>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Silence ]
>> I'm Rob Casper, I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center
at the Library of Congress and I'm very excited to welcome you
to our second literary birthday series event
of the spring on writer Ralph Ellison.
Today marks the end of Black History Month but we are happy to honor one
of our country's most celebrated
and essential African-American writers today.
You have a program for today's event.
You can read about Ellison in our featured writers.
Of course, we cannot be happier to have Jabari Asim
and Danielle Evans here to helps us celebrate Mr. Ellison's
98th birthday.   He was born in 1914.
For our literary birthday series, we usually invite a one local writer
and one out-of-town writer.
And today, we're very happy to have Ms. Evans
who is a rising young fiction writer and a faculty member
of American University in the former spot.
However, for the latter, we've brought back an important member
of the dc writing community.
And I want to make special thanks to Evan Small [phonetic] of the Office
of Scholarly Programs for helping us connect to Mr. Asim.
The program will go as follows.
Our writers will read in alphabetical order
from their favorite Ellison selections and talk
about his influence on them.
And they'll both also read selection of their own writing
to make that kind of connection.
And the very exciting second part of our Literary Birthday Series is
that after the reading, Alice Birney from the Manuscripts Divisions
of the library will come up and talk about this tabletop display
that we have of the Ellison collections
in the Manuscript Division and she'll also to talk a little bit
about the division itself and its work to ensure
that future generations can continue to learn about the exemplars
of our culture like Mr. Ellison.
So without further ado, here is Mr. Asim.
[ Applause ]   >> Good afternoon.
Thanks Rob.   Thanks Evelyn.
Thanks to everyone who had anything to do with me returning here
to a place I call home for more than a decade.
I'm really delighted to be here at this wonderful event
in this wonderful place in this wonderful city.
And I'm especially pleased to be in the company today
of Danielle Evans whose short story collection made me joyfully aware
of an important new literary voice.
And her presence here made this event particularly appealing to me
because I thought now I can get her to sign my book, so be warned.
I liked all of it.   I am very fickle.
I think today, harvest is the story that's speaking to me.
But if you talk to me next week, it'll probably be a different one
but they're all terrific and if you're not aware of them,
please make yourself aware of them.   It would be well worth it.
In his book, Ralph Ellison in Progress,
my friend Adam Bradley describes the Ellison manuscript drafts
and notes housed here in the Library of Congress as an evolving record
of Ellison's aesthetic vision.
Bradley goes on to provide valuable insights
into Ellison's creative process and explains
in part how the Ellison archives came to fill
such a significant and sizable space.
Ellison, he writes was a fast writer but a slow worker,
who often composed with ease [inaudible]
but constructed his fiction with painstaking deliberation.
He would jot down notes for characters or scenes on scraps
of paper and bound notebooks and even on the backs of envelopes.
Then he might write longhand rifts
that he would integrate into typed drafts.
He would take pen or pencil to these typed pages,
putting them through scrupulous revisions,
often producing half a dozen even a dozen drafts until he was satisfied.
These episodes would then be rendered and sequenced with others
until he assemble a continuos narrative that he would then retype
into a clean copy that he will subject to even more edits.
His Editor Albert Erskine recalls how the two
of them read the entire manuscript of Invisible Man out loud
with Ellison making subtle sometimes significant changes to the text.
Bradley described the process as reflecting a spirit of substitution,
extenuation, and adornment.
Reading Bradley's account reminded me of one of Ellison's comments
about the purpose of art.
In his essay, That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure, he wrote,
"I think that the mixture of the marvelous
and the terrible is a basic condition of human life.
And the persistence of human ideals represents the marvelous pulling
itself up out of the chaos of the universe."
From the chaos of his jumbled manuscripts, scribbled musings,
tattered envelopes, stacked notebooks and meticulous revisions,
Ellison reliably surfaced with pros that can be justifiably described
as the marvelous made manifest.
And Ellison's view of art, compelling pros, whether fiction
or nonfiction, couldn't approach the marvelous
without the approximating the majesty of the blues.
It had to at once express both the agony of life and the possibility
of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit.
What's more, it had to do so not
because of a political position embraced at the time but because
of a larger concern with the tragic struggle of humanity.
Conquest through sheer toughness
of spirit resonates powerfully throughout Invisible Man
but no less though through his early attempts at short fiction.
Afternoon, for example, is a slice of life tale written
in 1940 featuring Buster and Riley, two characters
who occupy center stage and at least three of his collected stories.
In those stories, the boys try on a variety of masks
in performance styles as test flights for forays
into the complicated
and unpredictable world they must soon navigate as men.
I read a couple of scenes from Afternoon followed by a passage
from a story of mind called The Genius inspired
in part by Ellison's story.
And I should proface my reading by sort of apologizing in advance
because it will contain a few words that may be offensive to some
but honest to Ellison's own language.
So this is from Afternoon, the two boys stood at the rear
of a vacant lot looking up at a telephone pole, the wire strung
from one pole to the next gleaned bright copper in the summer sun.
Glints of green light shock from the pole's glass insulator
as the boys stared.
"Funny ain't no birds on them wires, huh?
They got too much electricity in them, you can even hear them hum,
they got so much," Riley cocked his head listening.
"That's what making that noise," he said.
"Sure man, just like if you put your ear
against the street car line pole, you can tell when the car is coming.
You don't even have to see it," Buster said.
"That's right, I know about that.
I wonder why they have them glass things up there.
To keep them guys who climbs up there
from getting shocked, I guess."
Riley caught creasote smell of the black paint on the pole
as his eyes traveled over its rough surface.
"High as a bitch," he said.
"It ain't so high, bet I can hit that glass on the end there.
Buster, you full of brown, you can't hit that glass,
it's too high, shucks, give me a rock."
They looked slowly over the dry ground for a rock.
"Here's a good one," Riley called, "An egg rock."
"Throw it here and watch how old Lou Gehrig snags them on first base."
Riley pitched, the rock came high and swift.
Buster stretched his arms to catch it and kicked
out his right leg behind him, touching base.
"And he's out on first," he cried.
"You got them all right," Riley said.
"You just watch this."
Riley watched as Buster wound up his arm and pointed
to the insulator with his left hand.
