WEBVTT - Unheard 0:00:15.396 --> 0:00:21.916 Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the 0:00:21.996 --> 0:00:29.036 known things go a quarter of the mind. Unfortunately, it's 0:00:29.076 --> 0:00:31.516 a mess in here half the time. I can't find 0:00:31.516 --> 0:00:36.036 what I came for. Dewey decimals something this place could 0:00:36.036 --> 0:00:40.396 do with some kind of an organizational scheme. Also, she's 0:00:40.476 --> 0:00:43.476 it's so noisy in here. What would this crystal radio 0:00:43.556 --> 0:00:47.316 set and the old record player running would break a 0:00:47.396 --> 0:00:52.036 break about? I don't know why do you go this place? 0:00:52.436 --> 0:00:56.156 This chamber of knowledge stores the facts that matter, and 0:00:56.316 --> 0:01:02.516 matters of fact, the sounds that matter. The sign on 0:01:02.556 --> 0:01:07.996 the door reads the last archive. Step through the door 0:01:08.476 --> 0:01:12.236 and into an apartment in Harlem. For the writer, Ralph 0:01:12.236 --> 0:01:16.236 Ellison is packing a suitcase while listening to the radio. 0:01:21.716 --> 0:01:28.636 This is the mutual broadcasting system. Keep listening, Paul cliff 0:01:28.716 --> 0:01:32.636 Edwards jukulele I. The White House as an aust that 0:01:32.756 --> 0:01:35.436 we are still at war with Japan. Smoke and dust 0:01:35.516 --> 0:01:38.516 clods still roll up from what once was one of 0:01:38.596 --> 0:01:44.596 Japan's greatest cities. August tenth, nineteen forty five. The United 0:01:44.636 --> 0:01:48.756 States has just dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 0:01:50.276 --> 0:01:54.436 In New York, Ralph Ellison was packing his bags. He'd 0:01:54.476 --> 0:01:57.356 been in the Merchant Marines during the war, but sick 0:01:57.396 --> 0:02:00.436 in seven different ways, he was put on leave to 0:02:00.476 --> 0:02:03.476 get some rest. He had other plans for the time off, though, 0:02:03.916 --> 0:02:07.356 he meant to write a great American novel. I know 0:02:07.436 --> 0:02:09.796 that Ellison left New York that day. I don't know 0:02:09.876 --> 0:02:11.516 for sure that he listened to radio while he was 0:02:11.556 --> 0:02:14.836 folding his shirts and bawling his socks. Historians talk a 0:02:14.836 --> 0:02:18.836 lot about the historical imagination. You can't make things up, 0:02:19.156 --> 0:02:21.316 but you do have to try to picture things. You 0:02:21.356 --> 0:02:22.876 have to try to put yourself in the place of 0:02:22.876 --> 0:02:25.996 your subject, in the mind of your subject, as best 0:02:25.996 --> 0:02:28.596 you can. If I'm interested in a person and a 0:02:28.596 --> 0:02:31.556 person's story, I want to know that person's whole story, 0:02:32.236 --> 0:02:35.436 the evidence of anyone's story that was patchy. That's where 0:02:35.476 --> 0:02:39.036 your imagination comes in. So I don't know that Ellison 0:02:39.156 --> 0:02:41.676 was listening to the radio that August day, but I 0:02:41.756 --> 0:02:43.716 like to think he was, and I have a pretty 0:02:43.716 --> 0:02:47.356 good reason to think he was. Ellison listened. He was 0:02:47.436 --> 0:02:50.876 super interested in sound. What you can know by hearing 0:02:51.396 --> 0:02:58.716 by listening. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about 0:02:58.716 --> 0:03:00.876 how we know what we know? How we used to 0:03:00.916 --> 0:03:04.236 know things and why sometimes lately it feels as though 0:03:04.276 --> 0:03:07.996 we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This 0:03:08.076 --> 0:03:12.276 season I've been asking who killed truth. One way truth 0:03:12.356 --> 0:03:15.196 dies is when the kinds of things taken as evidence shrink. 0:03:15.956 --> 0:03:18.116 A lot of people tend not to think about novels 0:03:18.196 --> 0:03:21.556 or poetry or any kind of literature as evidence, but 0:03:21.676 --> 0:03:24.796 I think they should. This episode is about a novel. 