 started. Thank you all for staying and braving what is another snowstorm. My name is Tim McCarthy and I'm the host and director of the ART of Human Rights and this is the launch of our spring series and this is a collaboration between the American Repertory Theater and the CAR Center for Human Rights Policy, the Kennedy School, to use art to foster and inspire public conversations about human rights issues and political concerns. And so I am thrilled, thrilled beyond, beyond explanation to be sharing the stage tonight with three folks who need no introduction, but I will just run through them quickly. Eric Foner, who's been described as the nation's finest living historian. Susan Laurie Parks, whose play many of us have just seen and who is who has been described as the finest living playwright and and then my dear colleague and former professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who one of my students referred to last week as the Oprah of academia. Without the bank account. Right, right. So, so it's wonderful to have all of you here. Thank you so much for joining us today. So we're going to just have a conversation with four of us here for a bit and then we'll open it up for questions and comments from from the audience here. So thanks so much for being with us. So the first question I want to ask is to Susan Laurie, who's brilliant work we've we've just witnessed. And to talk a bit about what inspired you to write this play and at this particular moment, what you see it's sort of offering to the world. Oh, I don't know that the last one. But so I'll tell you about the show. You know, my father was a career army officer. He passed away. He was a career army officer before he was a professor. And my growing up, if your life is a piece of music, mine is the recurring motif, right, the chorus of my life. My growing up was my dad going away to war and coming home. He would go away and come back and go away and come back. And the story goes on the day I was born, my dad was out rehearsing for war. They called it being in the field, not behind a plow. But in a tank, he was a tank commander, really tall guy in a tank, rehearsing for doing war exercises. So the title was the beginning of it. And father comes home from the wars. And so I started writing. And yeah, other things came. Yes. So one thing that came is that this is set in the midst of the civil war, right, in and around emancipation, the emancipation proclamation. And yet it's an epic in so many ways in drawing from that tradition. And so what about the civil war is, you know, a fruitful place for you to locate this part of this epic? Yeah, I know, I know where I'm aware of the community that I am sitting in front of right now. And I'm one of those writers who writes and the ideas, if they come, the ideas that I have something to say about something come much later. Okay. All right. We'll get you to elaborate more on that in another question. So I want to ask Eric and skip to give us your this is the first time you've both seen this play. You just saw it for the first time and have heard about it in various ways. Give me your sort of audience reactions, not necessarily your scholarly reactions or critical reactions, but your audience member reactions. Eric, Eric. Well, I mean, I loved it. So congratulations. You know, it's it's fascinating. And I have to say, even though they're not here, the acting was superb. I mean, really, you know, congratulations to the actors. So, you know, to me, I mean, most of my scholarly work has focused on this question of freedom in one way or another. I can't remember them all, but I've written quite a few books with the word free or freedom in the title, freedom, nothing but freedom, free soil, free life, my most recent book, Gateway to Freedom. I've always been very interested in this question of what people think freedom is, how they achieve it, how they struggle to make it mean something, why it's never quite satisfactory in some ways. And so you, you know, I just I read this play through my own interest in that subject. And I think you did a great job of showing the complexities. And it's not, you know, freedom is not a simple thing. And even among a slave community of a few people, there's not one idea that everybody shares. There's conflict, there's fear, there's struggle. And, you know, so I just saw it as I think without being unkind to anyone in the, who is a movie director or theater, there's a lot of works which have a historical base, movies or plays, which really have no real understanding of the history. But in, I won't mention any names here. But, but I think this really captured something real about that, about that moment and about the, you know, the way people kind of responded to it. So, you know, that to me it brought alive things that were real in the history. So it's not a history, it's not a footnoted work of scholarship of history, but there are real insights into history there. So that's what it, that's, you know, that was what impressed me about it. Good. I'd like to preface my answer with a question by my friend Susie Lurk. How many months was hero gone? How many months? Yeah. Maybe the actors now. I'm sorry. I didn't, someone count. Oh, Benton. Yay, our hero. 18 months. Oh, thank you, Benton. I just want to know who the baby daddy was. That's all I'm talking about. And I'm not the only one. I was thinking, well, who's baby daddy? Penny's baby daddy? Yeah, you know, if he was gone eight months, that could be one baby, one daddy, but he was going 18 months. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. He was gone. Yes. More than, more than a year. Yeah, there you go. Well, he should have killed him. Skip, it's a human rights panel. We're not going to talk about killing people here. He were on that. But anyway, no, no, I love the play and I love the play because far too, I mean, Eric feels very strongly, Eric and our very, very good friends. And we have a very, a regular email exchange, particularly about things like historical accuracy and feature films. He's the historical accuracy and I'm the feature film. And we, he and I could argue about this all day long. But I've also found that historians, often, particularly liberal historians, historians of a left of center bent, often reduce the complexity of African American community in ways that are deeply offensive to me as an African American. And it's not a card I play in public because I don't, you know, when I was coming of age, we were talking about this before. I was an undergraduate Yale between 69 and 73. And it was the time of high essentialism. We didn't even know the word essentialism was, but we knew the white people weren't supposed to write about black people. Or if you were black, you had more authority, you know, another myths like that claims like that were made, which is just total rubbish. Smart people can master any subject and write about any subject with sympathy. We'll talk about that later. No, I know I will argue that till the day I die. You don't know what I'm okay, great, great. But I also know that there were times when historians, particularly white liberal historians would censor themselves in reaction to this bullying of black militants. So and I've had friends, not Eric, but I've had friends who were white and prominent historians would say, No, we can't talk about them public. Well, it might be true, you can say it, but I can't say it. Or this is what I think in private, but don't quote me, because I don't want to be accused of being a racist. And that's a sad state of affairs. And one area was the the black, the role of black people voluntarily and involuntarily in the Confederacy. And it was very easy for people to say, Yes, yes, involuntarily, they were slaves, blah, blah, blah. But I also know, just think about it, because of human nature, there had to be somebody black who volunteered to serve in the Confederacy. There just had to be. There were in the 1860 federal census, there are 4.4 million African Americans, 3.9 million are slaves. 