His body gave a twist and the rock flew upward.
Crack, pieces of green glass sprinkled down.
They stood with hands on hips, looking about them.
A bird twittered, a rooster crowed, no one shouted to them
and they laughed nervously.
"Come on over to my house and sit in the cool," Buster said.
They turned the corner and walked into a short stretched
of grassy yard before a gray cottage.
A breeze blew across the porch, it smelled clean and fresh to Riley.
The wooden boards of the porch have been washed white.
Buster remembered seeing his mother scrubbing the porch with the suds
after she had finished the clothes.   He tried to forget those clothes.
A fly buzzed at the door screen,
Riley dropped down on the porch, his bare feet dangling.
"Wait a minute while I see what's here to eat," Buster said.
Riley laid back and covered his eyes with his arm.
"All right," he said.
Buster went inside fanning flies away from the door.
He could hear his mother busy in the kitchen as he walked
through the little house.
She was standing before the window, ironing.
When he stepped down into the kitchen, she turned her head,
"Buster where you been you lazy rascal?
You know that I wanted you here to help me with them tubs."
"I was over to Riley's, ma.   I didn't know wanted me."
"You didn't know?
Lord, I don't know why I had to have a child like you.
I work my fingers to the bone to keep looking decent
and that's the way you appreciates it.
You didn't know."   Buster was silent.
It was always this way, he had meant to help.
He always meant to do the right thing
but something always got in the way.
"Well, what's you standing there looking like a dying cat for?
I'm through now, go on out and play," he asked him.
He turned and walked slowly out of the back door.
The cat arched its back against his leg as he went off the porch,
stepping gingerly over the sun heated boards.
The ground around the steps was still moist and white
where ma had poured the suds.
A stream of water trickled rapidly from the hydrant,
sparkling silver in the sunlight.
Suddenly, he remembered why he had gone into the house.
He stopped and called, "Ma?"   "What you want?"
"Ma, what we going to have for supper?"
"Lord, all you think about is your gut.
I don't know.
Come on back in here and fix you some eggs if you hungry.
I'm too busy to stop and for the Lord's sake leave me alone."
Buster hesitated.
He was hungry but he cannot stay around ma when she was like this.
She was like this whenever something went wrong
with her and the white folks.
Her voice had been like a slap in the face.
He started slowly around to the front of the house.
The dust was thick and warm to its feet.
Looking down, he broke a sprig of milkweed between his bare toes
and watched the green stems slowly bleeding white sap upon the
brown earth.
A tiny globe of milk glistened on his toe.
And as he walked to the front of the house, he dug his foot
into the dry dust, leaving the sap a small spot of mud.
He dropped down beside Riley, "You eat so quick," asked Riley.
"No, ma was mad at me."
"Don't pay that no mind man, my folks is always after me.
They think all a man wants to do is what they want him to.
You ought to be glad you ain't got no old man like I got."
"Is he very mean?"
"My old man is so mean he hates his self."
"Ma is bad enough, let them white folks make her mad
where she woks in, I can tell."   "My old man is the same way.
Boy, and can he beat you.
One night he come home from work and was going to beat my ass
with a piece of electricity wire
but my old lady stopped him, told him he better not.
I wonder why they so mean," Buster said.
"Damn, if I know."
"My old man says we don't get enough beatings these days.
He said grandma used to tie him up in a gunny sack
and smoke him like they do with hams.
He was going to do that to me but mom stopped him.
She said, Don't you come treating no child of mine like no slave.
Your mom might have raised you like a slave but I ain't raising him
like that and you better not harm a hair on his head.
Now, he didn't do it neither and man, was I glad."
"Damn, I'm glad I don't have no old man," Buster said.
"You just wait until I get big.
Boy, I'm going to beat the hell out of my old man.
I'm going to learn to box like Jack Johnson, just so I can beat his ass.
Jack Johnson, first colored heavyweight champion
of the whole wide world," Buster said.
"I wonder where he is now."
"I don't know, up north in New York I guess."
"But I bet wherever he is, ain't nobody messing with him."
"You mighty right.
I heard my uncle Luke say Jack Johnson was a better fighter
than Joe Louis.
He said he was fast as a cat on his feet.
Fast as a cat, Gee, you can throw a cat off the top of the house
and he'll land on his feet."
"Why by golly, I bet you could throw a cat down from heaven and the son
of a bitch will land right side up.   My old man is always singing.
If it hadn't been for the referee,
Jack Johnson would've killed Jim Jeffries," Riley said.
The afternoon was growing old.   The sun hung low in a cloudless sky
and soon would be lost behind the friends of trees across the street.
A faint wind blew and the leaves on the trees trembled in the sun.
They were silent now.
A black and yellow wasp flew beneath the eves drowning.
Buster watched it disappear inside his gray honeycomb
like nest then rested back on his elbows
and crossed his legs thinking of Jack Johnson.
A screen slammed loudly somewhere down the street.
Riley lay beside him, whistling a tune between his teeth.
And that's some Afternoon by Ellison.
Early story, 1940, which may have been lingering a little bit
in my mind as I composed the story many years later called The Genius.
And I have a couple of explanatory notes about that as I begin stories
about a boy named Roderick Bates whose nickname is The Genius.
And like Ellison's story, mine is about two boys trying on masks.
In these passage, Roderick and Crispus abounding
over a pint of ice cream.
They have gathered behind the neighborhood store called D
and E. Crispus' older brother is mentioned, his name is Schamberg.
And they're confronted by a local bully named Bumpy Decatur
who mentions his younger sister whose name is Lala.
So there'll be mentions of a couple of characters
that don't actually appear in this sequence.
Roderick, I'm sorry, Crispus followed Roderick outside and around
to the back of the store.
They sat on the shade facing the alley.
He pulled the pint of ice cream from his sack.
Crispus recognized the purple sealed test carton,
"Chocolate ripple, right?"
Roderick brand these two flat wooden spoons and smile.
"For sure," Crispus said.
He reached for the offered carton and quickly flipped it open.
"That's not all," Roderick said.   He reached in the sack again
and produced two small tightly wrapped packages.
"Baseball cards," he said triumphantly.
He tossed the pack to Crispus.
Crispus opened it and let out of whoop.