0:03:25.236 --> 0:03:27.596 The novel Ellison was packing his bags to go off 0:03:27.596 --> 0:03:29.636 and write, and it's about how he came to write 0:03:29.676 --> 0:03:36.236 it and why. Ellison decided he needed some quiet to write, 0:03:36.236 --> 0:03:38.636 and for that he needed to get out of the city. 0:03:39.516 --> 0:03:41.636 He had some friends who owned a farm in Vermont, 0:03:42.196 --> 0:03:44.596 so later that day he added north to the little 0:03:44.636 --> 0:03:48.476 town of Waitsfield, where a friend of his, Emily Bates, 0:03:48.836 --> 0:03:51.836 had a farm. Every summer she took her kids there. 0:03:52.716 --> 0:03:57.996 She found a farm that had no electricity, no running water. 0:03:58.196 --> 0:04:03.956 We lived very naturally. The rainwater. The rainwater would come 0:04:04.436 --> 0:04:07.636 down and fill a barrel. We use that for washing dishes. 0:04:07.956 --> 0:04:11.996 That's Emily's daughter, Diana Bates. She's a great grandmother now, 0:04:12.316 --> 0:04:15.316 but back in nineteen forty five, she was seven years old. 0:04:16.436 --> 0:04:19.876 It was a front room. That was probably the dining 0:04:19.956 --> 0:04:24.596 room in this farmhouse, and there was that's where our 0:04:24.636 --> 0:04:27.236 little tables were, But that became where he was going 0:04:27.276 --> 0:04:31.836 to work. Ellison got to Vermont and settled into write. 0:04:32.436 --> 0:04:35.436 A friend shipped him four pounds of Maxwell House coffee. 0:04:35.676 --> 0:04:39.836 He was ready, But then he found out a bitter truth. 0:04:40.316 --> 0:04:43.836 The country isn't as quiet as city people think. Dan's 0:04:43.916 --> 0:04:47.196 little sister Grace, who reminded me about that. It would 0:04:47.236 --> 0:04:50.436 have been noisier than because there was more bog life, 0:04:50.756 --> 0:04:53.036 and so you have the humming and the buzzing and 0:04:53.116 --> 0:04:56.556 the birds tweeting. And at that time there were no 0:04:56.756 --> 0:04:59.236 cars on the road. It was a dirt road, and 0:04:59.356 --> 0:05:01.676 the old man just once a day, and there's a 0:05:01.716 --> 0:05:04.596 certain time in the heat of the afternoon when the 0:05:04.676 --> 0:05:10.236 crow lets off. It's like to transport. It just transports 0:05:10.276 --> 0:05:14.396 you into another place. And I'm so oh, I don't 0:05:14.396 --> 0:05:16.556 want going to do that. I do at a home though, 0:05:16.556 --> 0:05:26.516 because they're they've taken it. That's fine, awful, beautiful, perfect, 0:05:26.836 --> 0:05:30.476 That's exactly it. Yeah, But the girls weren't really the problem. 0:05:30.716 --> 0:05:33.636 The kids were the problem. Their mother told the girls 0:05:33.676 --> 0:05:37.956 to hush, but they just couldn't Diana was irrepressible. She 0:05:38.036 --> 0:05:41.316 still is. I have to say then, I wasn't very 0:05:41.316 --> 0:05:45.276 happy about it because we had to be quiet. Oh yeah, 0:05:45.316 --> 0:05:49.476 so I do remember trowing. I always think of oranges, 0:05:49.516 --> 0:05:51.756 but I think it was probably something else at the 0:05:51.796 --> 0:05:55.196 door where he was writing. I don't know why I 0:05:55.236 --> 0:05:57.756 think it was oranges in my head now, but I'm 0:05:57.756 --> 0:06:00.196 pretty sure it wasn't. Because she were in Vermont, and 0:06:00.236 --> 0:06:02.636 this was the early time. You know that there wasn't 0:06:02.676 --> 0:06:05.676 any orange trees around, So it might have been apples, 0:06:05.756 --> 0:06:08.316 or it might have been stones, for all I know 0:06:08.676 --> 0:06:10.756 it was. But I flung up at the door and 0:06:10.876 --> 0:06:20.316 I ran. Ellison, exasperated, moved to the barn. He put 0:06:20.356 --> 0:06:23.596 some distance between himself and that bates girls the width 0:06:23.676 --> 0:06:27.116 of the road. In the quiet, he began to write. 