262,000 out there, 488,000 who are free. 262,000. Okay, more than half live in the states that become the Confederacy, plus the four border states where slavery remains legal during the Civil War. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Those black people lived in the Confederacy weren't, you know, lynched during the Confederacy. I mean, they lived under a lot of pressure, I'm sure. But by and large, they were not molested. And in fact, what's curious to me is that in the new episode of, you know, my show, Finding Your Roots, I have two African Americans, I can't tell you who. Both of whom have free people of color in their ancestry who were complicitous with the Confederacy. One was a blacksmith who did regular business with the Confederacy. And we showed her, we turned the page and I show a receipt from the Confederate Army for fixing a wagon. And then I set her up by saying, I'm sure that they made him do it, I'm sure it was only once. Then we turned the page like five more receipts, you know, this guy who had a regular, regular business. And the other one was the valet to the man who was the senator from South Carolina, and then the governor, the richest man in South Carolina, they went to Canada. His valet later said that he was ambushed by abolitionists. The senator of the rich, you know, senator, governor, rich white man from South Carolina looks all over for him, goes to Boston. I can't find him. So he goes to Boston. Two weeks later, the valet comes back, apologizes and said he'd rather be a slave in South Carolina in the big house than free and homeless and poor in Canada. These are two stories that actually happen. So all of this is to say, thank you. Right on. It will open a big discussion. And John Stoffer, my colleague at Harvard in American Studies and in English and African American Studies, is probably a great essay on how many black people, but he's concluded voluntarily served in the Confederacy, and it's about 3,000, just over 3,000 people. And I encourage you all to read it on TheRoot.com. You give complexity to the black experience that is very important, and you're opening a debate, and I applaud you for it. So I want to, I want to ask, because we were talking about this on the way over from the airport this morning about this debate that's reemerged over black Confederates. And I see on the one side, what you're, what you seem to be saying is that there's a need for any of us who are doing this work, certainly as scholars, to, to, to, to sort of work out the complexity of this history, right? That there's a need for us not to oversimplify. Or censor yourself. Right. Or censor yourself. Right. And I absolutely see that. But I'm also wondering, like, what is at stake in this new debate about how many people who were African-Americans served in the Confederacy? And to, to, to parse that out, what does it mean to serve in the Confederacy? That we know the stories of the Massachusetts 54th. We know the stories of African-American soldiers on the Union side and sort of what their service looked like. And so what's at stake in this debate? Well, you know, in a way, you're going to elevate the question to what is at stake anyway, in talking about the Civil War, what is at stake in talking about slavery, which is still an uncomfortable subject for many, many people to talk about. You can, you know. And what is at stake if, to say, slavery was the fundamental cause of the Civil War, which I find, when I say that in lectures around, I find there's a lot of resistance to that. Nobody alive today owned a slave in the United States, right? Nobody alive today was a slave. No one is being accused of anything personally. Nonetheless, there are people who find it a kind of personal affront, if you say that the Civil War was fundamentally fought over slavery. Now, there is no question, as Skip said, of course, when you're four million or more people, that you're going to have a tremendous range of ideas of responses to the war. The notion that some black people in the South identify the Confederacy should not surprise anyone. There were black people who served in the police in South Africa. There were blacks, there were slaves who fought for the British in the wars of the Caribbean. This is not something that is unusual. You're going to lose complicity with the notion? Yeah, complicity. But I think, but the, on the other hand, one has to push back, if you go to the internet, which doesn't always give you the correct information, you will find websites devoted to legions imagined legions of black Confederates, thousands upon thousands of them, it's sort of to demonstrate that the Confederacy was sort of a multicultural paradise. Right. And that, no, and that indeed then, and that in fact, it was less racist than the North. There was certainly plenty of racism in the North, obviously, but you know, the sort of historical defense of the Confederacy has now taken on a new, you know, a new language 50, 60 years ago, it was people didn't mind defending slavery in a certain way. Now you sort of can't do that anymore. So the Confederacy is seen as a, so the black soldiers represent the good race relations of the old South and of the Confederacy. I, as, as scholars, we have to do the research and decide what, what it is. Stalford puts, I mean, I have to say Stalford, don't take this wrong, is a professor of literature. We won't tell him. And as a, as a historian, I find the evidence that he puts forward, let us say, a suggestive, but not conclusive in many ways. Its reminiscences and other things. But nonetheless, the fact is that the Confederate, there is no question that some small number of African Americans did volunteer and probably served in Confederate armies. No question about that. On the other hand, the Confederacy as a government was very resistant to enrolling blacks in the army all the way through until the very, very, very end of the war when they finally said, okay, we're going to, we're in this desperate state. But the point is, yes, we have to separate this history from, you know, current politics in a sense, at least at the beginning to try to figure out what is the real, to say no black person in the South could have possibly identified with the, with the Confederate cause is absurd. On the other hand, the, one has to kind of distinguish between the, you know, distinguish the particular anecdotal event and the kind of center of gravity. And there's no question