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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, September 19th, and I'm Kortney Morrow, program director of the NFL Wolf Book Awards.

The book awards were founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith and Silver Wolf to reflect her family's commitment to social justice.

Administered by the Cleveland Foundation, the NFL Wolf Book Awards is proud to celebrate its 90th anniversary.

Over the years, the awards have celebrated over 200 groundbreaking authors and remains the only American book prize that recognizes books that have made significant contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.

Today, we are honored to introduce today's forum featuring Jonathan D.S.

Schroeder, literary historian and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design and this year's award winner in nonfiction.

Before we begin, let me take you back to 1855.

An American named John Swanson Jacobs, a fugitive slave, walked into the offices of the Empire newspaper in Sydney, Australia.

The conversation that ensued between the editors and Jacobs opened a path for the newspaper to publish his personal story.

Two weeks later, Jacobs brought them a manuscript titled The United States, governed by 600,000 words.

This was not a typical slave narrative, and they published it then for 169 years.

This narrative was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia.

It was in 2016, in the midst of other research, when our Jonathan Schroeder, our guest today, came across Jacobs autobiography, reproduced in full.

This narrative highlights the significance of hearing a firsthand account of slavery, a narrative untempered with and unedited, by white abolitionist, which has never been seen before.

Also joining us on stage is Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

He is a 2021 and Still Wolf Book Award winner in nonfiction for Tax Revolt The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.

He will serve as moderator for today's conversation.

A reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Jonathan Schroeder and Vincent Brown.

To turn our backs on right.

Do we have to turn our microphone?

I think they're already on.

Are they on?

I think somebody in the control room turned them on for us.

Music.

Full service, which is fantastic.

I want to thank all of you for coming this afternoon to this talk.

I especially want to thank Dan for inviting us and Cynthia and Courtney for that lovely introduction and all of the volunteers for making this possible, for organizing our visit.

And for, bringing you all here today.

I think there's going to be a fantastic conversation because this is a fantastic book.

It's quite amazing.

In fact, just the story that Courtney told about us, discovery reminds me that we have a kind of fantasy of scholarship that's a little bit like Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where, you know, you're an intrepid scholar out there in the archives or in the world or in the jungle, and you find some jewel of knowledge and you come back to the world and you reveal it for all to see.

Now, that's that's a fantasy.

And that's not normally the way it works.

Maybe that's not even the way it works in this case, but this book gives us that sense that we have rediscovered something lost to history.

And that's important to us and valuable to us now.

And I really want to talk about why that is valuable to us now.

But first I want to talk about the Indiana Jones part, which is about you, and how you got involved in this search for this slave native.

How did you even know that you wanted to look for this kind of thing?

How did you even get involved in looking at slave narratives in the first place?

I would never have found this narrative if John Jacobs did not have a sister who is one of the most important writers in American history.

Harriet Jacobs, who, I'll leave to the side, was also lost to history until the 1970s and until a scholar named Jean Fagan Yellin showed that Linda Brant, the name that appears on Incidents The Life of a Slave Girl, is in fact Harriet Jacobs.

A similar thing maybe happening with John Jacobs here.

I was doing research at the time.

I didn't know that this book existed, or I would have found it already.

I was doing research on Harriet Jacobs.

I think I would have found that if.

And writing, basically what you do after you get your PhD is you try to turn your book into a dissertation or your dissertation into a book, and you do this under a lot of anxiety.

So I was in the process of doing that.

I was in the process of studying the history of nostalgia, which in the 18th and 19th centuries referred to a disease, a disease of extreme homesickness that was only diagnosed in people who had been forcibly removed from their homes.

And it was specifically homes like longing to return home.

And so when that medical concept was exported from Europe to the Americas, it was used in the institutions that had discontented people who wanted to return home.

It quickly get gray and that kind of racist overtone, as did much, early 19th century science and medicine.

And maybe today we can think about the way that even today, emotions are racialized, that some people can be angry in public in America without fear of retaliation.

Not everybody.

As we know all too well.

So I was curious, though.

What about the people who are being diagnosed with nostalgia?

Who what do they say about loss and displacement?