0:06:28.196 --> 0:06:31.436 His imagination began to soar, fly like a bird to 0:06:31.476 --> 0:06:36.516 the clouds. And then right then, right there, he heard 0:06:36.556 --> 0:06:41.876 another noise, a voice in his head, the voice of 0:06:41.916 --> 0:06:46.596 a black man from the South. He did say things 0:06:47.316 --> 0:06:53.516 is sometimes advantageous to be unseen. He tried to ignore it, 0:06:53.556 --> 0:06:57.356 but he couldn't. He couldn't shake it, so he threw 0:06:57.356 --> 0:06:59.996 away the book he'd been writing, and he started writing 0:06:59.996 --> 0:07:02.756 a different one in the voice of this man, an 0:07:02.756 --> 0:07:06.996 American man, a black man. Grace Bates read me its 0:07:07.036 --> 0:07:13.076 opening lines. I am an invisible man. No, I am 0:07:13.156 --> 0:07:16.156 not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Powe. 0:07:17.276 --> 0:07:22.356 Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I 0:07:22.396 --> 0:07:26.236 am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber 0:07:26.316 --> 0:07:30.076 and liquids. And I might even be said to possess 0:07:30.116 --> 0:07:35.956 a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse 0:07:36.076 --> 0:07:40.276 to see me, like the bodiless heads you see sometimes 0:07:40.316 --> 0:07:43.916 in circus side shows. It is as though I have 0:07:44.116 --> 0:07:49.116 been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they 0:07:49.116 --> 0:07:54.116 approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves, or figments 0:07:54.156 --> 0:08:01.476 of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me that 0:08:01.676 --> 0:08:06.596 is so beautiful, That is so incredibly beautiful. The opening 0:08:06.636 --> 0:08:09.796 lines of one of the most famous novel of the 0:08:09.836 --> 0:08:14.636 twentieth century, Invisible Man, a story about what it means 0:08:14.676 --> 0:08:21.276 to be unseen and unheard. Out of Ellison's imagination, came proof. 0:08:22.716 --> 0:08:25.916 Ellison had a theory of history. He once explained it 0:08:25.956 --> 0:08:28.916 to his good friend, the writer Robert Penn Warren, who 0:08:28.956 --> 0:08:31.836 is working on an oral history project called who Speaks 0:08:31.836 --> 0:08:36.916 for the Negro Ellison called Warren read what you want 0:08:36.916 --> 0:08:45.036 to talk about? Oh? I don't know. Rather if it's 0:08:45.116 --> 0:08:51.596 the bath. The irony of American history is such that 0:08:52.236 --> 0:08:57.116 we're always trying to discover ourselves. People create themselves in 0:08:57.196 --> 0:09:02.516 the spectorating himself. This is very hard for some people 0:09:02.556 --> 0:09:05.876 to crash in writing a novel. Ellison set out to 0:09:05.956 --> 0:09:10.756 discover American history, to create American history. It took him 0:09:10.796 --> 0:09:13.276 seven years, all told, to finish the book he began 0:09:13.476 --> 0:09:16.436 up in that barn in Vermont. Invisible Man is a 0:09:16.476 --> 0:09:19.836 work of extraordinary literary imagination. But it's also a work 0:09:19.876 --> 0:09:23.716 of historical imagination, and it's also a piece of history. 0:09:24.156 --> 0:09:29.876 It rests on evidence, and it is evidence. Invisible Man 0:09:29.956 --> 0:09:31.876 tells the story of a man who leaves the Jim 0:09:31.876 --> 0:09:34.796 Crow south and heads north. It's often taken as an 0:09:34.836 --> 0:09:38.476 allegory for the entire African American experience, for the entire 0:09:38.516 --> 0:09:42.476 American experience, but it also comes out of Ellison's own life. 0:09:43.396 --> 0:09:48.316 Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in nineteen thirteen. Later, 0:09:48.436 --> 0:09:50.716 when he got to be famous, he talked about his 0:09:50.756 --> 0:09:54.396 early life a lot often to white interviewers like Red Warren, 0:09:54.756 --> 0:09:59.116 and even to studs Turkle, the celebrated oral historian. Where 0:09:59.116 --> 0:10:02.556 did your whatever it was that urge come from to 0:10:02.636 --> 0:10:09.636 be the right? Well? I always love to read, and 0:10:09.756 --> 0:10:13.836 my father was a great reader, although he died when 0:10:13.876 --> 0:10:19.436 I was three. I, as a young kid, dreamed a lot, 0:10:21.156 --> 0:10:25.316 loved to be told stories, and found a way of 0:10:25.436 --> 0:10:31.196 extending my environment through reading. And my mother was always 0:10:31.196 --> 0:10:35.716 bringing home books and magazines as she brought home Clasgow 0:10:35.756 --> 0:10:40.276 phonograph recordings from places where she worked. Ellison only knew 0:10:40.276 --> 0:10:42.636 his father through his words. A book of poems he 0:10:42.756 --> 0:10:46.396 left behind the letters the family kept a voice from 0:10:46.436 --> 0:10:49.956 beyond the grave. Ellison grew up working odd jobs to 0:10:50.036 --> 0:10:52.876 make ends meet, making ice cream sodas at a pharmacy, 0:10:52.956 --> 0:10:56.236 delivering newspapers. On the way to one of his jobs 0:10:56.356 --> 0:10:59.396 at a dentist's he'd pass a ku Klux Klan office. 