>> my name is rachel tiemann and the managing library and of the oakland public library temporarily opting -- as we anticipate the opening of her brand-new branch this fall. it is my pleasure to introduce a the event tonight. fatima shaik and jennifer egan

on subnineteen "economy hall." i'm so excited if due to the connection between the friends of the brooklyn heights friends group and it's a robust group that supports the brooklyn library in so many ways spreading connections with the team and i was asked by the president if as the branch we'd bebe interested in supporting fatima in a virtual look launch for economy hall. after discovering the story and seeing the review in and reading the glowing review in "the new york times" i jumped at the opportunity to host the program sharing this monumental book. as a publicity grew so did the importance of this program. then she drew her friend jennifer egan on board a brilliant author. this has become a bpl presents

event. fatima shaik shares with the world of free black rather adornments founded in 1836 that supported the community through the civil war white terrorism and the birth of jazz. this nonfiction narrative is in american history that needs to be shared. highlights voices that need to be heard and it's a deeply personal story from fatima herself of a descendent of the community. the book is a treasure. i am very excited about this conversation we are about to enjoy between fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall" "economy hall." fatima and jennifer please take it away. >> how low fatima. hello everybody. thank you so much for being with us.

i'm incredibly excited to have the chance to spread the word about thisnc remarkable book whh i've been talking with the team about for some years now. which has surpassed my every expectation in being a work of history that is an enormous leap covering aor lot of ground of tremendous importance and yet so readable and fun. it's a very complex piece of work and i thought the best placewo to begin would be where you begin fatima at the inception. tell us how this book came to be. it's a story that begins with your father. >> thank you jennifer and thanks everybody. up we found some journals we brought them home with i was already a writer but i saw all

of these journals and realized this was about history. >> can you describe what are the journals station that them? >> guest: the meeting of economies and organization of black meant that started in 1836 and what i realized after reading the journals i realized after reading the journals this is probably the most influential and prosperous organization. what years did the pulse cover? >> the journals cover from 1836 to 1935. until the 1950s because that is when the journals were

written. so play in the journal from 1842 to 1857. there are few get and i was able to fill that up by doing research. >> your father pronounce it in a french a way. i have a fourth french accent but could claim what this organization did and what its throle was in the community that serves? >> at the time it was a mutual aid society mutual aid society takes care of its members and the help health of someone gets sick they helped pay for the hospital and they also bury people. if somebody dies they would take care ofea the burial and help te widow however grew over the

centuries as politics became more important so they became much more politically active and around the civil war they became very involved with what was going on. >> you describe in 1950s in new orleans the kind of the ray sure of your community history in which he were told stories that people with various memories of the past and stories that they had heard about the past that somehow did not quite connect with the official history and there is a beautiful quote from your book that i want to reproduce set of people who were telling these stories each book of the past was the passion of the man accused of the crime who repeats over and over his account of the moments the prove hisac innocence. i love that. can you explain to us what were

these stories trying to prove any analogy that you give us? >> they are history itself basically. the history off the black community and anything with a white supremacist narrative. in those schools we knew what was going on because they would sit us down for longer times and we really wanted to listen and they tell us about this is this person's grandchild and his great-grandfather -- so we learn that like that. werbach the fourth class to immigrate. i remember asking distinctly unnun what about the black kids

and what did the black people do? and she said well p nothing. so i had to write this. >> i wonder if this connects was is and that you explain to different definitions of creole as you were growing up. can you talk about n that? >> yes ican. in my time he think of the what's up post reconstruct life and this is the book itself the

daily newspaper wrote about it here about the creoles are white. my mother spoke french and the people around me spoke french and what i wanted to say was clear was not a color. it means the old world and the new world blended so you could have people of african descent who could be int the range of color that are creole. and there are white people who married europeans down the line who are what they call white creole. we did make that distinction in my neighborhood because we felt it was a mixture of the old world and the new world and it matter.eally

