 Welcome to the British Library and the big news here is that our epic new exhibition, Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights, is now open to the public. So if you live in London Town, what are you waiting for? Tonight though, we're online. I'm B Rollat of the Cultural Events team and we're bringing together both sides of the Atlantic to celebrate a new book. It's called Wake, The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Rebels by Dr Rebecca Hall and artist Hugo Martinez. By the book, it's available here right now, you just click. It's an extraordinary piece of work as you're about to hear, not only for the important story that it relates, but also for the story behind that and of what this cost Dr Hall to research and to write and to guide us through this double story. I'm delighted to welcome back a friend of the British Library, the renowned critic, playwright, broadcaster and a non-stop beacon of brightness, Bonnie Greer. Over to you, Bonnie. Thank you. Thank you, B. And it's really always great to be back at the British Library and thank you everybody for joining us. I just want to say that this is a great honor to be able to do this tonight, not only because it's the British Library, but because I did a podcast in 2019 called In Search of Black History for Audible UK. And one of the contributors was Dr Rebecca Hall whose book we're talking about and celebrating tonight, Wake, The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Rebels. I always show the book and the illustrator artist Hugo Martinez is with us as well. And I just want to say and I never say this, Rebecca changed my life. And so I'm sort of trembling in a way to do this and sure I will mess up in every capacity, but she changed my life and changed my thinking about Africa, about my ancestors who like hers were enslaved Africans and about the slave ships. And I do mean totally changes. So I want to just get right into this. I just want to also say Rebecca's at the Schaumburg in Harlem, the great library of African American history and research is the British Library of African America. And Hugo is in New Orleans where we all wish we was, except the hurricanes come. So anyway, this is the difference and the link that we're doing. So let's just get right to this. And Rebecca, you begin this book and I want to say that this book is your journey and becomes Hugo's journey as well as he takes on the job, the task, the work of rendering you and your feelings and what you see and your stories into visual. And I want to talk to him about that just a bit. But you begin this by saying I am an historian and I am haunted. What do you mean by that? Yeah. Well, yeah, like you said, you know, being the descendants of enslaved people. I have my paternal grandparents were actually born in slavery. My grandmother was born on a plantation in Missouri, and my grandfather was born on a plantation in Tennessee, both in 1860. And so the idea that slavery was something that was really far away, you know, my own personal story relies that, you know, I mean, there's a huge generation skip in my family. You know, it's kind of unusual to be, you know, my age, which is like 58 and have grandparents who were born enslaved. But the fact that it's possible should let people understand that we're talking about recent, recent history. And here, in the United States, like it's hard for me to speak about the UK in particular, but here in the United States, the whole country is haunted by the legacy of slavery and being in the wake of slavery and, you know, not having had any kind of truth and reconciliation or any kind of coming to terms with this history, you know, really kind of poisons this country in a lot of ways. You know, when you talk about the complications of it, you know, I always tell people never go on ancestry.com because it's just the worst. And I found out that one of my ancestors who was a man of African descent actually owned African people himself. So, you know, that's a whole other voyage down the horror, horror trail. Hugo, tell me about yourself because you're new for me. I know, I know a bit about Rebecca, tell me about yourself. You mute it. I had to unmute myself. There are texts coming by and I didn't want that to invade the sound. I was born in California to Nick Rogwin family, you know, part of what was really fascinating to me about this story is just, you know, I have had women in my life that were revolutionaries. And, you know, there is a kind of a kindred ship that I saw in this story with regards to that. And I would think about that family often when I read the script and read Rebecca's papers. And anyway, that's part of my passion for this book. But I grew up in California. I lived in Nashville, Tennessee for almost 20 years and then I moved to New Orleans about seven or eight years ago. And in that period of time, I guess I was always interested in telling stories visually. I did a graphic design for a while and that was some of what helped shape how I did things in this project. And then I delved into doing illustration, doing that just kind of on my own, a lot of like, a lot of independent publishing on my part of stories that I felt had resonance with resistance and with issues addressing a lot of the aggressive foreign policies that the U.S. has created. You know, this book, thank you for that, Hugo. This book, I forgot to also add that Rebecca is a lawyer and law is in my family. So I'm always interested in lawyer heads, you know, lawyer minds. Lawyer minds always fascinated me and fascinate me. And this book is got not only the dogged sort of intensity of an historian, it's got a lawyer's intensity. You have cases you want to examine. You're knocking on doors. You're going up and asking people, you know, what happened to this and the precision and the preciseness of your asking about these records really takes it out of the historian's quest into you're trying to, you have a case that you're trying to prove and you start off with being a lawyer and you start off