0:11:00.116 --> 0:11:01.916 He had a vision of a life he wanted to lead. 0:11:04.036 --> 0:11:05.916 Maybe it was because of all those records his mother 0:11:05.956 --> 0:11:08.556 brought home from work, but he fell in love with music. 0:11:09.356 --> 0:11:13.156 He took up the trumpet. He loved sound. He built 0:11:13.156 --> 0:11:16.756 crystal set radios, made them out of doorbell wire, broken 0:11:16.796 --> 0:11:21.316 old telephones, and ice cream cartons. He wanted to write symphonies, 0:11:21.716 --> 0:11:24.596 a mishmash of classical and folk music, high and low, 0:11:25.156 --> 0:11:28.156 the music of everyone. He didn't have the money to 0:11:28.196 --> 0:11:31.156 go to college, but music got him there. On invitation 0:11:31.356 --> 0:11:34.116 to Tuskegee to be the first trumpeter in their orchestra 0:11:35.356 --> 0:11:37.956 in nineteen thirty three, he snagged a ride on a 0:11:37.996 --> 0:11:41.636 freight train headed for Alabama, but he never finished college. 0:11:41.996 --> 0:11:46.196 He ran out of money and left. This time he 0:11:46.316 --> 0:11:51.156 headed north. Now about what point in your life had 0:11:51.196 --> 0:11:55.036 you switched some music to writing. Well, actually I switched 0:11:56.076 --> 0:12:00.276 nineteen thirty seven. I left college and came to New 0:12:00.356 --> 0:12:04.196 York in thirty six to earn money. I which to 0:12:04.236 --> 0:12:10.796 go back, and as I as often happened, I found 0:12:10.836 --> 0:12:14.516 my plans change. That's Ellison on the NBC radio program 0:12:14.676 --> 0:12:17.716 Favorites of the Famous. In New York, he bounced around 0:12:17.716 --> 0:12:22.636 odd jobs, the Harlem YMCA, a psychoanalysts office, factory work. 0:12:23.316 --> 0:12:25.556 Sometimes we need didn't have a job, he'd sleep in 0:12:25.596 --> 0:12:28.796 the park. It was the Great Depression, a hard time 0:12:28.836 --> 0:12:34.236 for everyone. Nineteen thirty six, the year Ellison moved to 0:12:34.276 --> 0:12:37.276 New York, was the year after, FDR founded a massive 0:12:37.276 --> 0:12:41.316 new government agency known as the Works Progress Administration. It 0:12:41.476 --> 0:12:43.876 put people who'd lost their jobs to work building roads 0:12:43.876 --> 0:12:48.676 in parks and dams, and also writing literature. The WPA 0:12:48.756 --> 0:12:52.076 included something called the Federal Writers Project and employed about 0:12:52.076 --> 0:12:54.836 seven thousand out of work writers. They wrote plays, in 0:12:54.916 --> 0:12:59.676 poems and symphonies. They collected stories oral histories from Americans 0:12:59.716 --> 0:13:03.076 all over the country. Ellison started working for the Federal 0:13:03.076 --> 0:13:06.436 Writers Project in nineteen thirty eight. His job was to 0:13:06.476 --> 0:13:10.716 collect stories about black New Yorkers. The WPA paid around 0:13:10.716 --> 0:13:14.676 twenty five bucks a week, saved his life. All of 0:13:14.796 --> 0:13:17.716 the girls would have been hopefully taking courses in business 0:13:17.756 --> 0:13:22.276 and so on, went right into into the wa and 0:13:22.396 --> 0:13:26.036 they found a place in the society. So it was 0:13:26.556 --> 0:13:29.956 a moment of optimism for us. But for instance, either 0:13:30.036 --> 0:13:33.516 game right because I could get work with the WPA, 0:13:33.716 --> 0:13:38.836 wor research and learned to practice of my crowd. The 0:13:39.036 --> 0:13:42.636 WPA was the great patron of twentieth century American literature. 0:13:43.156 --> 0:13:47.876 Saw below, Zoraneil Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright. All of 0:13:47.916 --> 0:13:50.956 them worked for the WPA, which also often equipped them 0:13:50.956 --> 0:13:55.036 with cameras and tape recorders. Big heavy machines to make 0:13:55.036 --> 0:13:59.476 a record of American culture. The WPA was gathering a 0:13:59.556 --> 0:14:02.236 whole new body of evidence about the nation's past and 0:14:02.236 --> 0:14:06.236 its people, the evidence of history, the evidence of story. 