>> good afternoon.

welcome, everybody live at the l.a. times book festival. we hope you're having an extraordinary day. welcome also are friends coming in via this recording for c-span's book tv. we are thrilled to be with you. my name is martha jones and i have the distinct pleasure of moderating the panel today. the legacy of slavery through the generations. my first task is to introduce the extraordinary authors. i begin to my left. carry greenwich is the author of the grimkes: the legacy of slavery in an american family. congratulations on being a finalist this year before the l.a. times book prize.

rachel jamison webster, author of "benjamin banneker and us: 11 generations of an american family." welcome, rachel. williams, author of, i saw death coming, a history of terror and survival in the war against reconstruction. and, the author of "master slave husband wife and epic journey from slavery to freedom." you can already hear where this conversation will go and i am thrilled to help facilitate it. to start, i want to ask a question for each of you. it will help us introduce these

books. i want to start with the journey. how did you arrive to write the book and when did you know that it was the book you would write? where did you land? carry greenwich, can you get us started? >> marshall jones work on black women was a transformational piece of my journey of as a historian. so, think you so much. i first encountered the grimke name throughout my childhood and adolescence. i was told the story most of us are told about the grimke in terms of their relationship with enslavement and anti-slavery. as i was doing research for my first book, "black radicals" i came across the grimke name all over the black press. details told in the black press were often about the black side

of the family. and they exceptionalism. there were two things. one side, the white family that i was told is this exceptional family. and, the black side that has gone to these heights of accomplishment at the end of the civil war. i wanted to explore if that could be true. these two extremes. number two, was the legacy of the abolitionist movement and the ways in which white women in particular interacted with black women in that movement? and what does that say about the legacy of enslavement generally in families and in communities? not just in what happens and happened under slavery, but what happened generations afterwards. i think i knew where i was going with the bug when i decided to spend as much time as i did on the roots of the white grimke

family in south carolina that was so entrenched in slaveholding and the atlantic slave trade. i realized this book had the potential to be much bigger than the questions i initially asked. >> i admire the people on this panel so deeply and i am thrilled to be here. i found out about this ancestry and story in 2016 during the height and season when the narrative of what america means and where we are headed was really up for revision. as soon as i found out about this ancestry i wanted to write these stories because they were amazing. they went all the way back to a dairy made in england that was indentured for stealing milk and a kidnapped and enslaved man from gambia. they went back to the late

1600s. then the sister of benjamin banneker. of course, any writer coming up on these stories would be thrilled and want to tell them. but i was from the side of the family that several generations ago had lost contact with our black relatives and black ancestors. and with generations of activists and people that thrived and survived. i had to grapple with the ethics of the project. i did a lot of research. i wrote an essay called white lies and fiction that posited my families denial of black presence and black genius in our origin stories that we have written out of ourselves as americans was mirrored in a larger cultural denial of black presence and black genius. i continued to do research and grapple with how i could write more about this and it years

later my cousin ed lee harris saw the essay and got in touch and said, we need to talk about our family. that was an amazing moment in my life. it was a very healing moment. edie had done years of genealogical research on her own and was connected to black family members. then i understood the form it could take. each chapter is a chapter about the ancestors and then there is a present-day chapter about a conversation between me and my cousins about what we learned about history and how we were grappling with our ancestry and the moment we signed ourselves in today. >>kidada? >> i am thrilled to be here.

i have been interested in reconstruction since i learned my teachers lied to me in school and when i realized they misrepresented reconstruction i started digging deeper and i cannot get enough of it. the story i tell is a story that uses records which have been available for -- have been available for a long time, for more than 150 years. historians looked at them, but in a very particular way, focusing on election violence and elected officials targeted by the ku klux klan during reconstruction. when i looked at the records, i realized how much historians and missed. -- had missed. the extent to which survivors including men centered their kin in their accounts. they were attacked as family. they testified before congress they told family stories.

so i wanted to write a history of reconstruction from the perspective of those families. what i wanted to do, and i knew as the story came together, when i was able to follow families on their journey out of slavery. from the frying pan of slavery into the fires of freedom. and all the things they made and did with freedom and how successful they were and the price that white extremists made them pay. i wanted to center them in the story of reconstruction and that was what i was able to do. when i knew that is what i was doing the story came together easily. >>ilyon, please. >> it is an honor to be here with all of you today. i first encountered the crafts in their own writing, their own published narratives. for me, that was an indelible reading experience. i was in graduate school.