with looking at how your African American women plaintiffs, the plaintiffs were treated in different cases. Can you tell us a tiny bit about that and how that sparked you to go back and get your PhD in another area? Yeah, so I practiced law for eight years in Oakland, California. I did, I worked with... You need to talk about Oakland because that's very special place to practice. Yeah, I moved there from New York because I went to Berkeley Law and I stayed there. But I worked with low income tenants and I kept finding all these kind of deformations in the legal process that was hard to put kind of a name on because, you know, you're taught that, I mean, I didn't think, you know, I could perform miracles as a lawyer. But I thought that there would be some sort of basic justice and, you know, I'd have cases where I'd have white plaintiffs and black plaintiffs and it'd be the exact same fact. And the black plaintiffs would get half the damages. And, you know, things like this where, you know, I would go into a courtroom and I would not be read as the attorney, I'd be read as like some criminal defendant. So I got really sick of that and I wanted to, you know, understand it more. And so I went back and did seven more years of postgraduate education to get this PhD. But Bonnie, if it's okay with you, I'd like to respond to what you were saying about building a case. You know, that's a historian's art as well. But I appreciate you sort of teasing out how the lawyer part, because it really is about interrogating these sources. You know, you know, if we want to talk just a little bit about the of slave ship revolts and women's involvement in that. Before you get there, because that's the creme de la creme of everything, that's really what changed me. And I want to get to that. I want to stay with a tiny bit with the lawyer part, because one of my pet peeves, and I've said this to you, and I've said this to you, Hugo, a lot of people are teaching black history and running around talking about black history. But they haven't got a lot of facts. You know, they have a lot of facts mixed with fantasy, mixed with people's ideas about things. And you've been very dogged about facts. You really want to know what are the facts, what really happened. And to go back to thinking about you in that lawyer head, I just loved you pursuing Dom Regina. Can you explain that? Because a lot of people don't know what that means and what it means in relation to not only our ancestors, but to the United States of America itself. Yeah. Well, okay. So I look the book opens. I look at two revolts that happened early in the 1700s when in New York City, when it was a colony of England. And the main, the primary sources I had were court records. Dom Regina, the queen, who at that point was Queen Anne, I believe. Yes. Her name is repeatedly invoked in legal documents, almost to create some kind of jurisdiction, some kind of power, you know, where the language becomes an instantiation of the power. And the crime against the state is the crime against the queen. And, you know, the crime of revolt. So there's an image in the book where, I don't know if folks can see this, where, you know, I'm looking through the documents and there's so much of the text is spent just talking about Dom Regina, you know, Defender of the Faith, you know, paragraph after paragraph about, you know, oh, and then so little, you know, actually to none of the voices of the enslaved people. And that tells us, and that's what was so moving to me, is that you're piling through these documents looking for human beings, looking for voices, and it becomes even more in the book so powerful. And Hugo's drawing of you like just, you know, fighting this through, that it best becomes very obvious that this is property people, we're talking about property and we talk. We talk a lot about, we use the term slaves as property. But in your book, you show what that really, really means, how people are treated, how they when they come up before the law, how they're executed, why they're executed, what happens with women in particular, and you find an old statue that goes back to, I think, to Edward III or something, where if a woman kills her husband, she's committed treason. And so she's executed. And then that's doubly done if you're an African, a woman of African descent, your property. So all of this sort of complexity starts to come in. As you explore slave revolts in New York City, mostly we think about slavery as happening and slave revolts as happening in the South, you're up north. Right. Or we don't think about slave revolts at all. You know, I mean, they're hardly taught. But yes, and that's one of the reasons why I focused my research on New York City, besides being a New Yorker, I'm from New York. But it's so important for people to understand that slavery was all over British America. And that slavery was also an urban phenomenon. It was a northern phenomenon. And that enslaved people were, they were a fifth of the population in the time period that I'm looking in the early 1700s. And they helped build this, this, this city. And it's, and it's, you know, it's the financial capital of the United States, you know, some are through the world. And, you know, it's important for people to understand the role of the enslaved in creating this city. How can you tell us one story about New York? Because that again, that really changed me a lot when I learned about these women and what they tried to do and what happened to them. In New York? Sure. There's a revolt that happened in, in 1712. And there are a few articles written about it, and there's a book chapter here and there written about it, that all describe the people involved as men. But what I found was correspondence with the colonial governor of New York to the privy council, describing the revolt and talking about a one woman who was pregnant, whose, whose execution was suspended because she was pregnant, because that baby belonged to somebody, right, its property. And I was like, well, if there