that the center of gravity among the slave communities in the South was sympathy for the North, desire for Northern victory, desire for freedom, as you show. So, you know, it's, it's, it should remain a historical debate. But as you say, there's, there's layers and layers of emotion and politics, you know, layered onto it. Right. No, Eric's absolutely right, that they're confederate organizations that claim tens of thousands of black men fought for the Confederacy, but this is rubbish. But a few thousand did. And, and I'll accept that. Right. That's enough complexity for me. Yeah. Interestingly enough, another fact that's important is that, what do we estimate about 500,000 black people were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, right, which means that they ran away or were able to get behind Union lines after the Union soldiers liberated the areas in which they lived, which is what the Emancipation Proclamation was all about. You accept that? Skim and I don't agree about the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't know if this is the place to have that debate. Let's go. But you got to tell them what the positions are. I, I, I don't, I don't think this is the place that I debate. The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery, but I, my position is it changed the character of the war and made the death of slavery inevitable if the Union won the war. If the Confederacy won the war, slavery would have existed for a long, long time. No question about that. I agree with that. But the number, to say the number freed by the Proclamation is, I think, open, open to dispute. I would put the number considerably higher than that. Yeah, I wouldn't. All right. So Susan Laurie. I want to know about, could you, you both are talking about using the word complexity. And I think when we look back into history, where the kind of history where, as you said, none of us actually lived. And we look around us here and all over the world today. The notion of the idea of complexity and the other are things that are very hard to bring together. It is very hard, in my experience, for most of us to imagine the other and complexity. The other is that one, those people who do that. And even sometimes in our own community. We like to see ourselves. I mean, I don't know how many times I've been asked the question, what do black people think about? You know, I mean, we laugh. But the question is asked often. And so it is hard for us to imagine complexity today. And it would also, I think, be hard to imagine complexity back then. We are not, we do not practice that often enough, I think. However, I was, let me just, as the historian, complexity is essential, but it is not an interpretation. In other words, you can't just, you can't just say, well, my view of the Civil War era is it was complex. That's not sufficient, at least for a historian. You know, then you have to, as I said, say, well, what is the main tendency? Not the 100% tendency, not that every single person, but what is the main tendency that's going on? That's what the historian has to uncover. Complexity is important to remember, but it is not sufficient as an explanation of what was going on. I mean, there's more, there's more interesting complexion than there is in complexity. You know, the one drop, well, that's very interesting, but we don't really look at the one drop in terms of opinion when it comes to looking at ourselves and looking at the other. And that's one thing that does, I think, go on in the play. There are a lot of people thinking a lot of different things about the same thing, apparently. Well, I wanted to ask you a question about, about Hiro, both the character and the archetype, right, that you are, that he contains multitudes, right? He's constantly shifting and changing and containing all these things, not always at the same time, but it's revealed. He, I think one of the things that's brilliant about the play is that he always enter, he's the sort of center of the play in so many ways, but yet, at the same time, he only appears halfway through each of the parts, right? He sort of emerges. And, and, and there are all of these reveals, right, as the play goes on. And in a sense, what I guess the question I have for you is, does this play have a hero? Is Hiro that play? And is, are you actually creating complexity in, in that archetype, right? This play is, I mean, he's named Hiro, he could be seen as such, he's tragic, he's flawed, he's, contains multitudes. Are you trying to push against that notion that we need heroes or heroines in the, in these stories? A lovely question. I'm just showing him. I mean, he's, his name is Hiro, but as we find out in part two, his first master only called him Joe. Right. He decides to name himself Ulysses, putting him square in the sights of the greatest man of the moment to him. And in the, you know, right in the bullseye of the historical or the literary historical Ulysses who comes home and kills people. Darn. You know, so I'm just, I'm just, I'm one of those writers, there are lots of writers who have these ideas, they're going to subvert and there are writers like me who I have something, I have someone that I'm, that I love and I want to show you what he's like. Uh-huh. Okay. All right. Good. Skip. It's up now. The, I'm trying to ask a question that you'll answer in public, which is, yes, which is about your relationship to Greek tragedy and to Greek myth. Right. So, so why, why cite it, why use these archetypes? And some of the, some of the figures are very consistent with Greek mythology and some of them aren't. Curiously enough. So, so why, why sort of borrow or, I love, I'm so happy to answer that. Ulysses' wife is, was famously. Yes. Faithful. Yes. Unlike. Yes. Hero's wife. Yes. Or well. She was, faithful in her mind. She was true. She was true. She was true. There's honest, true and faithful. Oh, okay. Hero is honest. He exists in the framework as a good guy. Penny is true. Homer is true. True North. The dog is faithful. The dog is faithful. Yeah. The love that passes understanding. That's, that's the dog. But the dog says, I have no choice. It's part of my DNA. That's what, but that's, you know, he is called by power that is, is greater than himself, you know. Okay. But, but why do I follow the Greeks? I laugh when you ask that because, yes, because I, I love them. And because they're in the ground water, much like the Civil War for most Americans, much like who's the name of Hero's new, what's the name of Hero's new wife? This is the question I look. Yes. And who has a wife, a new girlfriend whose name is Alberta also? Ever heard of a play called Fences? Yeah. Yeah. And when I wrote that, I was like, oh, shit. It's so in, it's so woven into the ground water of my personal cultural experience that when the guy whose name is Troy comes home, he's got a wife named, he's got a new gal named Alberta. That's funny. Dang. And that's how, that's how woven, that's how thickly he meshed in the shit we are up in it so bad. That's called intertextuality, where it's my day job. I prefer and messed in the shit, actually. Well, I'm curious, actually, since the Greek mythology is built in, what kind of, to write this, what kind of like historical