i just remember the feeling of that voice in my ear. and, the story just, i mean -- william and ellen craft were motivated by love. they were actually husband and wife. they go on an incredible journey where she passes as a rich white disabled man and he pretends to be her slave. they journey over 1000 miles to freedom. and that's just the beginning. so, this is a story that was really a page turner. a 60 page page turner. i did not think there stop thinking about it in the moment that i could not stop thinking about it for decades. something about it, especially the family story. the stories of loss. the feelings of longing they expressed. the dangers. these all caps coming back. for a long time, i wanted to read more because there was a lot the crafts said and there

was also a lot they could not or would not say. i wanted to know more. i honestly hoped somebody else would write the book i wanted to read. and i was honestly not sure if i was the one to write the story. but, curiosity got the better of me. i started doing a little digging and scratching at the surface. and i know that my fellow panelists know what it is like to fall into that incredible rabbit hole when you connect to my material -- this material. this happened for me at a moment of incredible doubt. when i was heading to macon for the first time and it was raining i was thinking what am i doing here? am i going to do this? i thought, if i see william and ellen craft in the archives i will move. if i do not, isaac i will rest.

that day when i was in the macon county courthouse in this strange upstairs area where they improbably let me go to put my paws all over everything, i opened these great tomes that i do not think had been touched for a very long time. but, the pages i held that day, one was a document by which ellen crafts biological father, a document by which he gave his own daughter away as a wedding gift to his other legitimate legal biological daughter eliza collins. the way he writes it is he says, out of the love i have for my daughter eliza collins i give her this property, the property being his own biological child. when i saw her name on that page

and what i saw later that same day a paper by which william kraft, a boy, 60 -- 16 years old and trained as a cabinetmaker. when i saw that page where william craft was listed next to a bunch of -- a pianoforte and numbered church pews and other objects i thought, i have to know more about the story. >> thank you for that. we do not talk often enough about the signs that come to us and tell us, even if that we are -- if we are at the very beginning of a story, that we are exactly where we are supposed to be in the work. thank you for that, so much. i have shared with some of you that i am teaching a graduate seminar this semester called the black world. our focus has been on the history of family, on family history. each and every one of these books will be until the next

time because you have all really grappled with that. here i want to ask you about where you think the focus on family. which is different. as dr. williams has begun to suggest, it is different than a focus on political history or social history, and uncle monica -- an economic history, the history of capitalism. all these important threads historians follow in their work. you have each elected to stay connected to and rooted in this very intimate perspective. maybe dr. williams you can get us started. you have already begun. can you say a little more about what it means both as a storyteller and a historian analyzing the past, explaining the past, what happens when we

think through the family? >> when we center families, for me, when we follow their direction, and what i mean by that is, what if they believe was important, who they believe was important to them, then we have a better understanding of how they experience the world. the families i look at during reconstruction, when i realized i needed to trust them and not necessarily the investigators asking questions, not necessarily the historians that have whistled past a certain aspects of their account, when i paid attention to what they wanted known it became clear that they wanted people, meadowbrook -- members of congress in particular to understand how devastating the violence was to their families. and, what families were losing

in the war against reconstruction. i think when we only look at the political aspects of the violence, when we only look at the economic aspects of the violence we lose the personal. survivors who testified before congress did not have the luxury of looking past that. many of them say, yes, i lost the vote. but that is the least of what happened to me in my family during the attack. so, when we do follow families, when we do understand what mattered to them we have a completely different his grandmothers, his sisters often that allowed him to be the genius. i want to begin by saying that all of your stories have transformed the way i continue to learn the story of william and ellen craft. i was just thinking, dr. williams, reading your book, i mean, the crafts, there are many

layers to the story. but, they eventually leave the story then come back and start a farming and educational cooperative in south carolina. then they are attacked by knight riders. it's an event we don't know much about. but, reading your book opened it up. you were bearing such witness that i felt like i could revisit that space in a new way. but, i wanted to invite you all to join me back again in macon, that moment in the courthouse when i was looking at to that deed talking about family. we have already talked about -- i mentioned how james smith his idea of family definitely was warped. where he is giving one family member to another family member. the other thing really troubling about the document for me is that it is a document that not only condemned ellen craft to

bondage by her sister, but, it was in perpetuity. so, the language for this is not only would ellen belong to her half-sister, but, her increase would belong to the increase, or, the generations to follow after eliza collins in perpetuity. that is a line of bondage that extends then, potentially all the way to the present moment. but it did not. because ellen craft disrupted that when she embarked on this incredible journey with her husband william. the thing that really moves me now can sit -- to consider is that line, the crafts were running for their children. one day, they had the children they dreamed of having in freedom. so, they had a child. they held, named, and loved the child.

the child held, named, and loved another child. that child held, named, and loved another child and that child held and named and loved children who are sitting will hear -- sitting here with us today, in the front row, the descendants of william and ellen craft. [applause] >> thank you for that. what i was hearing in part as i was listening are the ways in which what your family stories do is not only invite us, but, insisted that we pull those threads into the present and that easy notion of the past and present becomes, i think, very blurred, very complicated, but very powerful. we rethought in all of your

stories. i hear another threat. that is thinking the liberty about family in black and in white and in all the compact cities we know is the product of violence, of exploitation and more. early america. you all forthrightly confronting that. i think something about the family's we are born into and the families we make. all of these books do such important work on helping us reflect about what we think family is, even in our own time. one thing that distinguishes our storytelling as historians are these approaches to research. i want to take some time for you to share some of that.