0:14:07.156 --> 0:14:09.436 It would really seem that we had finally on up 0:14:09.436 --> 0:14:11.996 with the nation. But we can spend a day recording 0:14:11.996 --> 0:14:14.556 such folklore as we have heard today. And this is 0:14:14.556 --> 0:14:19.436 only a beginning, only a beginning. Voices that can be heard, 0:14:19.996 --> 0:14:24.036 reels that can be unspooled. Here in the last archive. 0:14:28.396 --> 0:14:31.996 In the nineteen thirties in Harlem, Ralph Ellison collected amazing 0:14:32.116 --> 0:14:35.796 oral histories. No one's ever found tape of those interviews, though, 0:14:36.356 --> 0:14:38.956 but a lot of recordings from the WPA's work do survive. 0:14:39.316 --> 0:14:44.636 They're scratchy and garbly, but they're fascinating. I think this 0:14:44.716 --> 0:14:46.796 one from Texas made with a machine that weighed one 0:14:46.836 --> 0:14:50.316 hundred and thirty pounds. It's a little difficult to decipher. 0:14:50.916 --> 0:14:55.636 So listen, hard, lady up the mat and that what 0:14:55.796 --> 0:15:00.836 if you want to antymbastic flags? You know, bank I 0:15:01.356 --> 0:15:04.796 remember that's a woman named Harriet Smith talking to a 0:15:04.836 --> 0:15:07.756 man named John Henry Fok in her house in Texas. 0:15:08.196 --> 0:15:10.956 Fock was a white man and collecting oral histories for 0:15:10.996 --> 0:15:16.636 the government and Smith. She'd been born into slavery. It's 0:15:16.636 --> 0:15:18.956 hard to understand this tape, but she's just told him 0:15:18.996 --> 0:15:21.836 to ask her whatever he wants. Well, ain't her about 0:15:21.876 --> 0:15:24.876 how old are you? Well, I don't know, miss, we 0:15:25.556 --> 0:15:29.516 don't know my age. On the buy that the childs 0:15:29.556 --> 0:15:33.356 I'm telling me my mom died, and she she didn't 0:15:33.396 --> 0:15:36.716 know want much about idea, But the children traced back 0:15:36.836 --> 0:15:41.796 from me that they explained up the math. Well, how 0:15:41.876 --> 0:15:45.036 old you when you were? Well, I was about thirteen 0:15:45.156 --> 0:15:49.356 years old. That's the breaks you can't remembered slavery days. 0:15:50.316 --> 0:15:52.916 I remember all our white school, and all the name 0:15:52.996 --> 0:15:58.396 of all the children called everyone, the children's names. The 0:15:58.476 --> 0:16:06.436 baby's boy. Harriet Smith belonged to the baby boy. She'd 0:16:06.476 --> 0:16:12.196 been thirteen. At the breakup the Civil War, the WPA 0:16:12.476 --> 0:16:16.476 had been trying to capture a vanishing archive, the stories 0:16:16.516 --> 0:16:21.316 of people like Harriet Smith. Four million Americans had been 0:16:21.396 --> 0:16:25.116 held in slavery before emancipation, and by the nineteen thirties 0:16:25.596 --> 0:16:28.716 the last of them were dying, and when they were gone, 0:16:29.276 --> 0:16:31.916 the evidence of slavery from the memory of people who 0:16:32.116 --> 0:16:38.596 endured it would disappear forever. The WPA set out to 0:16:38.676 --> 0:16:42.356 capture those memories. At first, the state offices of the 0:16:42.476 --> 0:16:45.996 Federal Writers Project oversaw the work. Then the Library of 0:16:46.036 --> 0:16:49.996 Congress took over. Interviewers would send transcripts of their interviews, 0:16:50.436 --> 0:16:54.436 more than two thousand of them, to Washington. These life histories, 0:16:54.796 --> 0:16:57.996 taken down as far as possible, in the narrator's words, 0:16:58.356 --> 0:17:03.596 constitute an invaluable body of unconscious evidence. Eventually, these interviews 0:17:03.636 --> 0:17:06.916 were published in a collection whose value is hard to describe, 0:17:07.516 --> 0:17:09.916 but the editor of the project once did a pretty 0:17:09.916 --> 0:17:12.596 good job of it. For the first time and the 0:17:12.796 --> 0:17:16.516 last time, a large number of surviving slaves, many of 0:17:16.596 --> 0:17:19.596 whom have since died, have been permitted to tell their 0:17:19.676 --> 0:17:24.476 own story in their own way. Interviewers who collected these 0:17:24.596 --> 0:17:27.636 oral histories were supposed to send tape recordings to Washington. 