helus can you tell us aboutwa yr ownl hand history and being born in new orleans. there are some fun stories. >> summer really complicated. my grandfather came from india and probably the first to come to the united states. he married a black creole woman and she's was a black woman who spoke french and was born in new orleans. she was the granddaughter i believe of an person who lived in louisiana and i don't think you heard this part she was freed a day for her children were born and that's different from the other side of my family

who is the great-grandmother, my great grandmother and children by their owner. they were born and they were until they were at least 20 years old. id remember asking my grandfathr who is your family and he said well who wants to know? he wasn't going to tell anything about his past. because of the history of that it wasn't proud of. so they all met down in new orleans. >> what you say perfectly mirrors what you describe about the community that the economy was serving which was in the 19th century multiethnic and incredibly inclusive. i was very struck by the fact that the economy welcomed jews and chinese who might want to

join and i would love it if you could explain to those of us who don't know necessarily that much about the south we did multiethnic meeting in new orleans in the 19th century? >> i don't know. use that terminology multiethnic really. the people who have privileges because we were living in a segregated system so there were places that were white only and everyone was not white or was nonwhite but you were not to tell you the truth if you look at many communities to 50's in the united states you would see that nonwhite people that's where they made their first businesses at was quite inclusive. in the south especially it was

very inclusive people work together and as i said they didn't believe in racism. it didn't make any logical sense to us. >> host: "economy hall" your title comes from an actual place and i wonder if he could talk about that place in its history and also just about your very eloquent in your book about the importance of actually having a place to hold meetings. let's talk about the actual place of economy hall. >> guest: in 1836 economy hall was a small house and 20 years later they had heard other organizations build huge halls across the street from the

original building so they built the home that became the center of the community. there were a lot of performances and theaters and opera and it became increasingly political. it would p come down to suffrage and the 1860s and black men having the vote so became very important. that survived until -- my father when he discovered the journals in the back of the dump truck he discovered them as one of the last members of the economy society. he said they were getting rid of everything that was in there and nobody wanted these books. so this storytelling was no more

than 100 years. tesco now let's talk about the physical document. your father took them and you describe beautifully his to put the men in naming it and very likely having a house that was elevated enough that katrina for example did not damage these documents which were already waterha damage because you mentioned you had to put them out in the sun and let them dry because they got d rained on whh i have to say is to think about. but many years past and you became a journalist in and a fiction writer and a writer of children's books. talk about your return to these books that you had not had contact with until then it seems.

>> guest: i knew the books were there the whole time because when i was a child everybody came to the house they were told don't touch them. i they had it in the back of my mind it seemed that too much trouble. after i had been away for a long time i knew that this was their and i wanted to see what was ind anthere. just the handwriting alone tells you that these were people that were very educated. the person who you saw his signature it was my cousin's cousin. then to find out she had been a

schoolteacher and involved in all sorts of things it was really fun to find out. >> host: is surprising to me to see the beauty frankly of some of the excerpts from these documents. these are minutes of meetings and i'd like to read one short excerpts. love is a beautiful dream. the aspiration of the known and unknown. the diving ray ravished. created the world only because he needed to love. i mean it's not what you expect to find in reading minutes. fortunately we did find such things. so it's striking that in a sense these are literary documents. were you surprised by what you found in them and by the palms

that they ended up picking from your own literary life? >> i was definitely surprised by how literary they were. in a way it made sense because i knew my father and i knew my father's friends there always telling each other you can do this.. i'm writing a book about how we can get ph.d. in united states so he used to drive from new orleans to canada every summer. and it was one of his friends that told them you don't need to stick around here. so when i saw these guys writing encouraging words and these inspirational words it was surprising that they were written but it wasn't surprising that they did that.