research or reading, if any, did you do? I've read some of your books. I mean, did you sit down and start reading all sorts of work? She read the short history of reconstruction. No, no, actually, that's a lot of words. I've been writing about this period for a while. So I have a cube, I mean, I've written a lot about Lincoln and linking and how he links, you know, and I went off on that for a long time. So I've been reading a lot about this period for quite a while, but at the same time, you break free, and suddenly you're running down the road because what I wanted to capture is not what had already been written, but the thing I was hearing, those voices that are beyond, and so have a great respect for, you know, historians and history and wonderful works of literature and scholarship, and also we need to, you know, that's freedom, talk about freedom. It's true. You know, it's, and it's something in our arguments, I insist on, which is the freedom of the artists, artists that take historical facts and ignore them. You know, it's called art, not history. I completely have to do that. I completely agree. As long as they don't claim its history, like some people do, if it's art, if it's theater, absolutely, perfect novels, but some of these folks unnamed go out and say, this is real history. I'm giving it into the schools. I want it into the history class. Oh, yeah, well, that's wrong. I'm with you on that. But I'm talking about feature films or plays. I mean, after all, this very much reminds me of the first time, and I hadn't read the plays the first time I saw it, because I wanted to react spontaneously, and I love your work. I knew I'd love it. The first time I read Their Eyes Are Watching God by Zorna Hurst, how many of you have read Their Eyes Are Watching God? Okay, a lot of people. So I'm reading along. I'm 27 years old, 26 years old. I'm a new professor. I mean, with exaggerate quotation marks. I'm a lecturer convertible. It's called Haven't Finished My PhD. And one of my students said, you need to read Their Eyes Are Watching God. We need to teach this. I had a little tiny seminar. Nobody knew I was. I wasn't anybody. And she, it was out of print. So she gave me a Xerox. So I read it. And I'm reading, and it's like realistic, realistic, realistic. And you get to this point where the buzzards start to talk. You know, buzzards like buzzards. And there's a mock eulogy. And then the buzzard do a mock eulogy, which is like, what the hell kind of book is this? I had a similar experience on the stage here in the audience when the dog talks. And I thought, well, if there's anybody who thinks that this play is tied to historical reality, now they know that it's not. And I like that. You'd be surprised. So is that the explanation of the dog in the play? Because I'm waiting for one. No, I don't have one. I'm just saying that no one could make the mistake of saying that this is masking itself up as history. No, but I'm with you in terms of a history curriculum has to be, if I may, subject to evidence. You can't just make it up. But what happens is, and this is very much on my mind because of Selma, I think what's happened, what historians have done to Ava DuVernay is just, is horrible. You know, it's on play about Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson, big guy. Lyndon Johnson could take care of himself. There's a whole Lyndon Johnson industry. And when as soon as people say what will the children think, I think, didn't that happen in Athens? You know, a guy walking around and they made him drink hemlock because they said what will the children think? What will the children think if they listen to Socrates? Are you kidding? Nobody's going to see Selma learn about Lyndon Johnson for Christ's sake. But people have just tried to tear this poor woman apart. And I happen to love it. And as a scholar, I have a BA only in history. I'm not a professor of history. I'm probably a professor of English. But I do write a lot about film and I even make films myself. And there is a difference between making a documentary and making a feature film. And if the there's a beautiful essay that is a total deconstruction of the imitation game. If you've seen the imitate, I love the imitation game. I like Benedict Cumberbatch. I went home and read this essay. It's like it didn't happen. Or it didn't happen this way. But nobody is trying to keep that that imitation game from winning an Academy Award, which they did for Eva DuVernay. And it's just not right. And I was so glad when you did Top Dog that you didn't have that Lincoln industry on your, you know, you're on your on your head because you got the facts wrong. You know, it's not your job to read the fact. But there's isn't. I mean, this is one thing that drives me nuts about that the role of the public historian is fact checker for cultural productions. Right. Right. That there's got to be more useful role for historians to play in the world than to say, well, Lyndon Johnson took two bathroom breaks during that time that he was on the phone with those three senators. Maybe it was two senators. I mean, it seems to me that there's a more robust and interesting role for historians to play in the public sphere when it comes to debating these things. And one of the things and I so skip I agree with you very much so. But yet what is the role of the historian then when these kinds of historically themed art forms emerge, right? When a play like this comes, when anything that you do comes along, when Selma comes along, when 12 years of slave comes along, when these sort of artistic forms are generating and catalyzing fierce historical debates, what is the role for historians to play and what's the role for historians to play in conversation and debate with the artists themselves, right? Which is I think what is I agree. I don't think the job of historians is to just say this this little conversation didn't happen that way or this didn't happen on that day. Obviously the artist, the filmmaker, the playwright has the right of creative, you know, for invention and that's that's the genre. But I do think we should say and this is I like Selma a lot and I think the critique of the treatment of Johnson is a complete red herring. But I think there's something that of course the play doesn't fall into this trap at all. But there is something about Hollywood history which always tends to go to the great man. I don't care whether it's Gandhi, Malcolm X, Lincoln or even in this movie in Selma, you know, King. Yes, what I like about the movie is that it gives you James Bevel and it gives you some of the others who are unknown today. But it's still King really as the you know, the real catalyst of the movement. I think that's just that's in the DNA of Hollywood that you've got to have. And it's always a great man. Is there any woman one can think of who's had a movie like that? I can't think of one. Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. All right. You can have her. I think we do have a responsibility to say I'm not talking about individual thing, but a movement, a something like emancipation, something like the civil rights movement is not the work of one person. So let me take a crack if I may. The role of the historian to be a consultant, first of all, any smart director will anticipate the criticism of the public historian, as you put it, by incorporating the game in the game plan. And academics are so cheap, it's not like a big investment. Right. So free tickets, 200 bucks. So why don't they find out and so that they know and then say then they can be proactive, say, look, I knew this and that way they won't be defensive because I think they were caught off guard and then they were defensive and then that created the narrative to begin to spin out of control. But in the end, no, the creative writer is not obligated to get the facts historically right. It's a different genre. And Eric, I was so pleased when you wrote me that email and I told people, I said, ask Foner. You know, Foner and I agreed for once, by the way. This doesn't agree a lot of the time. I know, I'm being funny. I was thinking also about it. You said Hollywood goes to the, you know, the big one, the big man, the big moment. But it used to be that in theater, the stories were also going to the big one. I mean, you think of the Greeks, you think of Shakespeare and it wasn't really until we started getting beautiful plays like Death of a Salesman, you know, Salesman was the hero, really. And I just take it the next step where my hero is someone you've never heard of. And I would in your presence say it feels like it happened. I mean, not like Brian Williams bless his heart, but it feels like it, but it feels like, I'm sorry, but it feels like it, it feels like it happened, meaning there is so much of African-American history that is unrecorded. Did just, these people in this play, the majority of them cannot write. Can't read. They didn't, you know, the hero is excited about telling his story to his children. The bits and pieces of story that my father told me about his experience in the war. He was a career army officer, okay. Years went by and he said nothing. One day I said, finally, dad, what was it like? And again, he's six four and he curls himself up like this. And he just looks at me. And that was all he said about his service because that's what it was like for him, six four, riding around in a tank. That was it. So the stories were told. So, you know. But that's also a metaphor. Well. The fetal kind of, I mean it had to be, he had to have moments like that. Well yeah, but what I'm saying is it wasn't written down in a document that could be stumbled upon by somebody and then published and called history. Yes. So much of it is unknown. So this history that we're seeing here, and I talk about it a lot in some essays that I've written, I'm making history. Yes. Making it up. Okay. But it read true. What you said is absolutely true. That it, I mean read true metaphorically. It sounded true. I mean it was very, very convincing to me. And something about the tragic hero, which I think it's important to say. First of all, you gave him a capitalized hero identity ironically enough. So he's supposed to be in every man as it were, every person, but you went back to the tradition and made him the hero, which is what the hero is. A hero is the hero, right? And then who has to have the fall? But I would say as a student of tragedy, and tragedy is one of my favorite genres. I mean in Cambridge where I went to graduate school, you had to read three papers they were called and tragedy was one of them. Though the Greek sand Shakespeare had royal protagonists so that you had to have a noble person to have a huge fall, you weren't real people. You know what I mean? Nobody, you would not read Hamlet to get an idea about the succession of Danish princes for an anthropological paper. You just don't. They were, you knew that they were allegories, fictional or use whatever word that you wanted. So I never took them as historical personages. I took them as excuses almost, as a literary license. So it didn't matter to me that Arthur Miller made the salesman as, I know it mattered in the history of theater, but it did matter on another level. But what you do is to go back and take in every man and elevate him and give him a noble status within your play. And he has a great fall. But he's fallen to, talk about that for a minute. You know, this is not a guy who's up here and then has a hubristic moment and then falls. He's very compromised from the very beginning. But he also rises and falls continually throughout the play as he comes and goes, right? So he's not someone who has one trajectory, either up or down, right? He keeps moving. I know. I mean, that's why that's- And yet doesn't. Well, but he follows the brightest star that he knows, who happens to be a person named the Colonel. But he has, at high noon in the second play, what I consider to be the best moment of his life, he stands there with that rope, the end of the rope. And he decides not to follow that course. And for one brief second, and we've all had this in our lives, for one brief second, he decides he can free a man. And then in the next second, he cannot free himself. And then he can tell a story about it, which becomes either told- Well, exactly, the dog doesn't believe him. The dog even doesn't believe him. It had happened. Nobody's gonna believe him. Even faithfulness has its limits, right? Yeah. I tell you, but I'm not gonna buy everything, you know? And that's the- I wanna get back, you mentioned, I'm waiting for someone to analyze the dog. And I mean, I think the dog does exactly what you did at the beginning, right? There are three sort of, I mean, there's lots of stuff you're working out here, but it seems that the truth, the honesty, and the faithfulness, that without the dog, you can't parse out the distinctions, even when they're the blurriest in the play. You can't actually parse out all three of those things without his faithfulness, right? And, but yet at the same time, the faithfulness of loyalty, right? Of the faithfulness of a dog to a man, or a dog to an owner, however you're gonna conceive it, is also at the same time doing what Skip said, which is to say, look, signal to the audience, this is not faithful to reality, right? The dog is faithful to hero, but it's not faithful to reality, and that's the role that it- You like that? You like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like you intended that. And, but I wanna ask you a question and then I wanna open it up to the crowd. And this gets at a little bit of what Eric was talking about at the very beginning about freedom, right? Freedom is a word, if there's a word cloud for this play, freedom or free is, has a significant place in the center. And I can't help but ask myself and then I wanna ask all of you, who's free, right? Is anyone free in this play? And what contribution is this play or these three parts of this larger epic nine-part series? What contribution is it making to our debates about what it means to be free? In this play, you know, I used to think the dog was free, but then he's just the first runaway of the play in part, before part one, as you're gathering into your seats, he's running. You know, Homer's free until he falls in love with Penny, and then he's not free. He's tied. Penny's not free. She's in love with two men. I don't know. The colonel is free because he's dead. That's what the missus says. He's not free. He can't imagine his life without hero. And he also feels free because he believes so deeply in the fiction of whiteness. Well, he's so not free. Yeah, bless his heart. Bless his heart, as they say in the South. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he's hopelessly enslaved. Totally, right. He's like Hegel's essay of Lurchhip Abundance. I mean, that's what I thought of. I thought of what you were reading is the way that, in case you haven't read it recently, but it just says that the status of the master is dependent on the status of the slave. That neither is free. That they're both slaves. They're equally free and equally enslaved. You can't be a master unless you have a slave. And you can't be a slave unless you have a master, right? So that's what that means. What interests me is how, and in the writing of history lately, there's been a kind of tendency to, not exactly denigrate, but to deemphasize freedom in the sense that more scholars now, I mean, if- That's because you used it up with all those books you wrote about freedom. Go back to- Nobody can write about it anymore. You got the Pulitzer Prize. They tried, they tried. Go back to John Hope Franklin, you know, from slavery to freedom. That was a pretty clear trajectory. 1948. 1948. Yeah, well, but not a lot of addition. But that was a story which was very easy to understand, right? But today, a lot of, you know, you have books about the limits of freedom, the failure of freedom. I think it's, I think our views of freedom in the past are often, you know, are shaped by what's going on today. When people are disappointed as they are today, they look back and they say, things didn't quite work out the way we expected, you know. So whether it's the results of the civil rights movement or the results of the civil war, freedom didn't quite become the utopian thing that many people hoped it would. But what I like about the play is that you have a lot of different views of freedom in there, and, but you do not succumb to what some historians, I think, do is just saying, well, it doesn't mean anything. Yes. You know, and that between freedom and slavery, there's no difference, right? Which is not true. Well, in your book, Nothing but Freedom, you talk about that. You say they had nothing but freedom, but freedom was not nothing. Oh, no, it's huge. But I think the freest moment to me in the play, and I'd have to see it again, but as of right now, it's when the old man renounces the boy that he loves. That's the moment of freedom. Because he turns on him and you think he's gonna be loyal to him. He's going along this story and whatever he says, he's going, yes, that's right, yes, that's right. But as soon as he finds out that he's portrayed Homer, right, he turns on him, right? And that to me shows that the old man is free. You know, that he has, he does have principles. He does have values. And even if this boy that he loves as much as if he were his own son portrayed those principles, he cuts them off. And I admired that, I like that. But at the end, he's sitting on the porch saying, he does renounce, he does come out, he is free. And then he says, he promised he'd come home with luck it won't be long. And I just know that he's still tied to him. And you know, right, he's not a son anymore, but he's sitting there hoping that he'll return soon. Which is just adds another layer to the, right, the same, but you're right. I think you're right, I think the old man is the, but again, the runaways ask in part three, where is freedom really? Will the air smell sweet? Will the streets be paved with gold? Will there be a bed to lay my freedom head? Will there be food? Will I say at the end of the day, God, I wish I'd stayed home? Yes. Which is, yeah. Yeah, but that's beautiful. But you know, Eric will give us the statistics, but I remember when, no, and I meant that in a very admiring way. The, I'm very interested, the irony of doing black genealogy. If you're descended from slaves, well, we're all descended from slaves, but remember those stats I gave you at the top? So in 1860, 12% about of the black community is free. So if you know, if you're, you descend from people who are free, it's easier to do your family tree, because they're in the census and they're legal people. And by definition, being legal means you have a name and it's written down, you pay taxes. You pay taxes, et cetera, et cetera, right? So the irony of being able to do black genealogy, if you're descended from people who weren't free until the 13th Amendment, is that you need to find the white person who owned your ancestors. That's the only way you can do black genealogy back before the Civil War. So that what you're hoping, if you're me, is that all black people are in the 1870s. They're in the census for the first time with two names, right, because that's five years after the end of the Civil War. So you find them, let's say Oprah, we found Constantine Winfrey living in Attala County in Mississippi. So then you go back to 1860 census, hoping some white man named Winfrey owned a plantation and who owned a male slave 10 years younger than this black Constantine Winfrey who you happen to know is Oprah's ancestor. And not only did we find that, but he's living next door to the white man who owned the slave 10 years, Absalom Winfrey. So what I'm fascinated by is the notion of freedom and naming. All this was a preface to that, which is how many black people, the percentage of black people who took the name of their owner. Because at different points in the historiography, and I'm always fascinated by the waves of history, they're fads for historians. There's, at one moment it was thought that the slaves just took the names of the mess. Then another moment that none of the slaves rejected them. And another moment they all went to the north. I mean, no one seriously believes that. But the truth is, most of the slaves maybe walked off the plantation they were on and turned around and came back. There was a great deal of stability after the Civil War. And in a class I teach, there's an essay published in a special issue of the North American Review in 1884. It's like on the Negro. And this guy predicts that the South will soon be black. It's a white sociologist. I mean, it was a product but slightly before sociologists invented it. But he gives us the statistics and said, these are really black states. And these Negroes are never gonna move. If they didn't move before the Civil War, after the Civil War, they are never gonna move. And then six years later, great migration starts. All I'm saying is that, so I wanna know if, despite the horrors of slavery, isn't it true that most of the former slaves stayed where they were more or less? Pretty much or nearby, anyway, yeah. No, they wanted to be, as we know, when people asked about 40 acres of mule and everything, this was not out in Nebraska or the Homestead Act. They wanted land where they were. Their communities were rooted there. The guys in South Carolina with their petition said that. We want land where we are living right now. So, yeah, I mean, and to go to the North was not exactly a great option at that time since there were very few jobs available for