Harriet Jacobs happens to be the formerly enslaved person who knows the most about medicine of anyone that any any freedom narrative that we have.

So turning to her was a natural and also 19th century American is.

So this was well, in my wheelhouse.

I was reading her biography, which I encourage anyone who's interested in Harry Jacobs to read.

It's called Harriet Jacobs A Life by Ellen.

And I came across this footnote that said Harriet's son had gone to Australia and had possibly committed suicide in 1860.

He had not come back from Australia or gone with John Jacobs to England.

He stayed behind for mysterious reasons.

I then figured, okay, well, Yellen's doing research in the 80s and 90s.

She did not have access to digitized resources.

I just finished a cover letter.

I'm in.

I'm stressed.

It's October 2016.

I may or may not have still been smoking cigarets.

Maybe went out and thought about what to do next and came back inside and this is very like you went to University of Chicago like grad school training was like, you should not unwind by watching a movie.

You should do some more work as a way to unwind.

As University of Chicago.

Yeah.

The motto we're fun goes to die, isn't it?

The motto of the school is where fun goes to die.

I went upstairs, back into my apartment, and I figured, oh, there must be a historical database somewhere that contains historical Australian materials.

Turns out, actually, the state Library or the National Library of Australia had created a big one.

And so I started searching for Joseph Jacobs.

That's a pretty common name.

There are probably dozens of people named Joseph Jacobs who emigrated or were transported to Australia in the first half of the 19th century.

So I figured, okay, well, I could search for this uncle that I'm not really paying attention to just because he has this middle initial s. So his name is John S Jacobs.

Much more, much more, unlikely that I'm going to come across other.

John.

John S Jacobs.

And maybe I'll catch something about Joseph Jacobs.

In the same newspaper article that mentions his uncle.

So I then got to searching.

So if anyone's using Ancestry.com, well, Ancestry.com has very good software, but if you've used, like, a historic historical material database and it's mis recognize the spelling of what's on the page.

I was anticipating that that would happen because this, the material in this database looked pretty old and looked like it was, not going to be read well by the software.

So I searched for John S Jacobs without, let's say, the age or the age would be a different letter.

Eventually I searched for John S Jacob without the s at the end.

Then the screen was like this all caps.

The title of this book is long, so like the title was like filling in the screen.

It was all caps.

The United States governed by 600,000 words by a fugitive slave.

Second hit the same thing, said the word count and said, oh, this is 10,326 words.

Oh, this is 11,698 words.

And, I was like, this is not a newspaper article.

And so I, dove in.

I wanted to figure out where is the name appearing.

As I scrolled through the first installment of the narrative.

I immediately saw that the historic historical names of all of the people from Harriet's biography were there.

That's a big deal, because incidents in the life of a Slave Girl was edited by an abolitionist named Lydia Maria child, who replaced all the real names with pseudonyms for fear of repercussions.

Because this book's being published in America.

I scroll through all these names, know John Jacobs.

Then I get about three quarters of the way through the first installment, and I come upon a note.

It says, sir, I have left you.

Sorry, sir.

I have left you not to return when I have got settled.

I will give you further satisfaction, no longer yours, John S Jacobs.

And there's a lot to be said about that note.

But I'm going to stop there.

In the interest of time.

Well, I think that's that's that's fantastic.

And what a story.

But I want to key off that.

No longer yours, because he's he's gone.

Right.

And he's not only somewhere in the North.

He's not only in Rochester or Cleveland.

He's in Australia.

Right.

When he publishes this.

So, you know, why is it different that he's published this in Australia?

Like what makes this narrative different than all of the others that we have?

We have so many now, including that of Harriet Jacobs.

Why is this distinctive and what does that have to do with it being published in Australia?

I mean, that's a really good question.

And something that I wrestled with for a long time.

Particularly because I am a white editor and biographer who's discovered this text.

Now I have to figure out what is my responsibility to this text and what is the history I'm inheriting.

It's not a great history.

In the 19th century, before emancipation, of the 100 110 autobiographical.

I'm not going to call them slave narratives, because I think they're better called freedom narratives.

They were almost all published under the supervision.

We might call it gatekeeping today of white abolitionists and publishers.

Who believed, because they often ran the political organizations that were seeking to abolish slavery.