was one woman, maybe there were more women. And I went to look at this at the court records. And yes, there were, there were more women involved in that revolt. And, you know, they, they got together, they, they made a pack of packed of secrecy. And they lit a building on fire. And as people, which was, you know, fire was a really big deal in that time period, you know, level an entire city. And as the white people came to put the fire out, they killed them as they came. And, and then they fled. And some probably escaped, I don't know, but there were, you know, 21 people tried and, you know, and executed. So what was it like you go for you when you got the text, and you, you, you know, with your own activism, your own interest in the things that Rebecca is talking about, resistance, all that. How did you draw these women? They have a very particular look. And you, you feel as if something is happening inside that you drew them from the inside in sense. So I, I think there was a combination of what's inside and then looking at reference as well. You know, there was a lot of reference that, that, you know, Rebecca sent to me of what the clothing in attire was for enslaved people of that time. And then I had to delve a little bit to like, to try to create variety within that or, or try to find different varieties of style because it wasn't all uniform. And we need that also to just depicted individuals. And so there was that. And then I tried to look at images of women from West Africa and try to just design characters that, that would fit the description of who, who they were in the story. Their faces, you go with what struck me what really is such a perfect kind of, it was, it's not illustration, it's a text itself. The, the women look like they're lit from within, almost as if they are lit. Like you put a fire or lamp inside of them, which I found incredible really. Because there are a lot of, I mean, I'm not, I'm not illustrating, how do I know, but I mean, there are a lot of ways you could, you could do a lot of stuff with this. And if you hear the word graphic novel, and people go, oh, you know, when I, when you first, when I knew you were taking your research and you wanted to go down that route, I thought, well, no, we're back at all. But you know, because I did, I just thought, I just want to read it. But what you've done is you haven't illustrated it. You added another layer to Rebecca's quest, her story, you even made her into this part of these women as well, because she does begin saying she's haunted. And she's haunted all the way through. And you see her standing at library, like looking into the distance, like basically her face is saying, what? And knocking on doors and pursuing. And you create all of these women, especially with this light. Am I overstating that in a sense? Because I did do that. I mean, it's so flattering to hear that that's how they're perceived. I think they became characters internally, for sure. They were, you know, there are people that I wanted to get to know, as I drew them, because they were, they were, you know, they're, they had to come alive somehow. And I, yeah, I think they had to have, you know, some kind of expression. And I think, you know, for me, I think that a lot of that comes through in their facial expression. And, and their, and their gesture. They're amazing. They're amazing. I want to say, yes, I just want to say about the title, because a lot of people are getting messed up over this, because you know, it's like over here, like it is in America. I don't even want to say the word, because I'm tired of saying it, because it's a beautiful word. Woke is a beautiful word. It's one of the, one of the signs of the underground railroad that people use, and it's just been debased. But this book is called Wake. And it is, and at first, before I understood Rebecca's explanation, I thought Wake was the wake of the slave ship. Oh, I mean, that's the thing. It has multiple balances, right? And also the wake of slavery. You say that in the wake of that. But for me, visually, I saw the wake of the slave ship, which is where I feel I live. Right. Wow, that's powerful. And that's, that's what we're trying to, to, to convey. So Wake has this multiple balances, right? It's the wake of the ship. It's living in the wake of slavery. A wake is a way to honor the dead. And so the book does all of, all of those things that was, was, you know, was the, was the goal. And can I just say one thing about graphic novels? Yes, ma'am. You know, I, I, I think that particular medium that, that allows for, you know, text, which is linear and then art, which is kind of all at once, lets you do things you can't do in other mediums. And some of the most powerful works like Mouse by Art Spiegelman or Holocaust. Yeah. I mean, and in order to tell these intertwined stories, right? Because I'm telling the stories of these women and revolt. And I'm telling the story of my researching the revolts. And I'm telling the story about living in the wake of slavery. This is a lot of intertwined things. And so, and the graphic novel medium is really important for that. There's, there's an image of me kind of almost like passed out in an archive and reaching for me. I think we have this image. But I mean, I'll just show it in the, in the book. Before this, there's a revolt on a slave ship and, you know, these women end up overboard. And and their hands sort of reach for me and in the archive and it and where, and I say I'm a historian and I'm haunted. And so this layer of past, present, and future, the graphic novel medium is perfect for doing that. Can you tell us, Rebecca, thank you for that. Can you tell us the story of the Negro thing? That's a very frustrating story. So I uncovered a revolt that that I had discovered myself that occurred in what's now Elmhurst Queens, but at the time was called Newtown. And it was led by a woman. The records are sparse. And there are big gaps but you know, we have correspondence from the colonial governor again to the privy council