blacks in the North. No, the question after the Civil War was what kind of rights and power and recognition they would have in the places where they were living. That was what the battle was over. But it's funny because you think, Jesus, you know, if you're Jewish, you're gonna go back to Germany. I mean, this is like a horrific kind of thing, but that's what they did. And today, we stay in relationships that are less than perfect and we stay in jobs that are less than great and we can understand that. That's the thing, we understand and we can have a compassion for people who don't get up and go, you should leave. Well, you know, they were human and that's the thing about, I would say, that is one of my charges as an artist. And that is the only way that I'm interested really in addressing what people call the raised question or whatever. It's just reminding people that my people are people. And under that comes everything. But at that, you excel. And that's why you not only deserve one pool of surprise, you deserve another one, as far as I'm concerned. That's good. Let's open it up for questions from all of you. So, do we have two mics? We're gonna share. We're gonna share. I'll share, we can share. Okay, we'll share. Okay, so raise your hand, identify yourself and ask a fairly succinct question. Okay, right here. My name is David Rubin and I wanted to just do a... quick comment and then a question. The comment is that in some ways I found the most compelling thing about Hiro was that he wasn't a volunteer. He didn't do it out of, he didn't join the Confederate forces out of any idea of service to that cause. He was trapped, basically, in a set of survival questions. And I thought you brought that out very beautifully, painfully, but very well. It reminded me a little bit of Mother Courage, the breath play and this... I think one of the things you're doing, which I value a great deal, is you're bringing back the teaching theater, part of Brecht's idea, the didactic theater and by distancing the action as you do, connecting it in so many ways with myth and other literary echoes, I think really accomplishes that. The question is, at the end of the play, I had at least in the back of my mind that Hiro was testing Penny Penelope with the idea that he had a second wife and another life and not... I don't hear that in the conversation, but she never appears, so there's no dramatic part to that. And I'm not sure how well that actually works if I might be so bold, but I wonder what you had in mind because the odyssey was rattling around in my mind, but I don't think to any real purpose. And I don't think you had it in mind. Thank you for your comments. Alberta, well, parts one, two and three and parts four through nine are coming. That's the short answer. And she is real, she's, and again, she borrows her name, the groundwater, the funny referent that I could not escape is fences where Alberta does not appear. So there's a lot of, there's that, the misses they speak of never appears either, yet she is real up at the house. So there's a lot of barring from the Greeks, a lot of things that happen or are happening offstage that we do not see right away. So it's really in that tradition that I'm resting in. Other comments, questions, it's hard to see right here. I was surprised that people didn't say the union, the black union soldier was free. What'd you say? I'm surprised that none of you mentioned the black union soldier is being free. Blackish. One of the, but see, this is why I asked you about what you were reading because everybody's heard, especially in this town of the 54th, Massachusetts, 55th, but very few scholars even know about the Kansas colored unit. So why did you pick on that one as just to be, to identify that soldier? Is that right? Is that right? It was just, I didn't wanna choose one that was already done in some movie about something. And it was, again, it's like this is in a, an historical moment that we're all, you know, somewhat knowledgeable of, but it wasn't, again, it wasn't like I wasn't going in. The second play is called A Battle in the Wilderness and not The Battle of the Wilderness, you know. So it's intentionally not, yeah. So, but in terms of Smith's being free, it's funny, he is, he is. I would say he is and he's, I love him very much. He's on fire. He has Pentecost happening and yeah, I love him very much. And I think you're right. I think he is a free man of color. Yes, please. Can I ask you, did you start with, I was thinking, well obviously, why did she make him a capable passing, right? So then did you start with the character who's capable passing or did you start with the situation and then say, well the only way this would work is to have a black man who looks white because obviously the boss, the master boss would have killed him, right? Exactly, exactly. No, it started actually, that's a great question. It started with the two coats and if you just, oh, do you want more thing to throw into it? So I wrote part three first at the public theater, you know, that's where the whole play's been developed associated with ART and they wanted to produce part three by itself and I said, no, I have to write more because I knew it was a nine part play. They said, well we'll go forward, next play's Penny and the Wilderness or what, you know, with the baby and then Albert and Hiro at home because his name was only Hiro then. And I said, no, the next parts come before. I have to go backwards because I need to know where Hiro got his two coats. So it started with the two coats and asking, where did you get your coat? That tall, tall tail? The dog in me wanted to know the story. And so it went backwards into the coats and yes, the only person who could pull off that was someone who could pass. Like so many people in our families can like, whoa, pass. But chose not to and blah, blah, yeah. Yep, up there, Abby. Hi, I'm Abby Wolfe, no friends on the stage. I have a question about one of the most powerful moments in the play I thought was the hands up, don't shoot part. And the way that made the play resonate with, if it hadn't already, the way it resonated with things going on today. But that brings me to a question about costuming. This might seem like a minor question, but I was a little bit thrown off at the beginning in the first part by the crocs, the old man wears crocs. The one of the less desirable slaves wears Timberlands. Penny's shirt looks like it comes from Forever 21. So I'm just wondering where, I'm assuming it's intentional, but what was the intention? And then all the runaways have sneakers on. Yes, exactly, right, and the sneakers at the end, right. The black sneakers with the whites. Yeah, and one of the less than desirable says snap. Right, so it's right embedded in the language. And Esosa who did the costumes totally picked up on that. He also, we also worked together for Porgy and Bess and Top Dog Under Dog. But here we really, he really picked up on the fact that, whoa, this is now, this is then, this is now, this is then, this is now. And so he worked with us to put in some contemporary references. And the way it lined up with the events of the day from the hands up to make it possible so I could find a way to breathe, to even on a