"Man, oh man, Curt Flood and Lou Brock in the same pack."
Roderick laughed, "Looks like today is your lucky day."
The two friends relaxed and enjoyed their cool treat.
Crispus amused Roderick by imitating Schamberg,
slurping enthusiastically and smacking his lips.
The sun overhead beamed intensely, making it warm even in the shade.
Crispus examined the back of the Lou Brock card.
"All right," he said.   "Tell me what you know?"
Roderick closed his eyes.
"Okay. Middle name is Clark, born june18, 1939 in El Dorado, Arkansas,
bats left, throws left, 5'11, 170 pounds."
Crispus nodded his approval.
"Good. Now, what's so special about 1962?"
"Easy, first full season in the majors, played 123 games,
struggled a bit at the plate although an average
of 263 is nothing to sneeze at."
And he already showed clear indication
of his brilliant speed with 16 stolen bases.
Crispus shook his head.
"Man, oh man, how do you have time to learn all this stuff?"
"No it's nada, it's nothing.
And I don't try to learn it, I just do.
It's not like balancing equations or anything.
If I see the back of the card, I can usually manage
to see it again in my head."   Crispus smiled.
"I guess that's why they call you the-- " "Well, look at here,
if it ain't the mother fucking genius."
Crispus immediately recognized the voice is belonging to Bumpy Decatur,
he didn't want to look up but he had to, into the leering faces
of Bumpy and his brother Darwin.   "He ain't no genius," Darwin said.
"That punk be faking.   He don't know shit."
Roderick said nothing.   Crispus extended the purple carton.
"You all want some ice cream?"   "Shut up bean shots," Bumpy said.
He said it was such violence the spit flu
from his mouth and just missed Crispus.
"This ain't about your nappy headed ass.
You lucky Lala ain't here or I'll let her beat the shit out of you."
He turned to Roderick.
"Stand your ass up when I'm talking to you."
Roderick reluctantly complied.
"Everybody is always going around talking about you a genius.
What you think?   Is you one?"
Roderick sighed.   "Genius is relative," he said.
The witty Roderick was fast disappearing.
The muttering Roderick was taking over.
Darwin snorted and snarled with a confidence
of a bully who has many brothers.
"We ain't talking about your goddamn relatives.
I'm talking about your sorry ass."   Bumpy laughed and shoved Roderick.
"He ain't got no relative no else except his crazy ass mama.
I bet she ain't nothing but a dope fiend."
"What did you say?"
Something in Roderick's tone made Crispus look up at his friend.
Muttering Roderick was gone, just like that.
"You heard me, I said that bitch ain't-- " Bumpy grunted as he fell,
hitting the ground before he could finish the sentence.
There was a moment of silence, astonishment as he rubbed his jaw
and stared at Roderick who was studying his own fist
as if it belonged to someone else.
Crispus rose to his feet ready to run.
Roderick tried to explain, "Look."   "Oh no," Bumpy said.
He was grinning now, "That's my game for sure."
Darwin grabbed Roderick and held his arms.
Bumpy moved so fast that Crispus didn't register the fact
of his motion until he had pulled back.
A flash of silver glinting in his hand.
Roderick slumped, "Teach you to mess with me bastard," Bumpy shouted.
"Come on Bumps, let's go."
They took off in a flurry of footsteps.
Crispus turned to Roderick.
He was slowly sliding down the wall, eyes open.
His hand pressed against his shirt,
between his fingers, a trickle of blood.
Roderick, "Did he stab me?"   Roderick gasped.
"I think it was a screw driver.   Man, oh man, what should I do?"
"Get one of those palates over there, elevate my feet."
Several palates leaned against the wall next to the backdoor of D
and E. Crispus knocked one down and dragged it over to Roderick.
He lifted his friend's feet and placed them on top.
"Good," Roderick said.   "Now, get help."
"No way," Crispus protested.
"I'm not leaving you here, forget about it."
Roderick smiled despite his pain.   His fingers were now wet and red.
"I'm not going to die," he said.
"I'm pretty sure he didn't get any of my internal organs."
"You sure?"   "Pretty sure."
"Pretty sure?   What kind of sure is that?"
"Hey, are you doubting the genius?"   The backdoor of D and E burst open.
The butcher ran out in a crimson spattered apron.
"I hear you little creatons always loitering in back
of the store, this ain't your house.   So go home, why don't you--
" he paused, taking note
of the small boy kneeling beside his stricken friend.
The wet hand on the shirt, the buttons misaligned.
"Jesus God," he said.   "I'll get help.
I'll call the cops."   He ran back inside.
"Hear that?   Help is coming."
Roderick chuckled weakly.
Crispus somehow knew that he should keep him talking.
"Why are you laughing?   We've got a serious situation here."
"I was just thinking how good it would be
to see my mother right now."   "Makes sense to me," Crispus said.
But Roderick didn't hear him.   "It's funny," he said.
"All my life I've wished and wished for a father and now I can't think
about anything else but my mama."   He closed his eyes.
"Do you hear me mother?   Le necesito, mama."
The genius continued to laugh.
The blood continued to ooze slowly and thickly
like chocolate ripple melting in the sun.
That's that, thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]   >> Good afternoon everybody.
If there-- if there's a way to use a microphone wrong, I will do it,
so can everyone hear me, okay?
Great. Thank you all for coming out and thank you Library of Congress
for putting this together and for inviting me to be a part of it.
It is such an honor to be here and to be in such fine company.
In my day job, I teach at American University and one
of the courses I teach is African-American literature
which means among other things that I get the pleasure
of rediscovering Ellison every year when I teach Invisible Man.
By some cruel trick of the semester calendar, it always ends up to be
in the middle of writing their midterm papers
at the same time they'll be starting reading Invisible Man.
So I just had to give my annual lecture, discouraging them
from abandoning their selected midterm topics and writing
about Invisible Man instead.
And while I'm gratified that every year I got this outpouring of love
for the book, I have to tell them that for a lot of them writing
about it it's like writing about a new love.
There is no critical distance.
There is no acknowledgment of all the things that they don't know yet.
I can sympathize with that.
I, too, felt understood by the book before I actually understood it.