i heard that spirit in flight. >> host: what about the language of these documents because you mentioned a friend of yours described french americans. what is a language like and how is it different from just french or american english? >> it's not english until 1926. they are writing entirely in french and it was a little broken friends in the little broken english. the way french read those sentences is the sentence construction for example when they started to get around americans which was around the time of the civil war, when they

got around the americans they started using words like -- which i thought was so beautiful. [inaudible] >> host: i'm curious about the process of the enormous undertaking of synthesizing 100 years of documentation into an historical works and i would love to hear the timeline of how that occurred. simply reading these journals must have taken you quite a while. where were you when your life at that time and how did you mold the and when did it become a full-time project? take us through your

interactions with them. if >> i basically would go to journals and try to summarize what i thought was going on. it was something i couldn't really understand because the french was too difficult and i would ask somebody. there was a priest father distefano at the university who speaks speak something like 16 or 18 languages. so i would go to him and ask him what does this mean? these journals were entrenched

and i had to understand the etiology of the words that he could read french and. that took about five years. after i did that i started seeing and as i was going along with it i found names of my neighbors and family names and the people that lived in the neighborhood. that brought a little bit closer to it. and sometimes some really spiritual thing what happened sample there is a fellow who committed suicide and he wrote a suicide note. i was in the library and i didn't know who this guy was. there is a person i knew in grammar school who i hadn't seen for 30 years. i saw her sitting at a microfilm machine and i said do you know who these people are and have you heard of these people and she said that's my ancestor.

that's my ancestor and she didn't know he had committed suicide and that was the first time she had seen a letter in his words. it took me about 20 years and had i known i would be working on one book for 20 years i don't would have worked out long on it. i was trying to be published writer and i had a full-time job as a teacher and i did some shortun stories which are possie in short periods of time. that was the timeline for me. >> host: of course you had a tremendous resource which was your own community who had been giving you an offense and history component of the story even when as you said he didn't

always want to listen to them. to what degree did you reengage in the role of an historian to fill out this picture and what were those experiences like? s.t.e.m. that was some of the most fulfilling experiences because some of these were friends of mine. we are all cousins. he had an aunt who was about 100 years old and a daughter who is 80 years old. her mother had dan's death economy home. so when i got talking to them in the kind of music that was being played there and their parents didn't want them to go sometimes.s. some really rich stories. stay you feel like it further

enriched your own relationship to your community? >> guest: oh sure. you don't really ever leave. we can live somewhere else. it gave me more people to know. i found out a friend in my head than connect did and their parents, her parents and sisters were both members of economy hall. in the 18 50's. so that became much more fun that was just fun to know that i will always carry that around with me as you probably have seen. >> host: you are so lucky began the project when you did

in the sense that you caught a moment where more of this existed in living memory that i'm guessing it does now. a lot of the stories are fading and it just so crucial to get to people and record them while they are still here and can still remember. >> host: right are the four people i was talking about my friend this past end her family is passed so none of these people are still around. i was very lucky to talk to them and i talk to them when i started the second step when i started seeing the names of people that i knew. and i tried to see if i could talk to their older families. this whole process it was luck. it was like that my dad on the books that i was a writer and i found something in the books and

it was like that i was involved. there are séances in the book. >> host: i love that. there are séances recorded in the minutes. how many meeting minutes include the presence of ghosts? >> guest: it was fun to find out some of these historical events and then i would look in the séance journals and there would be a ghost talking about this real thing that happened. it was great. >> host: oh boy. now i'm curious about how you, the fiction right to your and journalists, undertook the mammoth job of trying to synthesize and crystallize this enormous amount of history into a journal into a story and you make some bold choices.

one of those as you alluded to earlier you choose to focus your gains on one particular person. >> we can say it in english. >> he is a fascinating figure with an amazing history. i would love to hear about if you could tell us about him and what it wasgo about him that mae you feel like he would be the to this story? >> there were so many things going on. n i had to find a person to hang the story on in order to move you and not just to be a historical account. in the fiction writer so i wanted to move like a novel and luckily he lived from 1812 to