personal note. My, I had a son who died in an early age was something that actually happened at the public theater with one of our colleagues. So it just lined up in a, it kept lining up with now. Right, right. You didn't need, you didn't need the crux for people to understand it was now. Yeah. You know that, right? I didn't do the costumes. I share, you know, I share the process with my colleagues. One of the other things too, in terms of the resonance, I mean, it's unmistakable, the hands up don't shoot, right? And the comments about the patrol men and when, you know, when we're free, will we be able to say, you know, we're here and we're free and we're not gonna get shot? Right, all of that is so resonant. And, but one of the other things too that struck me as being quite resonant with this play is the fact that we never see war. Right, that one of my students, I think last week made some comment about how they're very happy to be studying the Civil War in such a way that isn't just about white boys on battlefields and looking at African American perspectives and women's perspectives and all these different ways to think about the war. And one of the things that I always loved about August Wilson's work is that so often the white people aren't on stage, right? There are other referred to, right? And the systems of oppression and the people who are in control of those things are often offstage. And it seems to me that the war is always there, right? And all of the violence in the play, the physical violence is truncated or aborted, right? There's almost a stabbing, there's almost a shooting, there's almost a whip, right? Well, there was one striking, yeah. No, the foot. Right, right, the foot, exactly. So much of the violence is suggested and it appears it's performed and then almost all of it is sort of held back. And yet to me, that resonates so powerfully right now, we're a world at war. We're a nation that's been at war for most of my students' lifetimes. And this is a war generation. And yet most Americans have no connection to the war, no connection to the violence, no connection to the trauma. And it's striking to me how personal and also how profound that representation of the civil war is where you never see a battlefield. And yet violence is absolutely pervasive to the system of slavery, to their lives, to the way that they are bound to each other and bound, was that something you were intending? Is that something that... Did I write a battle scene and then cut it down? No, no, no, are you making a larger commentary on the sort of pervasiveness of violence that is often sort of out there? It's always there and yet it's suggestive in some way. Well, so many of my plays and so many of the things I write, novels, songs, everything, it's the impact father comes home from the wars. So it's what happens in the home, in the community. It's a relationship. Yeah, I'm just, yeah, that's kind of where, because that's the thing that most of us, even if we do have service people in our family, that's the thing that most of us are dealing with on a day to day, that's the thing. We can't go over and solve the issues of the crisis, but we are dealing with somebody at home. Mm-hmm, right, skip. I've had one scene very violent. To be locked in a cage is an act of violence. And I found that an actualization as it were of violence is very subtle, but horrible if you think about it. I mean, then the guy's bleeding the death and they're gonna lose his leg maybe because it's gonna be gangris. So anyway, that's my only. And that's also the part where the colonel does strike hero. Where that violence occurs too, and there's this, yeah, absolutely, we have time for one or two more questions. Right here. Hi, my name's Sophie. I first just wanted to thank you so much. I saw the play on Thursday and thought it was absolutely incredible. And one thing that I experienced was just feeling like my expectations were really confounded. I think I didn't realize that I had expectations for what the play was until I was watching it and realizing that none of them were being met. And I think part of it was I studied history here under Professor McCarthy. And I think I became really comfortable with the genre of slave narratives and came to expect things from it. And for one thing, a character who often is a hero and then having a narrative that has to do with escape and freedom. And of course there's diversity within different slave narratives, but I hadn't realized how much there was an expectation for me about what representations or narratives of this period in history were like until all of a sudden I was watching something that didn't obey any of those. So that was one of the most amazing experiences for me in watching this play was having all those expectations upset. And I'm just wondering if I'm not sure if you sense people's expectations and writing this kind of thing or if you ever had expectations yourself for what, for a play of this period following that certain format. I'm just wondering if you could speak to that. That's such a wonderful comment. I've really never thought about that. I've read, of course, plenty of slave narratives and respect them tremendously. But it is, yeah, they do follow a form. And they were written in a certain time where there were tremendous expectations. And, yes, I didn't wanna say, I was like saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And again, this is to break free of the traditional narrative and to say we have a hero who does not follow the hero's journey or here is a hero's journey, too. Just to put him alongside of all those other heroes and heroines is a way to be free. And then take it home in your own life. You know what I mean? We have expectations, we have narratives and we have things put on us. And to find ways in which you can be of service and be free at the same time. Yeah. I think that's a good place to end. Let me just a couple of quick announcements. One is that the Airt of Human Rights series will continue on throughout the spring. There's also a new initiative that Skip is part of, that I'm part of, that Eric Foner and Susan Laurie and so many people in this room are part of, that Harvard is going to have a whole series of events around commemorating and interrogating the Civil War and it's the Harvard Civil War Project. The Office of Fine Arts has put together all of the list of everything that we know that's happening starting now through the spring. And so if you go to the Office of Fine Arts website and look for the Harvard Civil War Project, there are literally dozens of things that are going on on Harvard's campus throughout the semester and Skip. And Eric Foner came not only for this discussion, but he will be giving the first of three lectures in a lecture series Monday, tomorrow Monday, and then he'll be lecturing on Tuesday and Wednesday. So please, please come, it'll be in the Thompson Room in the Barker Center, which is 12 Quincy Street and four o'clock, four o'clock tomorrow. So please come, he's not only a dear friend, but he's a great scholar and he's a magnificent lecturer. He's pretty smart. Yeah, so it'll be a real treat. Here's my dissertation advisor, pretty smart guy. Thank you all very much. Thank you.