Before I loved Ellison as a writer, before I loved him
for how brilliantly structured that book is
or how insightful he could talk about being a writer in America,
being black in American and particularly being a black writer
in America, I loved him because he had words
for the things I'd always felt but never knew how to name.
In the introduction to the Invisible Man, I don't have--
I have my copy like this because my actual copy of Invisible Man I stole
from my cousin like years and years ago when she was--
she passed it down 'cause she had it in high school and was done with it
and it's-- but really held together with tape and a little bit of glue.
And I thought, can I walk into The Library
of Congress with this abused book?
They'll arrest me for book abuse or something.
So I have a good copy to read.
But this is from the introduction to Invisible Man.
Ellison says, in fact, it seemed to tease me with illusions
that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held
that most Afro-American difficulties spring from our "high visibility."
A phrase as double dealing and insidious
as it more recent oxymoronic cousins
"benign neglect" reverse discrimination.
Both of which translate, keep those Negroes running
but in their same old place.
My friends had made rye jokes out of the term for many years,
suggesting that while the darker brother was clearly "checked
and balanced" and kept far more checks than balanced,
on the basis of his darkness, he glowed, nevertheless,
within the American conscience with such intensity
that most whites expand moral blindness toward his predicament.
And these included the waves of later rivals refused
to recognize the vast extent to which they too benefited
from his second class status while placing all
of the blame on white southerners.
Thus, despite the blind recessions of sociologists,
high visibility actually rendered one unvisible, whether at high noon
in Macey's window or illuminated by the flaming torches
and flash mobs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated
to the ideal of white supremacy.
After such knowledge and given the persistence of racial violence
and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked my self,
what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?
That sense of being so highly visible
that you can't actually be seen had been with me most of my life
and I was astonished to discover that someone had found
about it and put it in a book.
So because I love that book so much and it seemed appropriate
to bring it up in this speech, I'm going to read a few
of my favorite passages from Invisible Man.
Probably if you're here, you have read them before.
But I'm going to start with the section
where he comes upon the elderly couple being evicted
and describes the scene before him.
Something had been working fiercely inside me and for a moment,
I had forgotten the rest of the crowd.
Now, I recognized the self-consciousness about them,
as though they, we, were ashamed to witness the eviction,
as though we were all unwilling intruders upon some shameful event.
And thus we were careful not to touch or stare too hard
at the effects that lay in the curb, for we were witnesses
of what we did not wish to see, though curious,
fascinated despite our shame, and through it all,
the old female mind-plunging crying.
I looked at the old people feeling my eyes burn, my throat tighten.
The old woman sobbing was having a strange effect upon me
as when a child seeing the tears of its parents is mood
by both fear and sympathy to cry.
I turned away feeling myself drawn to the old couple by a warm,
dark rising whirlpool of emotion which I feared.
I was weary of what the sight of them crying there
on the sidewalk was making me begin to feel.
I wanted to leave but was too ashamed to leave,
was rapidly becoming too much a part of it to leave.
I turned aside and looked at the clutter of the household objects
which the two men continue to pile on the walk.
And as the crowd pushed me, I looked down to see looking
out of an oval frame, a portrait of the old couple when young,
seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there,
feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head
like that of hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street.
Seeing them look back at me as though even
in that 19th century day they had expected little and this with a grim
and illusioned pride that suddenly seem
to me both their approach and a warning.
My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved and polished bones,
knocking bones, used to accompany music at country dances,
used in black-face minstrels.
The flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep,
flat bones that gave off a sound when struck
like heavy castanets, had he been a minstrel?
Or the wooden block of a set of drums.
Pots and pots of green plants were lined in the dirty snow,
certain to die of the cold, ivy, canna, a tomato plant.
And in a basket I saw a straightening comb switches
of false hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters
against a background of dark red velvet, reading God Bless Our Home;
and scattered across the top of a chiffonier were nuggets
of High John the Conqueror, the lucky stone;
and as I watched the white men put down a basket
in which I saw a whiskey bottle filled with rock candy and camphor,
a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln,
and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine.
And on a pillow several badly cracked pieces of delicate china,
a commemorative plate celebrating the St. Louis World Fair.
I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded
with jet and mother-of-pearl.
The crowd surged as the white men came back, knocking over a drawer
that spilled its contents in the snow at my feet.
I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem,
a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced
with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string
for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message "Grandma,
I love you" in childish scrawl; another card with a picture
of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door
of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric
"Going back to my old cabin home"; a useless inhalant,
a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot,
a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher's mitt,
registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump
with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock
of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon.
I felt nauseated.
In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies
with perforated seals stamped "Void";
a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man
with the caption: MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED.
I turned away, bending and searching the dirty snow for anything missed
by my eyes, and my fingers closed upon something resting
in a frozen footstep: a fragile paper, coming apart with age,
written in black ink grown yellow.   I read: FREE PAPERS.
Be it known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo, has been freed
by me this sixth day of August, 1859.
Signed: John Samuels Macon.
I folded it quickly, blotting out the single drop of melted snow
which glistened on the yellowed page,
and dropped it back into the drawer.
My hands were trembling, my breath rasping
as if I had run a long distance
or come upon a coiled snake in a busy street.
It has been longer than that, further removed in time,
I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn't been.
I replaced the drawer in the chest and pushed drunkenly to the curb.
I'm always amazed by the level of detail in that passage by the use
of language, the use of the image but also that ending note,
it has been longer than that, further removed in time,
how long we felt that way and how close it always seems.
Ellison, I think, perhaps more than any writer does such a good job
of showing the way we are always hunted by the American past
in this country and for that, I've come to him again and again
in thinking about the ways that we can feel the past in the present.
I also think even in his writing, even in his creative work,
Ellison was always thinking about how to tell those stories.
So I'm going to read another very short passage
from later in the book.
I came out of the subway, weak, moving through the heat
as though I carried a heavy stone,
the weight of a mountain on my shoulders.
My new shoes hurt my feet.
Now, moving through the crowds along 125th Street, I was painfully aware
of other men dressed like the boys,
and of girls in dark exotic-colored stockings,
their costumes surreal variations of downtown styles.
They'd been there all along, but somehow I'd missed them.
I'd missed them even when my work had been most successful.