1892 so i had a very long life to work with. and at a time when it was against the law for the to read he had taught one who is on the side and then he became part of the reconstruction. he was the grand marshal of the emancipation celebration which was covered in new orleans and also by the near times. i was able to get a lot from that and then he was also a poet. his friends were poets so he had this beautiful handwriting and every once in a while they would say he gave a spontaneous poem. so how can you resist if you're

a writer? he stands up this men's meeting gives up a spontaneous poem. he was politically active and he named his children after writers. one child was named françois and another was named homer. all of this boy's were named after poets or writers. so it was really fun to learn that. >> host: it was the complement of this sensibility and his own awareness and the fact that he was present for somebody important historical events in so deeply involved in the economy and it just made him the guy that could bring you all the rest. guess >> guest: he was the go-to guy. wawhen he took the minutes he ws

veryy precise. every time they went to something new he would number it and then he would get the contents page. they would look at the contents page and see what was in the minutes of that made it easy. it was very clear to me. if anything important happened he would underlie it and make! so he wasn't easy person to follow. he's one of these people who is not a senator or president. he was just a person whose descendents from more than 100 years. >> host: it must feel as though you know him. like you know his personality and you know what mattered to him.

he was sort of like a helpmate for you. >> guest: at one point, they would get into arguments with each other at certain points and then there was one point well where he didn't agree with another one and he saw him on the street and hit them with his cane and a burst them in the face.lt the two men came to the meeting and they talked about this and one says i'm still burst in the face because of your cane. i'm bruised because of your insult and your cane. and then at the end, the other one says it is not my apology that i'm important you it is my arms and he writes they were so close they were like one.

mean you know was just beautiful writing and a lot ofma fun. >> host: want to take this moment to say that in the chat links are appearing for this book. these are pretty amazing anecdotes as remarkable tidbits in a very fun book to read. i encourage all of you to buy it for yourself and your loved ones. >> guest: thank you. >> host: for sure he's a big part of what makes this book so readable but the other part is you fatima. you bring us into these moments with the full array of scene setting tools that i think probably were honed in as your time is a writer and a journalist. senses, clothing and smells, you really putng us in a moment and it's tremendously telling. you also have a gigantic quantity of footnotes and i know

you were relying heavily on sources but also on your own imagination and i wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about the craft challenge of deciding where to draw the line ande what you are willing to imagine and how you negotiated those questions. >> there's imagination the setting of the scene. the scene itself is -- got me put it this way. kit was november of 1860 and i look at the weather on that day. i looked at the time of the sunset on some days. i was able to say i know for example he walked into the room

and gave the speech. he didn't give the speech from outside, right?om if the sun set at 6:00 -- so i can say he walked into economy hall just about the time the sun was setting and the room was warm because people either overcoats on and it was crowded. there were hundreds of people and hundreds of men packed in a room and its plaster walls. so i can do that. it's not imagination. it's not imagination or any of the words that were in there or the quotes that were in the journals.

in fact i had a fabulous editor kathy marcell nelson who would not let me get away with anything, not a thing. there was a street that the economy is on called ursuline. she said would would become the street and when was the avenue and what isn't avenue in 1852 or an avenue in 1857 so i found five references. everything that was in there we took account of so thanks. to kathy. >> host: it's not so much imagination as using their tools as a writer to connect the factual.l. and bring in the sensory quality of the to life in the moment. >> guest: right. fiction itself i have to feel

fiction. i have to feel something that's going on through my senses. i have five senses so for me to feel anything gets through your senses. they have to know what it smells like and what the sound is when they are in the room. icc saw -- also brought in a little bit of journalism. i've got some pieces of after katrina that are very not like. talking about what it felt like after katrina coming through the senses. >> host: you mention katrina now maps you want to jump in and ask a question because i was

surprised to hear you write in your book in the sense that guests disruption of this community that you are tracking going back to the early 19th century really was katrina. that is the event that has really fractured the community in certain ways. that was sort of shocking to me that in all those years in event of the century is the one that has been so disruptive. can you talk a little bit about ethat? >> guest: most of these generations i'm talking about within the downtown areas and the downtown areas of new orleans were where the levees broke. a lot of these people lost their homes and the elders were in their 70s, 80s and 90s at that time so we lost that connection.

there was one couple that you can read in the book that drowned in her house close to the economy hall. most of our elders were evacuated. we took them out of town. then they were having heart attackseo and strokes because ty were out of their environment. the statistic was that more than 80 people who were in new orleans at the timeor of katrina were born here. it's a city where people just stay. they really don't leave. that disruption of all those downtown neighborhoods floodedng out losing those elders that did the same. >> you also mentioned basically a diaspora that is resulted with the number of people in the city who have not returned. i believe it is almost 100,000.