explaining what happened. There's newspaper articles. And they refer to the woman who read this revolt as the Negro fiend, or sometimes the Negro wench. And I was really wanting to find her name. And I thought if I could get hold of the court records, I could find her name. And there was a trial and she was found guilty and she was burned at the stake. And her name would have been documented in those court records, but I could not get access to those court records. And that you said, I mean, you talked about the historian's worst nightmare. I mean, you used that phrase. I don't know if it was in relation to the Negro fiend, but you just said at one point you were caught up in the historian's worst nightmare, which is what? It's just like trying to find, trying to put the story together. Trying to bring these people to life and just having huge pieces of the record missing. The records are missing for a lot of reasons, but if you're going to talk about enslaved women in the 1700s, there were very few records of them at all. They weren't considered something that you would even create a document about. And you know, what changed me before we talk about coming over to these shores, which was one of my favorites of your adventures. I mean, this really should be a series. I don't know who would play you. Maybe you should play yourself. It's just, it's amazing. What really changed me and really made me rethink Africa, maybe rethink black history, made me rethink black women in history and women in history period was when I was growing up in the 60s, you know, all these movies were coming out of our slave revolts on ships and it was all guys. So the women were like tied up underneath the boat and being very frail and frightened. And the men were up at the top fighting. Now, what you made me rethink is that's actually illogical. If you think about the fact that why would they want men unchained on the top of the ship when they were the strength? They were, I mean, you got these young guys, why would you want them unfettered? But you wouldn't mind having the women untethered because they're women. And that's that whole idea of womanhood. What are they going to do? Right. So yeah, this is a really important part of the book and an important part of my research. And first of all, it's very important to understand that the slave trade, the British slave trade was a business. It was highly regulated. There were business practices. And in those documents exist. And historians, you know, once the internet was available, historians who studied slave, the slave trade, you know, some, some quantitative historians came together and created this incredible database that's free to access online, the Atlantic slave trade database with over 35,000 voyages of slave ships. And you can search that database. And the, you know, these historians searched it, and they found that there was a revolt on one in 10 of these ships, which was completely unexpected because slave ship revolts are mainly almost the kind of suicide. And then they compared the ships that had revolts with the ships that didn't have revolts. And the only difference they could find is that the more women there were on a ship, the more likely there would be a revolt. Let's freeze that for a minute. No, let's read that for a minute, because I want you to say that again, because that is the turnaround point for me. That was the icebreaker. That was the revolution. When you said that in your research talk with my for my podcast, can you just say that again, because people need to hear that is very important. Right. The more women there were on a ship, the more likely there would be a slave ship revolt. And these historians who did this research dismissed this as some kind of fluke because they they knew that women didn't weren't involved in this kind of activity. So when I came to England to research, you know, records about slave ship, which were captains logs and surgeons logs and all kinds of, you know, paperwork documenting slave ship voyages and slave ship revolt. Why are they documenting this? Because slave ships are insured. They're insured, you know, there's actually was an insurance provision that Lloyds of London and other, you know, slave ship insurers created that was called the insurrection of cargo. So if there was a revolt on your ship, you needed to turn in the documentation if you're going to get your insurance claim. No, no, no, no, this this this is what changed me to know this. I may name my production company insurrection cargo because of that. And the fact that the fact that Lloyds of London and this is what I try to say to people. When you're talking about tearing down statues, that's well and good. But you have to understand that every brick, waterfall, and the stuff under your feet is imperial and colonial, everything that this country was built on it, literally brick by brick by brick. And and Lloyds of London, uh, which came literally into being to ensure slave ships well against well partly their policy came into being. Yeah, I mean, they they were a very early maritime insurer and slave ships was a big part of that business. And women were and women, I mean, at one point you talk on my podcast about one one group of women actually turned a ship around about three or four times, they were going back to Africa, and they kept the ship just turned around until they stopped it basically. I think in order to understand what's going on on these slave ships, it's really important to understand the business practices of the Royal African Company. And the way it was set up was that once a ship left the coast of Africa, before it left the coast, every enslaved person all the captives were below deck and chained. Once the ship left the coast, the women were unchained and brought on deck. And so when I kept reading these captain's logs and would read actually sort of, you know, detailed stories of revolts, there were things like everything from we had another revolt today, but we keep checking the men's chains. I don't