They believed that they knew what was the right thing to say to abolish slavery.

And so there are the one reason why these narratives are often so conventional, why they always begin with birth and end with the moment of escape, why they don't talk about ancestors, they don't talk about extended family.

They don't talk about private life, romance, love very much.

In most cases, those are off the table altogether.

Is probably because of this kind of invisible hand that is affecting and constraining black autonomous self-expression.

John Jacobs does not have to worry about any of this.

He is an Australia which is not only outside American law and the threat of American violence.

It's also even outside of British humanitarian authority, because the British would also exert a similar influence over narratives or publish there, of which many were.

Up to 30% of all known narratives were published in England is in Australia, which seems to be going through its own kind of moment of calling for independence, calling for democratic reform, for separation from the British.

The newspaper he goes to, though it's called The Empire, which sounds like something from Star Wars, is an anti-slavery paper.

They are republishing Emerson's lecture on slavery.

They are serializing Uncle Tom's Cabin.

That's not all they're publishing, but it's remarkable that that material makes it to a place that people who study African American history, literature, and culture almost never look.

He publishes in a newspaper.

The editors say we have scarcely altered the altered a word other than to insert punctuation.

And we can also believe them because the daily newspaper, there's not a lot of time to edit things.

It's not like putting out a hardbound volume where you have as much time as you need sometimes.

So he writes in an unfiltered way.

He does not have that invisible hands dangling over him, and he writes with anger.

He writes with anger that might dispel the kind of common assumption that rage and reason can't go together.

They can.

They can.

This is in white hot incandescent analysis.

And I'll stop with just one final thing, which I think is one of the most remarkable aspects of the narrative, which is it also in the last quarter stops being what we would think of as autobiography.

It stops being autobiography biographical, and it's devoted to a 5000 word critique of America's founding documents, the Constitution and the declaration and the Fugitive Slave Act.

And it resembles nothing so much as one of the kind of texts of the black radical tradition, David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world.

That itself is incredible.

The title is incredible.

The title is something that he would not have been able to get away with if he was publishing in America or England.

In fact, when he moved to England, he resubmitted this book to a magazine, probably at the behest of white abolitionist friend.

And he set sail for Brazil.

Because he's a professional sailor by that time, as well as an abolitionist.

And while he's gone, they retitled the narrative A True Tale of Slavery.

Cut the whole thing in half.

Take out anything angry or.

And they effectively defang it.

It is like the Muzak version of the narrative.

And that's because white abolitionists took it upon themselves to write the philosophy of abolition.

And as, one person famously said to Douglass, just give us the facts.

We'll take care of the philosophy.

And then my bondage to my freedom.

Douglass then says, actually I felt like denouncing slavery.

John Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Martin Delany, William Cooper now they are all in Rochester in the 1840s at the same time.

They are all devising new rhetorical ways of denouncing slavery, new ways of taking on board their own philosophy.

And I think that's a good place to stop, to maybe go into the next question.

Well, maybe we can pick that apart a little bit, which is one of the things that characterized so many of the freedom narratives that we often call slave narratives is a kind of sentimentalism that, you know, you're supposed to mobilize the facts of slavery to make people feel something about it.

Right.

And the denunciation of slavery was supposed to come just from the revulsion that people felt of the way people were being treated.

But you say that one of the things that's important about John Jacobs narrative is that it refuses the sentimental objectification of black life in favor of a go for broke denunciation of slavery and the state, a style that radically rewrites the humanitarian contract between reader and text throughout.

You say the narrative uses personal experience and eyewitness accounts to speak to structural oppression and serve as occasions for denunciation through this potent combination.

Readers come to recognize the broader logics at work in slavery and the state, as well as the narrative itself.

So there's something here that you call an art of refusal to engage in the conventional tropes of abolitionist sentiment.

Would you talk a little bit about that art of refusal?

So this is basically the question how do you bring about political change in the 19th century?

The first big challenge to the obvious failures of, the Constitution, to which did not deliver universal citizenship to everybody, came from the outside.

It came from women's movements, from abolitionist movements, from labor movements sought to say, look at the way that being excluded from the franchise, excluded from protections and rights, harms us.