0:17:28.196 --> 0:17:31.196 Those reels as big as tricycle wheels. In ten cases. 0:17:32.036 --> 0:17:35.876 Sometimes they recorded with phonographs. The historical record in some 0:17:36.076 --> 0:17:40.396 cases was an actual record record how many, how many 0:17:40.436 --> 0:17:43.436 of how many slaves did he had? Man? He had 0:17:43.556 --> 0:17:51.476 my grandma and my mom. I'm always cool and them, 0:17:51.756 --> 0:17:54.956 you know, and then they've worked in the seas and everything. 0:17:55.036 --> 0:17:58.796 I remember when she used to float often, I've floud, 0:17:59.156 --> 0:18:03.476 I've thought often, my fa I'm very awful car Rolls 0:18:03.796 --> 0:18:08.036 dreammain is that right? As a historian, when I listened 0:18:08.036 --> 0:18:10.356 to Harriet Smith telling on Henry Fok about her life, 0:18:10.876 --> 0:18:13.676 I first thought is it's amazing that all this is 0:18:13.716 --> 0:18:16.716 now in the Library of Congress, because in the historical 0:18:16.796 --> 0:18:20.636 record words spoken by black people are rare. Probably that's 0:18:20.636 --> 0:18:23.836 because in the era of slavery, enslaved people couldn't ordinarily 0:18:23.876 --> 0:18:26.996 give testimony in court unless it was to testify against 0:18:27.036 --> 0:18:29.756 other slaves in cases of conspiracy, when they could give 0:18:29.756 --> 0:18:33.276 a special kind of testimony called negro evidence, but only 0:18:33.316 --> 0:18:38.316 after swearing a terrifying oath. You are brought hither as 0:18:38.356 --> 0:18:41.876 a witness, and by the direction of the law, I 0:18:42.036 --> 0:18:45.436 am to tell you, before you give your evidence, that 0:18:45.636 --> 0:18:49.756 you must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 0:18:49.956 --> 0:18:53.196 but the truth, and that if it be found hereafter 0:18:53.476 --> 0:18:57.436 that you tell a lie and give false testimony in 0:18:57.516 --> 0:19:02.276 this matter, you must, for so doing have both your 0:19:02.356 --> 0:19:06.796 ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and receive 0:19:07.476 --> 0:19:12.196 thirty nine last is on your bare back, well laid 0:19:12.476 --> 0:19:19.236 on at the common whipping post. The most notorious use 0:19:19.276 --> 0:19:21.756 of negro evidence in early America was a set of 0:19:21.836 --> 0:19:24.836 trials held in New York in seventeen forty one, when 0:19:24.956 --> 0:19:27.636 hundreds of men black men were accused of conspiring to 0:19:27.716 --> 0:19:30.716 burn down the city. I got really fascinated by this 0:19:30.796 --> 0:19:33.236 story years ago. I wrote a very long book about it. 0:19:33.516 --> 0:19:36.876 It's called New York Burning. Ralph Elson in the nineteen thirties, 0:19:36.876 --> 0:19:39.916 when he was working for the WPA, he got fascinated 0:19:39.956 --> 0:19:42.716 by this story too. He tracked it down. He found 0:19:42.756 --> 0:19:46.436 out all about negro evidence during those trials. In seventeen 0:19:46.556 --> 0:19:49.276 forty one, a New York judge complained that it was 0:19:49.356 --> 0:19:54.076 impossible to take negro evidence seriously. Many of them have 0:19:54.196 --> 0:19:58.876 a great deal of craft. Their unintelligible jargon stands them 0:19:58.916 --> 0:20:03.276 in great state to conceal their meaning. The law of 0:20:03.356 --> 0:20:07.036 negro evidence lasted a long time. Nearly a century later, 0:20:07.076 --> 0:20:09.596 when Frederick Douglas was growing up in Maryland and some 0:20:09.756 --> 0:20:12.356 white men beat him up, an assault witnessed by dozens 0:20:12.396 --> 0:20:15.596 of slaves. Douglas's owner tried to get a magistrate to 0:20:15.676 --> 0:20:19.236 press charges, but the magistrate said he couldn't do anything 0:20:19.396 --> 0:20:22.996 unless there'd been a white witness. Douglas later wrote about 0:20:22.996 --> 0:20:26.716 this in his autobiography. If I had been killed in 0:20:26.796 --> 0:20:30.676 the presence of a thousand colored