They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job
to get them in, all of them.
I looked into the design of their faces,
hardly a one that was unlike someone I'd known down South.
Forgotten names sang through my head like forgotten scenes in dreams.
I moved with the crowd, the sweat pouring off of me,
listening to the grinding roar of traffic, the growing sound
of a record shop loudspeaker blaring a languid blues.
I stopped.   Was this all that would be recorded?
Was this the only true history of the times,
a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums,
a song with turgid, inadequate words?
My mind flowed.
It was as though in this short block I was forced
to walk past everyone I'd ever known
and no one would smile or call my name.
But after I loved Ellison for writing such eloquent words,
I loved him for the way that he made me think about writing
and the project of being a writer.
Structure I think is the last thing that writers learn to love
about writing because if it's working well, you don't see it.
In a book like Invisible Man, there is such pleasure in the sentence
by sentence that it can be a second or third,
or fourth read before you realize just how intricately crafted it is.
But when you do, the amount of work that had to go
in into putting all those pieces together is astounding.
If Ellison's use of structure gives the writer a certain challenge,
a sense that fiction is indeed as he says a very strong discipline,
it's also true that Ellison gives writers certain important
and explicit permissions.
In an interview with Harper's magazine, he says,
I mean that it is futile to argue our humanity with those
who willfully refuse to recognize it, when art can reveal
on its own terms more truth while providing pleasure insight,
and for Negro readers at least affirmation
and a sense of direction.
We must assert our own sense of values, beginning with the given
and irrevocable, with the question of heroism and slavery.
Contrary to some, I feel that our experience
as a people involves a great deal of heroism.
From one perspective, slavery was horrible and brutalizing,
it is said, "Those Africans were enslaved,
they died in the middle passage, they were abused,
their families were separated, they were whipped,
ravaged and emasculated."
And the Negro writer is tempted to agree, "Yes goddamn it,
wasn't that a horrible thing?"
But he sometimes agrees to the next step which holds
that slaves had very little humanity because slavery destroyed it
for them and their descendants.
That what's the Stanley M. Elkins "Sambo" argument implies.
But despite the historical past and the injustices of the present,
from my perspective, there is something further to say.
I have to affirm my forefathers and I must affirm my parents
or be reduced in my own mind to a white man's inadequate even
if unprejudiced conception of human complexity.
Yes and I must affirm those unknown people who sacrificed for me.
I'm speaking for those Negro-Americans who never knew
that a Ralph Ellison might exist, but who by living their own lives
and refusing to be destroyed by social injustice
and white supremacy, real or illusory, made it possible for me
to live my own life with meaning.
I am forced to look at these people and upon the history of life
in the United States and conclude
that there is another reality behind the appearance of reality
which they would force upon us as truth.
Any people who could endure all of that brutalization
and keep together, who could undergo such dismemberment,
resuscitate itself and endure until it could take the initiative
in achieving its own freedom is obviously more
than the sum of its brutalization.
Seen in this perspective, theirs has been one
of the greatest human experiences and one of the greatest triumphs
of the human spirit in modern times, in fact, in history of the world.
It is tremendously liberating to be able to say to yourself,
I am not writing for people who do not recognized my humanity.
It is in fact that that allows me as a writer to be able
to creat black characters who are fully human,
who are sometimes flawed and foolish,
who speak in different registers,
who find themselves frequently stumbling in their quest
to make sense of themselves and their country.
That I think is a second permission
that Ellison has given me as a writer.
The permission to dare to try to make sense of America,
to write fiction that is about the individual but also necessarily
about the society that produces and restricts individuals,
about the ways in which private existence may come
as my necessity performative in accordance with social expectations
or in resistance to social restrictions.
I take from Ellison that the project of the writer in the US is to take
on the task of telling the true story.
So, you know, I got this e-mail inviting me to this event
and I was really excited to be included and honored
and I'm reading, yes, I can talk about Ralph.
Yes, I can read my favorite Ellison passages and I got to the part
that was like and then we'd like you to read some
of your own work, and I was like, hold up.
So you want me to read my work to an audience
that just heard a lot of Ralph Ellison?
It's like being invited to be in a beauty contest with Beyonce, right?
Like I'm cute but I'm not stupid.
But if we take anything from Ellison,
it's a little bit of boldness.
The writer's job is never to be shy, so I'm going to read a bit
from the very opening of my novel in progress.
Because it's from the opening, you don't need a ton of context
but since you don't have it in front of you--
in front of you, you will be able to see
that the very opening is actually one
of the characteristics keeps a trouble blog,
so the very opening is actually a blog posts and then we move
in the Chapter one, so I will say chapter one
and you'll know I changed it.   The essential metaphor
for the American experiment is not a patchwork quilt,
or a pot of multicolored melting wax but a railroad car
on the way to California.
A thing built with blood, shaped by the whims of commerce contested over
and over again in the courts.
A site of socialization, a site of social contestation,
a thing hanging forward and stubborn denial of the fact
that destination could be gradually falling into the see.
I had a professor once who argued that the embrace
of the automobile implied a certain bargain with death,
the clear right acceptance that we are willing to accept a daily risk
of dying in exchange for a certain level of comfort and convenience.
If this is true then it is also true
that change help us-- help get us there.
From Philadelphia to California,
there are literally bodies underneath the trucks.
Many of those that the railroad workers
who are building the trucks before there were even trains running
on them.
Then of course, you had your crashes,
and your stagecoach robberies, and your coal miner's lung.
But there was always glamour in trains,
a sexiness outside of the [inaudible].
It's no accident that some of the earliest lawsuits
in the country centered on trains.
The ability to be employed on trains with dignity, the ability to seat
in ladies car, when was the wrong color to be considered a lady.
The ability to be free if the train is taking you to free territory.
Part of the romance of trains is
that they move people forward in more sense than one.
The fact that trains are now largely in efficient ways
to travel only emphasizes their romantic aspects.
West of Chicago, trains are now vehicles of leisure not efficiency.
If you want to be on time, you drive somewhere.
The passenger trains don't own the trucks,
which means that by law free trains must pass first.
Before this trip, I only been in the middle
of the country a few times just enough t know
that the mid west is not in fact a Jedi mind trick
to make the US look bigger on world maps,
as my former room mate alleged once when I told her I was on my way
to a conference in Kansas.