And the logic there was that you need to bring your Pin into the public sphere so that people can witness it and they can empathetically.

Or at the time, you would say sympathetically, take on board that pain as their own.

And usually when I say they can take on board their pain as their own, we're talking about privileged people who are citizens who do enjoy full protection and are in a position to do something about it.

Theoretically.

The problem, though, is that that doesn't produce structural change.

Oftentimes that leads to a kind of individualizing of this problem.

And this is why, much later in everybody's protest novel, James Baldwin goes off on sentimentality.

He goes off on the kind of sentimentality that, most famously, is epitomized by Uncle Tom's Cabin and says sentimentality is the ostentatious parading of false emotion, sentimentality.

The tears of the sentimentalist are crocodile tears.

They are false tears.

Nothing will come from this other than maybe they will feel like they've actually brought about change.

And really, what they're just confusing is their own feeling that something has changed in them with the actual change that needs to happen out there.

The slave narrative and I'll call it that for, for this, moment.

Is full of representations of black suffering and black pain.

Explicit graphic representations.

And that was part of this kind of humanitarian logic, of sentimental sentimentalism that was supposed to bring about some sort of political change.

Now, Jacobs recognizes that it does not, and he refuses to describe an individual suffering, being punished, being whipped.

You might talk about the practice in general, but he doesn't really zoom in on an individual body.

And in fact, this is because he wants you to read this book and say what's important is not the suffering or pain itself, it's that we need to be able to trace where this pain is coming from.

We need to trace this pain, psychic and bodily pain to its source.

As he writes, you cannot remove the evil without removing the cause.

And so he not only calls out real historical actors, but he particularly calls out.

And he not only calls out the slave owners of North Carolina, he calls out Washington politicians.

He calls out Daniel Webster.

He calls out John Calhoun, Henry Clay, a number of other people, and he calls out the American people who have not used their vote to change the system.

They are ultimately, or this group of people, laws and institutions are ultimately what is responsible for what creates the conditions for these acts of suffering.

And so he wants to, in an anti sentimental vein, ask readers to sign up for what I call a revolutionary contract.

One that doesn't link the reader to the formerly enslaved author who is reproducing his dehumanization and abjection in order to then show that he should be treated as a human.

We might call that as reliving your trauma today.

He calls for readers to develop an eye to eye relationship with all the people that are upholding the system.

Okay.

So this is going to be my last question before we take questions from the audience.

And I really want to get you guys involved in this conversation.

And I wasn't even sure I was going to ask a question like this.

But I feel compelled by what you just said.

If we do think of this book as a kind of gem of knowledge for not only our own admiration, but for our, our learning, how we're going to value it.

I guess I'd like to know what you think of.

Is the ideal contract between yourself as a writer and readers in the present?

As Dan alluded to, it's been kind of a tough several months for freedom narratives.

And I guess I'd, I'd like to get a sense for you of how we should read this book now, in this moment, whether it has anything to teach us about narratives of freedom and unfreedom in the present.

So.

One thing that discovering this book also did is that it forced me to kind of step out of the the lock step that is kind of climbing up the ladder of academia, which usually means you should publish this at this time.

You should publish that at that time, that kind of thing, and you should do it within vetted, academic, peer reviewed journals.

What do you do when you find this?

You should not lock it away behind a paywall.

And, charge $300 for it as some, academic books cost.

You should give it the biggest platform possible.

How to do that?

Took a long time to figure out, because I had no idea.

The same time, if I'm a white editor and biographer, the question becomes, how do I put John Jacobs's words first?

How does how do his words reveal retain their power?

How do they retain their autonomy in conjunction with learning more about him?

Because for as unconventional as this narrative is, it still conventionally does stick to the birth to escape kind of period of his life.

And there's much, much more about his life, his life as a sailor, an abolitionist on two continents.

He lived in India for a while.

He lived in Australia for a while.

He sailed a gunboat to the King of Siam, who is represented in the King.

And I, he helps complete the transatlantic telegraph line.

He's basically Forrest Gump with, like, a much higher IQ.

No offense to Forrest Gump.

That part of his life needed to be told the way that this life as a black citizen of the world who had rejected America informed this narrative that he's publishing in 1955, even as he doesn't talk about leaving America.