understand how that's happening. I mean, there were no men who got free or or more specifically like the women got the men free of their chains or, you know, the women grabbed the weapons from the armory chest, which was also on deck, you know, and started this revolt. And there was a revolt on the ship, the unity. There were four revolts that happened on that one voyage. And there were women involved, you know, documented in the captain's log in all of them. You know, you talk about, I mean, it's not actually hilarious, but it actually kind of is when you come to London and you're just trying to get some answers. That's all. I mean, not trying to cause any problems. You just want somebody to answer you. And it's, it's, I mean, that's a movie in and of itself. I mean, I love when you went into the Africa gallery at the British Museum and called it a crime scene. And I thought, you know, that is really incredibly ironic because you've inspired me to actually go back to the British Museum and do my project there with the director of the British Museum. So, you know, we're in there and you're one of the genesis and he sends his greetings to you. You know, it's incredible. It's, so you walk through London, you know, with your same dogged, intense, scrutiny, and passion about trying to just find the story, trying to find the story as an historian, trying to find the story as a detective, trying to find the story as a lawyer, and trying to find the story as a descendant of enslaved people. And you talk a lot about what I feel about the duties of the ancestors, the ancestral duty. Can you talk us through that a bit? Yeah. I was at a protest, well, I was at a lot of protests last summer, and I saw this woman wearing a t-shirt, and I think I've seen these t-shirts in other pictures, but the t-shirt said something like, this isn't my, this isn't my ancestors uprising, you know, and, you know, the idea being that, you know, we are going to be more radical and confrontational than our ancestors who were not. And that made me so sad because, you know, Black history is not taught in this country and African-American people don't know their history, and our history is filled with resistance. That is how we survived 400 years and thrived. And the part of the book that's about awake, about honoring the dead, you know, about us needing to have a memory that's longer than our lifespan, this is like a crucial part, you know, of this book. And there was an image, it was actually of a woman emerging from the water after she went overboard in the unity, and I actually had, I dreamed that. There it is, there it is. I dreamed that image. And I woke up and I called Hugo, and I was like, I had this dream, can you draw it? And he kept trying, like over, like he would put something, and I'm like, it's not quite it, it's not quite it. And then, like, you know, then he got it, he got it. And I was like, exactly, you know, for the future, you know, this woman, you know, who was, you know, thrown overboard in the process of initiating a revolt, you know, she's back, you know, she's back, you know, through this work, and she's going to bring us into the future. And I think it terrifies me a little bit, and I'm glad you brought up that march, and it's the terror of an elder. And at one point, you watched the gen, I watched generations now, young people, and, you know, I stand back, you know, because I know everybody's got to go through their own definition of the moment that they're in, and the historical moment that they end, that I took that moment in 68 when I was a teenager, and they're taking that moment now. But, you know, the fact that there's so, it's so ahistorical that it's shocking in a way. And you think, you know, how are we going to go forward if people don't know about the past, if they don't know that our whole history is resistance, our whole, our whole life is about resistance. I worked with Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party, and you couldn't tell me 50 years ago that I would be talking about some of the things I'm talking about now. So it's, you know, the arc of history is, as Dr. King said, is a long one. And I feel one of the contributions that your book has made, and what, and your, and Hugo's work, is to remind people of the legacy of resistance. That's how we're here. That's how we're breathing. We weren't a bunch of passive people sitting around, getting beat up, and trying to figure out who am I going to do next. And we come from warrior women as well, not just women who, you know, this ain't going with the wind. This, this, and even, even, even, exactly, but even, even the people who played and gone with the wind, they were warrior women. They just took the money and took that thing. But I, I, you know, I want to, I love the fact that you made a book about warrior women, and you made a book about women being erased from history as a systemic, systematic part of what the historical record is, where historians would look at this, this, this information and go, no, it's women. I don't believe that I don't buy it. Or in my time, let's keep the women down, because we need to bring the brothers up a little bit more, because all this stuff is happening. And women still were sort of put in their, their body. That's not an or. That's the cause. What you're describing of, of, of, we've got to keep the women down and put the men up is why all of this historical work written about slave revolts, like this was the first generation of historians, you know, black men writing about revolt in the context of the late 60s and 70s, when all of the discourse was about how black people had dysfunctional gender roles and black women were emasculated. And so the, so the discourse back against it was this, no, black women are, are behind and quiet and et cetera, you know, and, and so these historians who are writing these history, this history in this time period are writing things like, of course, women weren't involved in this revolt, women in Africa were in a separate private