I've been taking trains up and down the East coast all of my life,
and before this trip, they were responsible
for my general impressions of train travel.
Trains leave hourly in absent disaster arrive
within half an hour of their schedule time.
Once my train from DC to New York was 45 minutes late
because a man near Philadelphia jumped in front of the trucks,
the woman next to me spent the last hour of the trip on her cellphone
with M truck that would be demanding her money back.
I've read later that the man died.
So looking outside the window, looking at the window at Omaha stop
where we've been stuck for the last two hours, I can't help
but be a little unsettled.
The train is currently nine hours behind schedule
and truth be told I'm a little shocked
that there are still this many people on the country
who can take a nine hour delay in stride.
Luckily, I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere except out of New York.
I used to have a job there, and now I don't.
I used to be finishing my visitation and then I'm done.
I used to have a boyfriend
and now he's married and living in Tennessee.
I ran out of things to tailor me to the city, and so it seemed
as good a time as I need to leave.
The luxury of having a country with so much space in it is
that every asshole was right on the road thinks they can head
to California and be a different person by the time they get there.
[Laughter] In America, we like our origin stories
and you could construct a good one about trains from these jail workers
to the railroad barons, to the private car owners to the hobos,
and another about the west itself.
Either of those would ultimately be a story of extensive motion,
of going somewhere, even if you first have
to violently invent a place to go.
It is no accident that in our country's mythology we replace the
European prince on a white stallion with a cowboy rugged, untethered
and most importantly always on verge of living.
Fall for a cowboy and there is no palace to aspire to you.
You're either going to learn to let him go or you are going
to live what you know and ride off into the jagged,
fleeting sunset with him.
We have a romance with movements, a love affair with departure.
Our national bedtime story is the story that you can go somewhere.
And historically, somewhere has been west.
So my trip begins with heading west.
Chapter 1, it was a summer of burning things, of trash can fires
and lazy mattresses of sofas and old recliners and piles of clothing gone
to ash in alley ways with such frequency that whole sections
of the city smelled vaguely of lighter fluid some days.
Bedbug was the official explanation.
They'd arrived in mass a tiny blood sucking army meant
on keeping the populus awake at night.
Maybe it was the bedbugs to some degree.
They had become so bold and proliferate that even
in the most upscale of apartments and restaurants, it was not unusual
to see them crawling across the floor in broad daylight.
It'd become nearly impossible to take the metro
without a telltale red welt appearing hours
or days or weeks later.
But it was also the heat, which spread both the fires
and desire to burn things.
And the restlessness of living in a time and place
where one big threat came after another so frequently that it was
like being eternally held ransom by an easily distracted mad man.
There was an existential panic that frequently faded and deflected
on me, a communal sense of fuck it, you're all going to die.
[Laughter] It was not unusual that summer to see people in a state
of undress, to see children and teenagers wandering the streets
in swim wear in search of fountains or broken hydrants,
to see adults sunbathing in clothing covering only the bare minimum
percentage of body, to see often enough
that it stopped being startling.
Someone's stripping off last night's bar clothes
on their own front porch inviting them on fire
in a front yard trash can before waltzing nearly naked
to the front door.
Although, they had been all told the bedbugs had nothing to do
with cleanliness, there was a great deal
of suspicion regarding the sanitary habits of general public.
And one night stands and paramours were not to be trusted.
It was cheaper to throw the polo shirt or cocktail dress
than to radiate one's apartment.
So ubiquitous for the underdressed young people
that when he first saw her, it took Phil a minute to understand
that the blonde girl in her g underwear was protesting anything
other than summer feel or atmospheric inconvenience.
She looked about 20 and he decided she must be crazy or midwestern,
no local in her right mind will [inaudible] an alter protest
in DC in July.
It was 114 degrees with the heat index.
And so humid that things in the distant seemed hazy.
Her skin was reddened and damped and doughy.
Her white bra was soaked too with sweat.
Her name, he discovered by reading the poster board she popped
up next to her was Diana.
And she was opposed to the war or wars,
her sign was not especially clear in the first place,
and its sense has been defaced.
Once by group of interns would take the [inaudible]
of their picnic lunch, waxy white sandwich wrappers
and empty paper cups and glaring foil
of chip bags to her sad billboard.
Once by someone who inscrolled in red marker
for a good time call me along
with an arrow pointing in Diana's direction.
And once by someone who inscrolled that magic marker,
hunger strike, bitch you need to diet.
Phil had never had any children.
And now that he was on the other side of 50,
it seemed unlikely that he ever would.
But he imagined that if he had, he would have felt something for them
like what he felt for Diana in that moment.
A desire to protect her
from something she didn't even know what's out there.
And a competing desire to let her survive this
on her to prove him wrong.
Ultimately, the first instinct won out.
He bounded across the park to buy a bottle of water
from a hot dog vendor on the corner and then returned to the section
of the park where Diana sat.
She looked defeated, wilted, and sticky but something
about her reminded Phil of a farrow cat an ex-girlfriend
who visited once tried to trap and take to the vet,
weary enough to strike when cornered.
And so, he approached her slowly.
The water bottle held up in front of him as a piece offering
to dissuade her from cursing or spitting or running.
"Hello," he said, and Phil, she cocked her head to the side.
Up close, he could see the dark roots on the top of her scalp.
More than an inch not quite two, a fault line of polish indicating
that her life had recently been divided
into a before and an a after.
"I'm on a hunger strike," Diana said.
Her voice came out hoarse and musky and he couldn't tell
if it was the existing or sun that she'd been shielding
at some point in the recent past.
"You're not in a water strike, you'd be dead by now," said Phil.
Also, forgive me for saying so, but your hunger strike doesn't seem
to be particularly effective so far.
I'm waiting for the president to come down, I have a letter for her.
President is in Rome, there's no news in Rome.
Honey, there's no news in the world that's worried about you right now.
Have you seen any reporters?
How would I know if I had seen them for all I know, you're a reporter.
For all you know, I'm Santa Claus but I wouldn't count
on him showing up either.
Let me get you a cup of coffee and we'll talk
about how you can do this right the next time, okay?
