you can still set them down for
Speaker 1: the record. You listen, you record, and you're right, because
Speaker 1: the half still hasn't yet been told. The Last Archive
Speaker 1: is produced by Sophie Crane, mccabbon and Bennette of Haafrey.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is
Speaker 1: Mia Loebell. Jason Gambrell and Martinin Gonzalez are our engineers.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss
Speaker 1: and John Evans of Stellwagen Sinfinett. Many of our sound
Speaker 1: effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Janette Foundation.
Speaker 1: Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones,
Speaker 1: Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent.
Speaker 1: The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Speaker 1: Andy Lancett at the w NYC Archives, the American folk
Speaker 1: Life Center at the Library of Congress, Alex Allenson at
Speaker 1: the Bridge Sound and Stage, and Simon Leak at Pushka.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carly Migliore, Emily Rustick,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw,
Speaker 1: Olivia Oldham, Henriet O'Reilly alive, Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector
Speaker 1: I'm gillipour