I took inspiration from people like Toni Morrison, who I had taught, and reading a book like Beloved or Song of Solomon.

You learn a lot of lessons about how to.

Go back into the past, how to find an ethical means of representing the past.

And in the case of beloved, which became a touchstone.

In some ways, this is a this this novel is reparations for the way that Margaret Garner's act was covered in 1854, where she was decontextualized made into a modern day media and her murder of her children was seen as the act of an insane or crazy person.

In beloved.

You learn all the reasons why this was the logical and rational choice, even if it is as terrible as it is and was, the reason why you're able to learn about all of that, though, is because Morrison builds out this world, a world that was not part of the 1854 coverage and builds out a community, a cast of characters, setting, and you begin to see connections that would have been severed otherwise.

I kind of saw that that would be the role of biography.

And I kind of started calling this book an auto slash biography to remind myself that I'm always writing biography in the footsteps of this autobiography.

And so my goal and this particularly also is about redressing this a bad history.

My goal was to build out worlds that supplement and complement and inform the narrative, but don't supervise it, that don't try to certify or legitimate the author, which is what a lot of preferred prefatory material in the 19th century was trying to do, is to say the person here is telling the truth.

I did not want anything that smelled of a courtroom, that smelled of cross-examination, because clearly that is also ingrained in this kind of eyewitness testimony, this genre's history.

Great.

Thanks.

Okay.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A for those just joining via our live stream or radio audience.

I'm Cynthia Connelly, director of programing here at the City Club of Cleveland.

Today we are celebrating the 90th anniversary of the NAACP Book Awards, and we are joined by two award winners.

Actually, today, Jonathan Schroeder, the author of the United States Governed by 600,000 despot A True Story of Slavery.

He is this year's winner in nonfiction.

Moderating the conversation is Vincent Brown, the Nashville Wolf 2021 award winner in nonfiction.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining the our live stream at City club.org or live radio broadcast at 89 seven WKU Idea Stream Public media.

If you'd like to text a question for Jonathan, please text to (330)541-5794.

Again, that's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

We have a first question.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for being here, both of you.

During the writing of the censorship bills where the extremist claimed that white children would feel uncomfortable if you teach the truth about history.

I want to ask you, during your writing, did you ever have moments of feeling uncomfortable doing this writing as a white man?

In relationship to not not using it the way the extremists use it, but.

Okay.

You know, asking yourself, am I really qualified?

I haven't had these experiences.

Did you ever have moments of feeling uncomfortable, doing this writing?

I mean, that's a that's a very good question.

I don't know if discomfort is the right word for how my psyche works.

I'd say anxiety and stress are, higher up on the family feud.

Answers.

There's the University of Chicago again.

This, but definitely a lot of anxiety and worry and concern over.

Trying to come up with a model that would work and trying to create a model for, Bringing this into the world.

I didn't really think about giving up the project, because one thing I did learn, I have learned in the past, is there are very few people in the world who are going to spend like eight years working on something and doing obsessive research and spending lots of money out of pocket and all sorts of things.

So I had lots of conversations in Providence, along these lines.

My partner, above all, I think and the kind of other way that I kind of structure the relationship between the autobiography and the biography is, I made sure that the that I was not going to edit the language of the autobiography, except if it looked like the newspaper had introduced some sort of error.

I wanted to keep that verbatim.

I also wanted to.

And this is another reason why I didn't think about giving up the, giving up doing this narrative.

I was following in the footsteps of Jean Sagan.

Yellen.

And so one thing that I also wanted to do was to have, basically like citations that showed that Yellen was right and that corroborated what she had, the research she had been doing.

Because this narrative revealed all of the names and it, you know, showed a few people that she didn't even get.

So that kind of critical apparatus, which appears on the bottom of the narrative, is hopefully not distracting, but represents a different a second kind of conversation or a third kind of conversation that's happening in the book, that's happening between me and Yellen.

That's informing readers about a time period a long ago where we can't expect to know all of the people that he's referencing or events that he's referencing that will need some glossing.

If I could just add a footnote to your answer, which I think is great.