She looked up at him momentarily defiant.
"Sit with me," she said.
"You want to tell me what I'm doing wrong, you can tell me here."
"Why don't you first try to tell me--
why don't you first tell me what it is you're trying to do?"
"My brother is dead," she said,
"And I think madam president owes me an explanation."
Phil looked away from her out of consideration,
half naked was one thing but she seemed like the kind of person
who would never forgive you for having seen her cry.
He let her words hover for a moment and remain seated beside her.
Passersby stopped at a distance and looked startled,
the image of the near-naked white girl and older black man in khakis
and one button down, but a few of them came close enough
to find out what it was about.
Someone has presented juvenile impression
to the protest from amusing to toggery.
"With all due respect [inaudible], your brother is going to be dead
for a very long time, long enough for you to have some lunch and talk
about their right way to do this."
It took her a few minutes to concede the point but finally,
she grabbed for the dusty backpack beside her and fished through it
until she emerged with a worn yellow sun dress
and [inaudible] over her head.
The dress was a smidge too tight, it hits up centimeter by centimeter
above her thighs as she walked and in the front of the fabric was
so flimsy, you could still see the clear outlines of her nipples
but she was at least decent enough for them to walk
up to 16th street and held a cab.   In the taxi, Diana seemed to wilt
against the window glass outside downtown loomed, pre-rush hour
and post-lunch hour and so relatively quiet.
The fatigue of the feel of protest seemed to have caught up with her
but not enough to take the edge
of her national curiosity about the city.
Phil almost didn't know what to tell her anymore.
People like to draw dividing lines in DC, DC versus Washington,
black DC versus white DC, DC proper versus DC metro.
But the only division that had made--
ever made a categorical sense to Phil was permanent DC
versus temporary DC, the people for whom DC was home
in some lasting sense that they would never get away
from versus the people who came to DC for six months or two years
or ten years but knew that were only there as long
as their company retained the contract or their boss stayed
in office or their grant money lasted.
Temporary DC was permanent in its own rights.
There would always be a new carpet in terms and legislative assistants
and appointees, young people with decent incomes or trust funds
and no long term designs on the city, no ties to what it had been
or even what it would be.
And then of course, people let Diana, kids who came here
with the idea they changed something and go home, pile into group houses
and run their protest through NGOs and charities
and then leave after the revolution.
So because it could, DC, of course, should need a ephemeral [inaudible]
of the infrastructure more or less alone.
It to tore down abandoned buildings and built classy condos
and added boutique, grocery stores, and small plate restaurants
and extra cups in the neighborhoods where these existed,
but delivered in a way of less glamorous development,
left most of its schools and prisons that they had been for decades tried
to annex with [inaudible] it could to the southeast quadrant
of the city and the nearby Maryland suburbs.
If Washington was the eternal mistress of cities, sleek, glossy,
replaceable vote for people who came
to it knowing they would live somebody.
Then there was also the aging, abandoned wife.
She might be stock or she was but she would never get really away
from her either, never really get away from the knowledge
of what you done to her or what she done for you.
Phil thought sometimes that you could map city simply asking people
to tell you what DC used to be.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
>> I'd like to begin without a small correction to the program,
the items on the table are not the from the Hughes collection
but from the Ralph Ellison collection,
that was something left over from last month.
I brought today just a few examples from the writings
and the correspondent series of our Ellison papers
and the manuscript division, what else is in the manuscript division?
I deal only with literary
and artistic materials, cultural materials.
Of course, the manuscript division has been in existence over a century
and both the holding 23-- the papers of 23 early American presidents
and other documents of American culture, supreme court justices,
women suffrage figures, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead
and then we have the world's largest Whitman collection and I could go on
and on with that, but this time not today, only for Ellison.
The library's vast research collection of manuscripts, drafts,
and notes for published and unpublished works
by Ralph Ellison also includes family papers, speeches, notebooks,
lectures, subject files, photographs, recordings and his work
in the library in other divisions and a flute.
[Laughter] Not that he played the flute, he played the clarinet.
Although Ellison produced several volumes of stories and essays,
as you know it was Invisible Man that made him his fame
and established the genre of the African-American novel of identity
and made him a major American author respected worldwide.
He, by the way, wished to be known
as an American author not an African-American author in spite
of his focus on race relations in the country.
Ellison, of course, helped teaching poets at 10 universities,
some of that is in your program.
He lectured at the Library of Congress in 1964,
served as the library's honorary consultant in American letters
from 1966 to '72 and returned in 1983 to read from his drafts
of his novel in progress,
some of which documentation I have on the table.
The first part of his collection was officially described in 1997,
two years after I traveled to the Harlem apartment
of the grieving widow and begun transferring materials
to the library.
Part 2 was added in 2010 and has been very little used by scholars.
They forget to look at the back of the finding end.
Even the biographer, Arnold Rampersad,
did not see its additional 83 boxes.   We didn't have them at that point.
The manuscript collection now holds 74,800 items
and a total of 314 archival boxes.
In part two of the collection, I found evidence
that other repositories had pursued Ellison's papers, Howard University,
Boston, Brooklyn College, University of Oregon
and The Lilly Library in Indiana.
But a friend at Colonial Williamsburg
with which Ellison was affiliated, highly recommend the Library
of Congress as his official repository.
Mrs. Ellison and two previously named state trustees made the final
selection the year after his death.
Literary executer John Callahan, professor in Oregon,
worked with the manuscript division on terms
for administering the complex of deposits, gifts, and purchases.
For many years, access like 15 years, access was highly restricted
and because of the need to track permissions, I became acutely aware
that this has been our most used literary collection since 1997.
The selections on display on the table today omit family papers,
organizational papers, and reference series all of this very rich.
He was very active in many cultural organizations
and he maintained running files on subjects
from Civil Rights to jazz and whatever.
The writings on the back row
and most writers will try poetry before they find their own genre
and was no exception.
He was 19 when-- a poem, typescript for the girl in the restaurant,
for Jessica whoever she was.
Never to grow old, my dear, nor loose the trace of laughter
from eyes, nor liquid music from your voice
which now you sprinkle over silver.   It begins.
[Laughter] From the obscure to the most famous,
the next is the final draft of Invisible Man
with corrections in 1952.