>> guest: it was 100,000 that had not returned. you can read on the web site about this. it was a diaspora. the houses were flooded and you have to follow the supremacy all the way down. howard going to get the insurance to pay for the houses in people before having all kinds of problems like that. who would give them loans? usually they were from out of town. we have a lot of secrets that we couldd not reveal. people with a lot of money could come in and spend two or

$300,000 for house doesn't mean anything but for people who bought the house for $5000 the house now is worth three and a thousand dollars can't get along because they are retired you see this. so they would go to houstonhe or atlanta and they will say the lifestyle never be the same. >> host: i feel like it's exactly with the economy wasas there to do to try to pull the community back together to find tangible ways for people to help each other and it feels like that's what we don't seem to have any more. our communities do not seem to have that anymore. >> they are still people and i have friends as to live here but we lost a lot because they were operating at a time or part of

their goal was to educate one another. that's what they did. they educated each other and that they needed to house but they would ask one of their friends to do the job. and i will tell you something the house i'm sitting in right now the new part of our house i remember the day that all the relatives and friends came over and told -- framed up the house. they were cooking food to be cooked and the guys came in framed up the house in a papa half a day in the priest came and blessed theee frame. the next person who needed the house to be built every one went on saturday of to their house and that's how this community was built. >> and wondering how your community has reacted to this remarkable contribution that you have made to it which synthesizes so much history.

>> guest: well they like me a little bits more. i think they like it. >> host: that is so funny. it's that personal. >> guest: that's exactly what's going on. >> host: that is so funny. some measure of how diffracted my own pastors and i can even imagine being part of a communitypr like that but that s so telling and it's so human nature. all want to be included and to picture our ancestors were given their proper due.

>> guest: when you look at history and this is something i've learned you are not responsible for your ancestors and you can't take anything from your ancestors. if your ancestors were and you don't want to claim them -- so you have to make arl choice. >> host: that was funny. you are in new orleans right now. >> guest: i am? >> host: is this the house where you grew up? >> guest: this is the house where he grew up. behind me is the porch or my dad pulled the books out and this is the house became too. because it didn't flood we were able to keep the house after katrina. i lost my dad though. he had a heart attack after we

evacuated but we are able to keep the house. the book is special to me in many differentnt ways. rpost that special to me in your house with you which is something we wouldn't be able to do if it weren'tg for this virtual nature of our meeting so there's a silver lining to be present in s the house where so much of this took place. i feel like i'm seeing some questions coming in here. so i'm going to take a look at those and we will hear from some of you. >> guest: there's one more thing i'd like to talk about the let's get to questions first. was there a connection between the economy and the g church? >> guest: there was a connection. they were very connected in the

beginning because for example the government did not recognized -- but they do get married ink the church in the chur recognize them as married people. after the civil war when white supremacy came after the civil war near the end of reconstruction and many of them broke away from the church. we were talking about having séances and going towards spiritualism and the protestant religions. the catholic church was segregated and they were going to go for that. >> host:ll one comment the team

a when you leaned back some people are having a little bit of trouble hearing. and then we have a question that i really loved basically what you said about the family connections to your book. do you know the family? >> guest: frank krump the musician was my godfather. >> host: was luther almost killed by a? >> guest: yes, thank you for mentioning that. it was time -- the constitution when it first came back into united stateslo link and -- i'm sorry moving. lincoln wanted it back into

united states so he did the 10% solution. he came back without giving the right t to vote for blacks so my decided they would change the constitution. the police came and they killed teverybody that they could in that home. luther was there and so were several of the economy members. i think his son was nine or 10 years old. they shot out his eye. he was almost killed when he tried to come out ofte the buildings. was almost killed but they grabbed the man in front of him. he was able to run away.