people, their testimony combined 0:20:31.116 --> 0:20:34.676 would have been insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers. 0:20:35.396 --> 0:20:37.916 And over a century after that, in nineteen forty one, 0:20:38.716 --> 0:20:41.756 John Henry Fox asked Harriet Smith to serve as an 0:20:41.796 --> 0:20:46.636 eyewitness to her own life and yours blade remains same time. 0:20:51.036 --> 0:20:53.116 What would to preach a bridge about then? To say, 0:20:54.036 --> 0:20:58.236 now that you go recordings like these, they seem at 0:20:58.316 --> 0:21:02.876 first to upend centuries of evidentiary and justice. But then 0:21:03.556 --> 0:21:06.916 listening to this rasping record, he started to have questions, 0:21:07.756 --> 0:21:11.876 what really is going on here? Well, then the traits 0:21:11.916 --> 0:21:21.796 that you might helped to treat you good bye, They 0:21:21.956 --> 0:21:26.476 was good to us. Really it isn't just her and 0:21:26.596 --> 0:21:29.836 a bunch of these recordings. People interviewed say basically the 0:21:29.956 --> 0:21:35.156 same thing. Hey, slavery wasn't that bad, But that testimony 0:21:35.236 --> 0:21:38.596 contradicts just about every other possible type of evidence that survives. 0:21:39.636 --> 0:21:42.796 There are a few explanations for this discrepancy. Most of 0:21:42.836 --> 0:21:44.956 the people interviewed for this project were in their eighties. 0:21:45.676 --> 0:21:48.916 There were children before slavery ended. Maybe they'd been spared 0:21:48.916 --> 0:21:51.516 the worst of its miseries. But there was something else 0:21:51.596 --> 0:21:54.516 going on too. A couple of years back, the writer 0:21:54.636 --> 0:21:57.876 Debbie Nathan went sleothing and figured out that John Henry 0:21:57.916 --> 0:22:01.436 Fox and Harriet Smith were neighbors. Fox family lived only 0:22:01.476 --> 0:22:04.716 four blocks from Smith's. She'd known him since he was 0:22:04.756 --> 0:22:08.036 a baby. On the recordings, he calls her aunt Harriet, 0:22:08.636 --> 0:22:12.276 she calls him mister Falk. He was in his twenties, 0:22:12.636 --> 0:22:17.436 she was in her eighties. Falk, like Ellison, was interested 0:22:17.476 --> 0:22:21.516 in sound. Later he became a successful radio broadcaster. He 0:22:21.676 --> 0:22:24.876 was also a prominent liberal. He joined the NAACP and 0:22:24.996 --> 0:22:28.236 fought for civil rights. He was a famous storyteller. He 0:22:28.316 --> 0:22:31.036 used to tell a Christmas story that NPR broadcast every year. 0:22:31.476 --> 0:22:33.916 He's not the bad guy here, but he's not an 0:22:33.996 --> 0:22:38.516 innocent bystander either. Debby Nathan went through Fox files at 0:22:38.596 --> 0:22:41.916 UT Austin's Briscoe Center. One day she noticed an MP 0:22:42.076 --> 0:22:45.676 three mark Harriet Smith. Somehow John Fox had forgotten to 0:22:45.716 --> 0:22:50.756 submit that one recording to the Library of Congress any 0:22:50.876 --> 0:23:08.796 Us John Good High School, Slahama Cab Did you hear it? 0:23:09.356 --> 0:23:12.956 He asked her. Some folks were awful good to their slaves. 0:23:13.916 --> 0:23:18.076 Weren't they. Of course, that's what's known as a leading question. 0:23:19.116 --> 0:23:22.076 This wasn't just a personal dynamic between Harriet Smith and 0:23:22.196 --> 0:23:26.916 John Fog, though, between Aunt Harriet and mister Fogg, the 0:23:27.036 --> 0:23:30.996 problems with these interviews were often a lot worse. Some 0:23:31.116 --> 0:23:34.556 of the people asking the questions were actually descended from 0:23:34.596 --> 0:23:38.516 the owners of the people they were interviewing. Use your 0:23:38.556 --> 0:23:46.316 historical imagination sit on that porch. Harriet Smith wasn't going 0:23:46.356 --> 0:23:49.036 to give John Henry Fock real answers to his questions 0:23:49.116 --> 0:23:52.516 about slavery. He was a white man in Texas in 0:23:52.596 --> 0:23:57.436 nineteen forty one, lynching Texas. She told him some things. 