Even on this there are writings on the final draft.
We have many other drafts of Invisible Man, we have the notes
for it, we have all kinds of report material and reviews,
a complete archive of Invisible Man which has been much used
to study the evolution and style of Ellison.
Lots of revisions, lots of scribble used,
but this of course begins I am an invisible man, no I am not a spook
such as those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe, you know,
one of your Hollywood movie ecoplasms.
I a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids,
I might even be said to possess some mind.
I am invisible you see simply
because people refuse to recognize me.
Then in the blue paper, I have the Hickman novel.
That's what we had to call it
because that's the way he left the title at his death
and archivally, it's the Hickman novel.
And the blue paper has an episode draft.
He liked to write in episodes both for invisible man
and for the second novel and he would keep these
in alphabetical order rather than in the order in which they would appear
in the novel, in which may have led him
to major chaos in the second book.
This is Hickman and Bliss at the hospital.
It's a typescript, undated
and literary executer John Callahan edited
and published the unfinished novel [inaudible]
as you know, as Juneteenth, 1999.
And then with Adam Bradley in an expanded form
as Three Days before the Shooting, 2010.
This is the seminal scene around which the novel was reconstructed
for the 2010 publication.
Set in the frame of a death bed visual,
this story is a multigenerational saga and centered
on the assassination
of the controversial race-baiting US senator, Adam Sunraider,
who is being tended by Daddy Hickman.
This is Elison by the way knew somebody named Hickman
and we have a book, you know, Rare Book Room that's inscribed from him.
This elderly black jazz musician
in the story turned preacher had raised the orphan Sunraider,
he called the child Bliss.
As a light skinned black in rural Georgia.
And then in talking about structure as one of our speakers did,
on the easel is an outline for the first 100 pages
of Ellison's unfinished novel chapters 1 through 8,
and it's a meticulous outline
in which he really was working with the structure.
I found this in part 2.
I don't know how many people have seen it.
I have a message into John Callahan to verify the handwriting.
It's possible that it's Fanny Ellison hand writing
but Ellison's writing changed a lot and I think he was trying
to struggle here with an effort to gain control
over many overlapping episodes
and rewrites sprawling over several decades.
And then the last item on the back row is the author's memoirs
unpublished, unfinished, one of two folders that we have.
The original type script undated but it's clearly after 1984
since it was a date on a verso of some of the pages
that he used to recycle the paper.
And this section covers childhood and youth and it's written,
it's all written in the second person.
It begins, when you were a young boy in Oklahoma, you daydreamed widely
of adventure, and it goes on and some of the material is reminiscent
of living the territory in his other writings.
The second row is a small selection from the vast correspondents.
I'd begin with Ellison's 1957 reply to William Faulkner concerning
in part Ralph's opposition to the proposed release of Ezra Pound
from St. Elizabeth's Hospital.   From his position at Random House,
Faulkner had been organizing prominent authors
to issue statements against foreign tyranny as in Hungary in 1956.
This is Ellison's measured response.
Many of the authors by the way did agree to sign.
I do not, however, agree to the freeing of Ezra Pound.
Pound is, as you say, a great poet but I can't see this as a reason
for the free, for freeing him anymore
than I could see the Rosenbergs free
because of their particular professions and whatsoever.
Even had they been the first in their fields.
Pound committed treason and if what the Paris edition
of the Harold Tribune states is true, he continues from his room
at St. Elizabeth's hospital
to encourage the treasonable activities of John Casper.
Thus, since his confinement does not interfere with his side of--
with this side of his activities, I cannot see why it should interfere
within his creation of poetry and it didn't since he wrote some
of The Cantos from St. Elizabeth's.
And then Faulkner's letter is beside that.
In difference to the poetry office sponsorship of this event,
I decided to select just a few additional letters
from former LOC poetry consultants.
I had a wide array of many other authors I could have chosen.
The most used corespondents actually are the Langston Hughes
and Richard Wright files and also the copious files of letters
between Ellison and Kenneth Burke.
The Hughes and Wright files became so worn that we had to make copies
and retire the originals from service.
So the next little item is from William Jay Smith.
And it's a cover letter for a printed poem of his Winter Morning.
Poets do this.
Since Frost that I know of send out beautifully, privately printed poems
to their friends in the holidays.
"Dear Ralph and Fanny, this is 23, December 1967.
We've just heard the terrible news about the fire.
How ghastly?
I hope you were able to save your manuscript
and that 1968 will bring you only the best of things.
With affection of greetings, Bill."
Of course that's the fire that destroyed most
of the Hickman novel manuscript.
After that, William Jay Smith served as consult--
poetry consultant in 1968 to 1970.
After that is Ellison to Robert Penn Warren, it's a computer printout.
He loved technology.
And we have printouts, I hope, of everything that he put
into primitive computers.
This is a draft letter to Robert Penn Warren in 1971.
It refers affectionately to their long friendship.
Warren served as Library of Congress poetry consultant 1944 and '45
and then again, as the first to be designated poet laureate in 1986-87.
I won't read it.   You can look at it yourself.
The last item is William Meredith.
Midnight lovely holograph poem written out, sent to the Ellisons
as a Christmas greetings in 1978.
This is one of the series of such poems in this file and part 2
of the Ellison collection.
Meredith served as poetry consultant in 1978 to 1980.
And when you read it on the blue paper on the end,
it has a marvelous use of these 5 senses
which poetry teachers always tell us to use.
It shouts out and you can smell it and hear it,
and I recommend it very much.   These letter sample, the wide value
of the Ralph Waldo Ellison collection
in research many major 20th century artists and thinkers.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Thank you, Alice.
Please do come up and look at the table top display if you'd like.
Thank you also to our readers, to Jabari Asim and Danielle Evans.
We have books by both of them for sale in the back
and we have Invisible Man for sale as well.
So if you want to stop and get a book
and one our readers sign the book, I'm sure, they'd be happy to do so.
I hope we see you again.
Our next literary birthdays event is actually
on I believe Monday the 26th featuring William Jay Smith reading
from his new book called My Friend Tom
about his relationship with Tennessee Williams.
So you can check our website too and find out more
about our events but thanks for coming.
[Applause]   >> That is great.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.