It's about the active imagination that's important to any work of scholarship or any work of fiction, frankly, that I think is crucial to writing.

And, you know, I wrote a book on the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire.

And a key part of that book was the suppression of that revolt by the British Royal Navy.

Right.

And so I wrote a lot about the Royal Navy, though I've never been a Scottish sea captain in the Royal Navy.

I think I've written one of the best accounts of Royal Navy counterinsurgency in the 18th century.

Because I did the work, as Jonathan was saying, I spent the time I was careful, and I use my imagination to try and imagine experiences that I have not had.

And I think that all scholars, all writers, actors, directors have to do that.

And I would hate for us to think that the only stories you can tell our stories about your own experience.

And the other question about experience that I think I did not know anything about biography before doing this.

A lot of the records of that tell us where and when John Jacobs was somewhere.

They don't talk about anything he experienced.

They don't.

They're they're anonymous records that weren't built to record the humanity of someone like John Jacobs.

They're basically just like the census.

And so I can tell you, the 35 ships that he was on between 1857 and 1872.

I can't tell you what his experiences on board the ship were, unless something happened that got recorded.

Which rarely happens.

And so his experience is mostly coming through in the narrative, which I think the question then becomes, as a white biographer and editor, to what extent do I use that narrative and what it says and the problems that it thinks are important?

Do I bring that into the biography?

Do I let that shape the biography and shape the tone and the style of the book?

Please.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Morning, and thank you for a wonderful presentation.

I intend to get this book as soon as possible.

I hope it doesn't cost $300.

Suppose you could buy a lot of books for a lot of these.

A lot of copies for 300.

Yeah.

So, please do.

What are the critiques of the freedom narratives written by men is the way women are represented in them.

So I'm wondering, especially considering, that Harriet Jacobs was his mother.

How do you describe the representation of women in this freedom narrative?

So what's kind of interesting about the narrative is how little of the plot of his life is narrated.

We tend to think of autobiography is like you setting out the major key events and plot points of your life in order to say something about how you became the person you are.

Not for Jacobs.

And partly this is because he's refusing the logic of other freedom narratives.

He actually reduces the account of his autobiographical experience to a minimum experience here, meaning like events.

And that actually creates more space for him to critique slavery in this last section.

But also to have you as the reader, focus on his style, on his rhetoric.

And so that rhetoric and that style, I think we should see as a performance of who he is.

That style can be autobiographical.

It can say who a person is at the very moment of writing.

And make you as the reader to think.

How did he get here.

What did he have to overcome.

How did he what did he do himself.

All those questions.

There is a scene where he represents, an enslaved woman.

And it's a very interesting one, I think.

An enslaved woman named Agnes who does get punished while she is pregnant.

And yet he does not describe any part of her body except for a part of her back.

Unlike Frederick Douglass in his first narrative, The Where, which has been criticized for his, as a child sort of spying on his aunt, getting on, Hester, getting whipped, which for him is how he went through the blood stained, gate and understood what slavery was.

Jacobs enters the scene as a caregiver because he had learned to mix medicines and apply salves from.

He was forced to learn all that stuff from his, his owner at the time.

But here he's taking that knowledge and applying it for a different purpose.

And so he is dressing her back and helping her heal.

And so while there are not that many descriptions of individual men or women, I think that is emblematic in some ways of perhaps the way the gender is working in the narrative.

There is also a lot of sort of a strong emphasis on black masculinity.

So that's why I say perhaps.

And he is very interested in the way that, in slavery, the possibility of a father's power is canceled, that it is taken over by the owner.

But yeah, that's that's as far as I can get right now.

Anyway.

Thank you for your book and great discussion.

I'm descended from what Dubois called the white workers of the Deep South, the cotton belt that came to Akron and Cleveland on my father's side.

And I'm struck by the comment, about the cause of versus the evil that you mentioned.

So when I was studying historical sociology at Michigan, we used to, you know, we read Allen's The Invention of the White Race.

And one of the key issues there is, which came first, the exploitation or the hatred?

And, you know, I'm just sort of struck because in reading one slave narrative at the time.

The author said, you cannot.

Hate on people until you hurt a people.

And I was so struck by that that it stuck with me over the decades, because this was not just an individual level narrative.