he said the floor was slippery with blood. the things that i want to mention and i'm glad you brought this up. we think right now the history everything we do is new. and it's not. these men were fighting for voter rights and voter registrationrs was going on an economy hall and there were people trying to stop voter registration of blacks and that sounds familiar, right? there was police violence because there were white supremacist groups. they tried to kill elected officials legitimately elected officials that were mobbed. if he can learn something from this book and i don't want to be. >> she. realize white supremacy happened in the 1860s if you look ats the playbook you can see what

came out of it and you can do something about it. you know when they started denigrating people and use the police to kill people and mobs start taking duly elected people and threatening them you know something's going on that's going to boil over. >> host: another question how was economy hall related to plessy versus ferguson? >> guest: the members of the economy society are probably one of the first, among the first to black mutual aid decide -- societies. plessy versus ferguson was in the 1890s. there were hundreds of mutual aid associations by that time and many of them supported the plessy versus ferguson case. the press and of the economy society was a member of the citizens community who were

involved in taking the plessy piece to corporate economy raise money for them. i know many of you are in support of the emancipation proclamation. they were very much against that. for those of you who don't know the decision was a case that was taken to the united states csupreme court. >> host: i wanted to ask one more question and then maybe we'll endit fairly soon but i wondered if you could talk for a minute about music. so many of us associate new orleans with music and jazz in particular and you write a lot

about music in the book. can you talk a little bit about the economy and its relationship to music over time? >> sure. >> guest: it is based on this particular hall because the economy had music all the way through. all of these things in the early world and this last incarnation was jazz. when they were driven out of jobs they played music in one of the places they played music was in the economy hall. they would have a party and raise money with the party. the money that they rates raised would go to the poor people or the nuns and the money was circulated in the community.

if you've read the book you will see louis armstrong played at hall.onomy people who came to economy hall for d the first new orleans. another question is did economy hall have members that were as well as free people of color? >> they did not. they were millionaires. one of them have homes in italy france in louisiana. they didn't mix with the people of society and the second thing in more importantnt thing is it was against the law. when there was free people of

color and they could not mix. there wasn a fear that free people would incite the to revolt. there was a good reason for them to be afraid. the police didn't want free people g of color they are. they would go to jail and police started -- their meetings. everybody would go to jail. >> host: fatima when this is done i you to look at the chat. we have frank krump's granddaughter andgh other people who know other people so it would mean more to you than it does to me. we are pretty much out of time. i'm going to ask you one final

question which is kind of a s tough one. just to quote you quoted this in part from the economy's mission to help one anotherr and teach one another while holding out the protective hand to suffered humanity. you can't shoot much higher than that. we live in a moment of such tremendous division and o racial tension and political strife and i wonder what economy hall can tell us if anything. it's a lot of weight to put on your fatima but what can the story tell us about how to improve our own situation and live better? >> guest: may i "quote to you from economy hall? i was expecting a question. i want to read you something. he said to the members in 1858 african blood runs in our veins.

brothers of an oppressed unjustly and they must follow the path to eternity and come out of the isolations of our press or so they would like to see us forever disunited tearing each other apart. if we could say what we should do we should not have hate in their hearts for one another -- the oppressor. post go here, here. that's an excellent note to end on its been such a pleasure to talk with you fatima and i want to continue the conversation the next time i see you. thank you all so muchh for joining us and please i you to buy this book. a thank you so much. i hope that you've all enjoyed this conversation tonight with

fatima shaik and jennifer egan as much as i have been if you haven't had the honor to read this book "economy hall" the hidden history of a free black brotherhood i you to. to treasure. thank you so much again and i hope you all have a wonderful night.

the nixon tapes are part private conversations part deliberations and 100% unfiltered. >> let me say we have the main things that will pass and my heart goes out to those who are overzealous.

if i could have a little more time being a politician last year and less time being a president i would kick them out but i do know what they were doing. >> host: larry kudlow be writing a book? >> guest: i don't have anything planned at the moment. i'm very busy. i'm loving life. never say never. at the moment i don't. let's go how many jobs you have? >> guest: well of course there's the "fox business" show everyday. it's from four to 5:00 p.m.. that's the bulk of what i do. i also do a lot of different segments for fbn and "fox news." in fact i