sphere, like they were here. It's like, no, they weren't like, you don't know what you're talking about. You know, and, and, you know, there it's very developed martial tradition of women in Africa, you know, not in all nations by, by any means, but the homemade which you taught in Dahomey. Well, yes, but there's also, you know, stories of, you know, evil women defending their village from slave raiders. There's, I mean, there's a, there's a, you know, it's not just Dahomey. Dahomey is a very intense case because, you know, they were feeling an army of 10,000 women. That, that's something that, yeah, it's, it's, it's a unique case. Is it true that they, they were the women who wound up in Haiti and actually the French had to take them on? I mean, they were, they were, they were warrior cast and they just thought they were just women who were just laying around, you know, whatever they thought and then found out that they were confronting, you know, warriors, basically soldiers and didn't know that they were fighting. Yeah, you know, so there, there's been some recent work done on that where, you know, a lot of the people who were sold as captives were war captives. So like one army would defeat the other army, army, and then they would like, you know, sell all the war captives, you know, into the trade. And so, you know, there would be entire slave ships full of warriors, you know, men and women. And then they would get to Cuba or Haiti or Jamaica or whatever. And, and yet you, there's definitely more, I mean, this is sort of beyond the Caribbean is beyond my, but there's been some interesting work done in that area. You know, one last observation before we go to questions if we have any. Your work, particularly about women on slave ships developed, helped me develop a theory that I'm working on at the British Museum and I call it Meta Africa. And to me, the user word diaspora is too dainty in a way. I mean, it's too benign. It's too genteel. And, and for me, the fact that these were nations on these ships, these weren't just black people and they were anonymous. These were nations and they, some of them were enemies and they were on these ships together and they were starting to, they had to find a way to survive together. They had to find a language together. They had to find a way to be together and to survive. And it creates within all of us, I think, who are of African descent outside of Africa, this incredible I call crisis competence where we just, we survive, we make it, we know how to do that because we survive that passage. And I want to thank you for that because that, that really, that's the part that really, really changed my whole way of thinking. And Rebecca, you, you talk about Chicago. I mean, that's my hometown. You did you? Did you talk about, you talked about some, you had a Chicago, it was something that said Chicago or when your relatives were out in your head. Do you remember? Yeah, I remember this is a crazy, right? Okay. At the end of I think chapter six or chapter five, where, where your grandmother is moving to Chicago from Nebraska. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. I'm halfway through another book. This is a lot. You're right. Chicago is in this book. Thank you Hugo. I thought so. I thought it was going crazy. Right. Yeah. But I wanted to, I just wanted to respond just a little bit to what you were saying about Meda Africa. I think, you know, historians really, you know, are studying the Atlantic world, like understanding the relationship between Europe and all of its nations and Africa and all of its nations and the Americas. It's a very complex interwoven history that can't be broken down into what we see as nation states. And so, you know, this history is fascinating. It's intriguing. And there's always more, always more to learn. And that's how, and uncover, and that's, that's the historian's craft, you know, the historian's craft is to uncover the history. And also to, to uncover the history, but also to tell the story in a way that you have to honor the story, which you do brilliantly, both of you, both of you. But also you leave the door open, which is what somebody like me, even though I read history at the undergraduate level, and have always been a student of history, you left the, you leave the door open for investigation, you leave the door open for adventure, and you leave the door open for, I'm going to use a baseball term, left field thinking in some kind of way. Because, because in a sense, we are all children of a kind of line about being, you know, the descendant of enslave. And some of those lines, some of that line is necessary to have in order for, I guess, the narrative to keep going. But there's so many, there's so much nuance. There's so much layer, there's so many layers. There's so much hidden history that I think would change the game if it came up. I mean, it's particularly about what women and the, and the role of women on those slave ships, I think would be a total revolution. It totally revolutionized me. Bonnie, get me into Lloyds of London. Get me into the archive, and we're, and we're going to uncover some more, more stories. We have to, because I think those stories and, and to look at the role of women in this whole story of enslavement is key. Rebecca, what was the hardest thing for you to do? I mean, what was just the hardest that you faced that you found out that you, that you had to chase up? I think reading, reading so many slave ship captains logs when I was in London, like doing that, like seven, eight hours a day for, you know, two months. And, you know, Hugo, there's a, there's a, there's a drawing, you know, of that Hugo created of the Brooks diagram. I don't know if somebody can, can pull that up. But, you know, this is a diagram I think that people might be, you know, familiar with. But what people don't understand is that diagram that shows, I'm trying to find it in the book, that that shows, yeah, that shows, thank you. You know, the proper stowage of captives or cargo on a slave