This was sort of a theorization of the relationship of cause and evil.

What is the evil?

Is it the hatred alone, or is it the institution of dehumanization and exploitation and oppression?

What do you think the author, the author's own theory, was of this.

And what do you all think about that question as to.

I think it's an unresolved question and historical scholarship in some ways.

The question of which came first, race or slavery is a famous one.

And I have to give it a little bit more thought in John Jacobson's case.

That question, I think, is addressed really fruitfully in Vance's colleague Walter Johnson's book Soul by Soul.

Life Inside an Antebellum New Orleans slave market in which the fantasies of buyers are projected onto black bodies and made, which are then made to serve out these fantasies.

And he talks about this as marking bodies with race.

In the very act of thinking about the work that the people can do.

And so he talks about the way that this divided up people into parts.

And so people became known only for their long fingers or the color of their skin, which might be said to be good for like light skin was supposed to be good for artisanal craft labor.

John Jacobs doesn't really get into this.

I think more he gets into this kind of political philosophy of how do we locate the problem in America and try to cut off its head?

That's where he's locating, the problem in Washington.

Yes.

I have two short questions.

I don't know if I'm allowed into, you know, as to, when I was wondering, John Jacobs was a slave.

If he didn't have an income, he didn't have any wealth.

How did he pay for his trip?

All the way to Australia?

And one of the question I've wondered about for a long time, if it wasn't for the Civil War, I wondered how long slavery would last in America.

Because in the 1860s it was very, very strong.

So just wondered, how long would it take until that, you know, just sort of vanished in this country without the Civil War.

So, I was just opening an exhibition on the marriage, the Maritime Underground Railroad.

In Philly at the African American Museum there.

And, we were talking a little bit about how when you talk about escapes by sea, it changes the kind of imagination of how people escaped, how people took their own freedom.

It takes it out of kind of this primal, natural scene of of escaping through the woods as a fugitive, under cover of night, hunted by dogs.

And then suddenly it becomes a question of how can you use your knowhow and your knowledge to take advantage of the more advanced technologies of your day, which are going to be more efficiently get you somewhere you want to be?

How can you use a train?

Or how can you use, a ship?

When Jacobs, leaves his master takes his freedom.

When he leaves that note on his now former owner's bed, he walks down to Battery Park.

Wharf.

Wharf in New York City, gets on, a effectively a ferry for Providence.

And he makes his way to New Bedford, which is was widely known as a safe haven for fugitive slaves.

And in fact, his great grandparents and their five children all escaped to New Bedford in 1792.

So maybe he had had stories passed down through the family, and he signs up for a whaling voyage to the Pacific.

Maybe to distance himself from his owner.

He also buys books that, he uses to teach himself to write, because the laws of North Carolina prevented people from learning to write.

Or prevented enslaved people from learning to write.

And he comes back, a professional sailor.

There have been a lot of men in his family who were professional sailors and probably intimately knew the waterways of North Carolina, who sailed up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

His uncle, Joseph Hornblower, even escaped and went to the Ottoman Empire and never came back.

When he comes back to New Bedford in 1843, that's the first money he's ever earned.

At least the first sizable chunk.

He takes his $354, and he thinks he's going to have to buy Harriet out of, where?

Out of slavery.

He does not know that she's escaped yet.

When he leaves the US in 1850, he presumably works his passage to Australia.

Our first story goes to California first and then to Australia.

It probably works its passage both times.

And when he gets to England in 1857, this becomes his career occupation.

And there's probably another conversation to be had also about how occupations were gendered and race in the 19th century.

What kinds of jobs were open to men and two women?

Because in the case of Harriet and John, the reason why they didn't see each other hardly ever in their 22 years of freedom in which John was alive, is because of their occupations, because sailing takes him around the world, far, far away from any possible, because Harriet was forced or the job she could find was in somebody else's home.

Thank you to both of you.

I feel like we're looking at the canons of great literature of our time and weathervane of justice.

And thank you, Cleveland Foundation and his field, Wolf, for bringing the gods down to us mortals here at the City Club.

I mean that sincerely as an English major.

You guys are amazing.

And you both extracted something out of this fantastic work, and I felt our table murmur, and the room did as well.