0:23:57.996 --> 0:24:01.876 She didn't tell him everything. Mainly, she told him what 0:24:01.996 --> 0:24:14.076 she thought he wanted to hear. But Ralph Ellison, back 0:24:14.116 --> 0:24:17.116 in New York, he wasn't John Henry Fowk. He was 0:24:17.156 --> 0:24:20.636 a black man interviewing black people, a lot of whom 0:24:20.716 --> 0:24:23.516 had only lately come north from the Jim Crow South. 0:24:24.236 --> 0:24:26.956 They were part of something called the Great Migration, when 0:24:27.076 --> 0:24:31.396 millions of African Americans left the South. Ellison was part 0:24:31.436 --> 0:24:35.236 of that migration too. Black people who left the South 0:24:35.516 --> 0:24:39.956 went most off into cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, 0:24:40.276 --> 0:24:46.756 Los Angeles. Isabel Wilkerson appealed surprize winning reporter wrote about 0:24:46.756 --> 0:24:49.516 the Great Migration in a book called The Warmth of 0:24:49.636 --> 0:24:52.636 other Sons. Her book is beautiful and the way she 0:24:52.716 --> 0:24:56.916 put it together is incredible. She became a one woman WPA. 0:24:57.956 --> 0:25:00.156 She began working on the book in the nineteen nineties 0:25:00.596 --> 0:25:03.316 when she realized that those people who'd made the Great Migration, 0:25:03.836 --> 0:25:06.396 they weren't going to be around for much longer. So 0:25:06.596 --> 0:25:12.396 she began interviewing them as many as she could, you know, 0:25:12.476 --> 0:25:14.916 just the passage of time. And I was really running, 0:25:15.116 --> 0:25:17.996 racing against the clock. You took to like a thousand 0:25:18.076 --> 0:25:20.356 people or so when you were first doing you know, 0:25:20.476 --> 0:25:24.836 just finding people, hundreds and hundreds of people I did. 0:25:25.196 --> 0:25:28.516 I can never say that I'm going to take the 0:25:28.596 --> 0:25:32.956 easy route towards something, and this was a case in point. 0:25:33.276 --> 0:25:39.156 I went to Senior Citizens centers, I went to AARP meetings, 0:25:39.316 --> 0:25:44.836 I went to pensioners reunions and meetings that they have, 0:25:45.156 --> 0:25:48.796 the postal workers and the you know, the CTA bus drivers. 0:25:48.876 --> 0:25:51.116 I mean all of this. How conscious were you of 0:25:51.596 --> 0:25:54.356 the legacy of the you know, the Federal Writers Project 0:25:54.396 --> 0:25:57.676 At the WPA work of tracking down people who lived 0:25:58.036 --> 0:26:01.916 under slavery before they all passed on in the nineteen thirties. No. 0:26:02.076 --> 0:26:06.036 I absolutely felt that I was in a position to 0:26:06.396 --> 0:26:11.596 get testimony, you might say, from the surviving people of 0:26:11.676 --> 0:26:14.236 an entire era that was passing away, with each one 0:26:14.276 --> 0:26:16.956 of them going. It was like a mission I was on, 0:26:17.236 --> 0:26:22.396 and I was determined and felt that this was the 0:26:22.556 --> 0:26:25.396 last chance to get to hear from some of the people. 0:26:25.436 --> 0:26:28.556 And those stories just hadn't been written down. They hadn't 0:26:28.556 --> 0:26:32.996 been recorded at all. Really. No Wilkerson structured her book 0:26:33.036 --> 0:26:35.836 like a novel, writing together the stories of three lives. 0:26:36.556 --> 0:26:39.996 She'd started interviewing more than twelve hundred people, and then 0:26:40.076 --> 0:26:45.156 she narrowed them down to three. One of these three 0:26:45.196 --> 0:26:48.356 people was item A Brandon. She'd been born in Mississippi 0:26:48.436 --> 0:26:51.596 in nineteen thirteen and grew up picking cotton and hating it. 0:26:52.436 --> 0:26:54.676 When she was about six, two white boys grabbed her 0:26:54.716 --> 0:26:56.756 and held her by her ankles over a well, just 0:26:56.876 --> 0:26:59.756 to watch her squirm. She went to school only to 0:26:59.836 --> 0:27:03.156 eighth grade, you couldn't go any higher. When she was thirteen, 0:27:03.236 --> 0:27:05.436 two black boys she knew talk back to some white 0:27:05.516 --> 0:27:09.276 lady and they were lynched and so. In nineteen thirty seven, 0:27:09.316 --> 0:27:11.036 after some end with guns came to their house in 0:27:11.076 --> 0:27:12.796 the middle of the night looking for someone who stole 0:27:12.876 --> 0:27:16.556 some turkeys, Idemy and her husband, a man named Gladney, 0:27:17.036 --> 0:27:21.116