ship. Can you talk us through it, Rebecca? Can you talk us through it? Yeah, it is actually, you know, people think this was some kind of abolitionist document to show how horrible the slave trade was. But it was actually created by parliament to regulate and ameliorate the conditions on slave ships. And this was the law about how many captives you could put on a ship and how you could quote, store the cargo, you know, and then abolitionists took it up to show, you know, how, how, how horrible, how horrible that was. And Hugo, I mean, you could talk about, actually we have time, I don't know, but, you know, how difficult it was for you to, to draw that. Yeah, I think, you know, the whole process of drawing, you know, you draw more than once, you know, you create a storyboard, you do your drawing, and then you ink it. So I, you know, I went over the images several times, and this one was particularly difficult to go through. I mean, there was a lot that was, that was very just impactful and hard to express. And that went in particular, you know, I read, you know, I read the book as a reader. And, and I, you know, I was hearing up, just, just looking at it. And the same went for when I was depicting that image. And just, you know, what you're saying about, about, oh, this is just the, this is what was intended to be the safer and better practices of, of, of using people as cargo. And seeing, I don't know, there was something about seeing what people were experiencing as they were treated as cargo. That just really was overwhelming for me to, to experience and, and, you know, looking at it and drawing it. I kept, you know, I don't know, I think this one took me a long time to, to. I was going to ask you about that. But you chose to do it. Yeah. Well, I asked him to do it. Right. Right. But, but he showed, but he did it, you know, he did it. And, and, and, and he went through that voyage. Hugo, do you have another image that you like to show us that, that tells us a bit about your process as well? Because I love the images you have of Rebecca, which I think are just amazing and captures her inner self as far as I understand that to be, but. They're, they're honestly a lot. You want to show the burial, the one, I think the last image. Yeah. So this is part of the, the valence of wake as an honoring the dead. Right. And so that's me in the, in the center. And, you know, I'm, I'm surrounded by enslaved people in what was called the Negro burying ground, which is in downtown New York. And that was destroyed. Did that go at 911? Is that still there? No, no, no, no. And Hugo and I went to, it's now a national monument. Hugo and I went there and, you know, took photos and spent time. And, and I think that really informed, right, Hugo, the way that you, that you depicted that. And to be, and to be in the middle of that, to put her Hugo in that, in that image was kind of an expression of where or how you felt actually about her, Rebecca's, I guess I was going to say role, but her movement through this story, through history. I think, you know, we actually took a photograph of, of Rebecca where there's an installation at that museum where, where there are like figures standing around a burial site. And it's, it's really a really moving photograph that, that, you know, had to be captured in this book I felt. And, and, you know, Rebecca referenced it in the, in the script when she gave it to me. And, you know, I agreed that this, this was the image that, that really connects that, that image of the past and the present as, as coexisting. And so much about this book is about how the, the present has not left the past. And, and, and we need to, we need to reckon with it continually. And, and, and I think that image is one of those that, that really is able to capture that along with this, the, this, this loving connection that Rebecca has with, with all of these historical people that, that, you know, are, that she and other historians are trying to bring to bring back to life. Can we see one of her images of the one you got, you got several that are very striking of Rebecca, who's sort of standing in, it's not a void because there are things around, but her, her quest is evident. And, and, and that I've never seen that before in, in any kind of a book that's illustrated and the author's involved. I've never seen that kind of, I guess, nakedness in a way where she's standing and she's stuck. And she's also raging at the same time. And you draw her body and, and, and her head in a particular way. And she's looking almost at us saying, we have to do something here. But I don't even, but they're stopping me. But, but why, oh, you got one, you got one. But what, but while you're looking, I, I think I would like to say as we were wrapping up that and, and, and to show the drawing, show the image is that Rebecca, for me, you are role model because you got on this path by yourself. Now you have people, there are people on it, there are people who've done things before, there are people who are doing things. So you weren't alone in that sense. But you did get on that path from another space and you decided, as you said at the beginning of your book, I am haunted. And you followed that haunt. And I think it's an inspiration for anybody, particularly women of color, particularly black women, to start where you are, start where you are and do your work if you feel what your work is, do it. And there it is. That's that. And that, that's the one where he's standing there basically asking the question into the ethos, into history, into the void, into the future. You know, basically, what, why don't, why isn't all this known? Where are the records? What's happening? What's happened? Why is this erasure? And you talk about erasure and I talk about erasure too. They're part of what's, what the intention of, of our, of historians in relation to us is erasure. The slavery was erasure as well. Yeah. I mean, this, this image here about being in the wake of the slave ship, where I say, you know, I was born to