When you spoke about reason and rage.

And, I feel like you're talking about today.

And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit more in this context.

And then where we are on Friday here in this place.

Oh wow.

This is.

I appreciate your doubling down on this because I think I ignored, the part of Vince's question earlier.

And by appreciate, I mean, what am I going to say?

No, I mean, the question of how you take your scholarship and bring it into the real world is a really important one.

For me.

Getting the book the biggest platform possible was also about having these words in other people's mouths, heads so that they could form their own opinions and takeaways from this book.

That could manifest as taking political action.

Or perhaps it could lead to other outcomes.

I don't know.

And it's true.

You see this title and aside from the word despotism, which is a little archaic, the rest of it is like, oh, who are they talking about today?

Like, who are the 600,000 despots today?

They may not own people, but they own some.

They own things that, I don't know, maybe just as bad or maybe whatever they're creating the gross inequality that defines this nation right now.

And that has only been increasing over the past 45 years.

I think the thing that would be hard to take from Jay Jacobs into the present is that we always expect that these kinds of righteous critiques of America will lead to a prescription about what to do, how to fix America.

Scholar Sacks and Berkovich says there's a long tradition of this called the Jeremiad.

The kind of screed in which you call for America to recommit to its founding promise.

I think it doesn't do that.

It does not say, oh, America can be fixed.

Let me show you the way.

He is gone.

He says, if the American flag is going to wave, over freedom, then I will come back, and I'm willing to be sacrificed on that altar.

But if it must wave over the slave with his chains and fetters clanking, let me breathe the free air of another land.

Die a man and not a chattel.

He brings up a question that maybe we should be asking today.

Even though it's a controversial one, which is why are we holding on to the like?

What are we holding onto about the nation right now that we want to save?

Or what would it mean to detach from whatever toxic fantasy we're probably holding on to?

And what would it mean to leave?

What does it mean to seek freedom in another country and to give up on American exceptionalism, which continues to promise that this is the only place where this can happen?

That might be part of John Jacobs's legacy.

One of the sources of that rage also is a moral horizon that comes from the reading of Christianity.

And you see that throughout of a lot of these freedom narratives, right, which is the idea that slave holders have turned their backs, have disavowed the example of Christ.

In owning other human beings and gone selectively through the sacred texts to find justifications for their power.

And one of the things I think he does do, even if, you know, the founding principles of the United States, are not that moral horizon, right?

The rage does come from the idea that these people should be held accountable to some higher authority.

And you see that running through David Walker's text, you see that running through Frederick Douglass.

And I think one of the things we don't talk enough about in these freedom narratives is the importance of a particular reading of Christianity as a route to liberation.

So there's a kind of liberation theology that you can find in these freedom narratives that I don't think we have really fully teased out, and we really contend with as much as we ought to.

I'm Jacobs.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you to Jonathan Schroeder and Vincent Brown for joining us at the City Club today.

And thank you to our partners.

At the end, it's filled with book awards.

Be sure to check out the free forums in the community.

Tomorrow, September 20th, we'll kick off the celebration at Cleveland Public Library's MLK branch at 9:30 a.m.

and then in the afternoon, you can book hop across the Near West Side.

We have multiple free events at various locations, including Bop Stop, Transformer Station, Saint John's Episcopal Church, and the Ohio City Farm.

You can learn more about tomorrow at City club.org.

Forms like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City club.org.

And today's forum is also part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series, in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Our gratitude to Third Space Reading Room, of course, for.

Writing or onsite book sales.

And we would like to welcome students joining us from Shaker Heights High School.

Thank you, students, for being here with us today.

City club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Field Book Awards, Cleveland Foundation, Cleveland Heights and University Heights Public Library.

Cleveland State Honors College, Global Cleveland, John Carroll University and the YWCA of Greater Cleveland.

Thank you all for being here.

Coming up next week at the City Club on Friday, September 26th, we will be talking all about entrepreneurship.

Kumar Aurora with Aurora ventures will join us to discuss how we can accelerate growth and success to help shape our communities today.

You can learn about this forum and others and get your tickets at City club.org.

Thanks again to our guest today and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly.

This forum is adjourned.

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