tell these stories. And I think, I mean, it kind of addresses what, what you were saying. I think a lot of the kind of haunting of history, we experience it like almost, you know, like I talked about in the book, like catching something out of the corner of your eye, but you can't quite see it. And in order to really be able to put it front and center, so you can see what's going on, you know, for me, that meant studying it. And staring it in the face as much as you, as much as you were able to do it. And, and also to deal with whatever you had to confront with, because you've got images of, you got images, if we can see those of you standing up in front of people. I mean, it's not funny, but you're standing there being obstructed. I mean, just basically people are obstructing you. And you guys recorded these basically guys saying, you know, I'll tell, I'll show you what I want to show you. Or I don't know what you're talking about. And their English is quite interesting. But do you have, you have, you have an image of one of these guys standing there. And just basically telling Rebecca, you know, this is on there, tell you, I show you what I want to show you. These belong to us, not to you. And these records, you know, I will divulge what I want to divulge. Are you talking about the Lloyds of London experience? Yeah. Yeah, very, very frustrating experience. I tried to use all of my legal and historical skills to talk myself into this archive. And it didn't work. They don't let people in there who are studying slavery. They just don't. And I understand that they've hired an internal archivist to, to reckon with this legacy. And sorry for being, what's the word? There's a word. I don't believe them. I mean, I'm sure they're gonna, I'm sure they're gonna, you know, pull up a couple records and say, see, we, we, we dealt with this. But if they really want to reckon with the history of their involvement in the history of the slave trade, they should let in historians like myself. And, and I guess in a sense, one of my big arguments is that the thing with systemic racism and, and what's so dangerous about systemic racism and so elusive is that systemic racism can pass out a couple of ice cream cones and people think something has happened. And, and it hasn't because we haven't been able to burrow in to the structure, to look at the sinews, to look at the, the, the stuff that makes it what it is. And until we're able to do that, and our allies are able to do that, then the system just keeps perpetuating itself and perpetuating itself and becomes a different shape, a different color, a couple of people get more jobs with more wars, whatever. But the same structure. And that's what exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And you want to go into the structure. And that's the issue for them is the structure. Is there one more thing, is there anything that the two of you want to say before we wrap? Because this is, this is, this is a discussion that is the time we had is too short to actually go into everything. The forensic activity, the, the kind of thinking about it in the legal way, and also in the historical way, and also in a poetic way that both of you did in the pursuit. And that, that above all is the most important thing for me. This is the journey of also two artists. And they use their tools and everything that they have, they try to bring to the story of uncovering particularly the story of African women and enslaved African women, and our ancestry of revolt, resistance, and survival. I want to say that Hugo draws everything by hand, right? So all of that is like pencil and then pen. Yeah. You know, and he poured his all into that, into that work. I can tell. I can tell by the way I can tell by the strokes. You can feel it as well that it's like that. It's very, very sort of, that's what I meant by the manuscripts in the, in the. Right. And that's what, that's what Hugo was doing. I am, I'm, this is an honor to meet you and I know we're going to meet each other in person. And your inspiration for me, even though I'm in a place that you call the crime scene, you know, sometimes, sometimes yes, you know, but sometimes you got to be there, you know, and, and it's, it's, it's really important to, to be in places, I think, to engage with the people who are there who want to be there and who are doing the kind of work that we need. And you know, I'm, I told you I'm like a technical, oh, there's a question. Oh, this is interesting, because I know the people involved with the Reich Museum's big exhibit called slavery. I mean, we, you know, I'm a museum person. So we don't talk about other museums at, at one museum, but it's massive. And this person wanted to know, have you ever looked at Dutch slavery? That's our last question. Yeah. So my, you know, when you get a PhD in history, you have to specialize. And, you know, my specialization is British America. And I haven't spent, I've read books about it. I know, you know, something, you know, about it. But it's not my area of expertise. But, you know, the Dutch slave trade was, was a real thing, you know, and there's, there's, there's plenty of work done on it, you know, if you want to learn more about it. So I just want to say thank you personally for inspiring me as a black woman, as a writer, as a former deputy chair of this, this great museum to see its beauty and to find the things inside of it that I can work with. Thank you very, very much for that. And Hugo, you're, I, you know, you're incredible personal work and you can feel it when you, when you look at every page. It's personal. It's involved. It's deep. And you extend Rebecca's story beautifully. And this book, Wake, it will change your life, too. I just urge everyone to get it. You will not look at black history again, in the same way, after you read it. And so I thank the British Library for this privilege of meeting one of my heroes. And thank you all for being with us tonight. Thank you, buddy. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Hugo.