you not only center voices and perspectives and past experiences by black americans, we know that is not as straightforward an undertaking as it might be. in your stories, there is something about how much possibility there is in asking those questions. i think some readers might be surprised by how rich the archival record is. i want to start, if i could, with you because i know you began very deliberately, very early in your thinking about the crafts with their words but you did not end there. that was just a start. tell us about your archival

journey. >> thank you. i knew if i was going to tell this story, i had to do something more with the crafts then they had already done with her own words. there are areas where there story did not go. one thing was there was a reason they would not tell is because ellen craft's mother was still enslaved by her biological father's widow. he had passed away but she was still living. ironically, this woman's story is what ended up yielding a lot of the research. a sad reality of the archives is there is this richness but there is an archival deficit. an imbalance between what we know of the enslavers and the

enslaved, who were denied literacy in part because of this reason. i wanted to know more about this woman. this is a woman, she is the reason why ellen was separated from her mother because she could not stand the sight of alan baer -- ellen bearing such a strong physical resemblance. she is the one who has ellen given away when she is 11 years old. it is easy to demonize her and make her a bad guy. we can say she is not like us, this is a past era, but she is not the only person who made the decisions she did. i wanted to try to evoke the fullness of her reality. there are tons of records. she comes from an illustrious line that connects to a

presidency, the cleveland family. i know what her favorite hymn that she wanted to have sang at her funeral. there is so much information. i know of for losses, too. we do not have the same information about maria but we can find her information. age, dollar value assigned to her and -- the challenge that i found in writing about this, on the one hand, i wanted to evoke the fullness of what her experience was like. i did not want to re-create the same in balance we are seeing in the archive by giving so much to this woman and not being able to give the equivalent amount to maria. what transformed for me was almost a changing at the

molecular level of storytelling. mr. smith has many more records and much more stuff. we can change the access by which we tell the story. i went back into my writing and looked at the sentence and the paragraph in the section to see who is a subject, a direct object, who gets the thesis, who gets the story because that is something we can change. in all of your reframing's, we can shift the access upon which the story is told. >> who wants to come in? >> i will go. for me, i had access to survivors' testimony before congress. what is really interesting about those sources is they are full

of all this information that lawmakers and some historians have deemed irrelevant. they tell us a lot about the family's transitioning from slavery to freedom. who is selling hogs. they have a listing of their earnings. a number of them detail how much property they have acquired. how much they paid for it. when they were driven off their property. how much they lost in earnings for that year. you have a lot of rich information about those families. what i wanted to do was sit with that material and help readers understand what family's achieved when they left slavery in a very short period of time. when i talked about following the direction, it is not to say

you do not use a critical analysis of the sources because you do, but there are other things that make sense to follow. a lot of the people who testified before congress, they referenced people coming through. even though the senses is a complicated -- even though the census is a complicated source, it help me find the potential names of family members who were referenced indirectly in the account. when they focused only on the men, because they were elected officials or voters, what we miss is how many people were in their families during the attack. a story of reconstruction that focuses on the men alone would say one person was attacked by the klan without acknowledging or knowing there were three generations of the family in the house that night.

you had 10 people, right? they were held hostage, as opposed to that one. there is a lot of rich material in there. i look for additional evidence to try to thicken the data if you have a better understanding to reveal as much about who they were and how much the achieved in this moment and what they were losing to violence. the last point i will focus on is in their first-hand accounts, what is really interesting, and revealing, is how much they theorize on the future. there is a refrain in the testimonies, i will never get over it. she will never get over it. we will never be over this. i think that challenges the way people have thought about reconstruction violence. they think it has neat bookends.

the violence ends when the men leaves. the accounts are clear that is not what happens. they are living in a disaster for a very long period of time. when you follow them using the census, most people who were landowners do not recover their land. they are driven from their home communities. they leave places like white county, georgia, and end up in atlanta and have to start over from scratch again and were never able to achieve what they had to that point. these accounts reveal a missing puzzle piece that might help families understand how their families transitioned from slavery to freedom. >> one of the things -- it bears repeating what we are all getting at it -- trusting black

people in the spaces of the archive. i think too often there has been a tradition of historians having a caveat. this was said by someone who was illiterate and therefore what they said about their family in 1840 could not possibly be true. you hear of a mother who every other historian has said we do not know who she was related to and do not know anything about her. she was brought up to believe she would eventually be freed. she believed her sons were free. nothing in the sources i saw made it through. what i found was she could not read or write but told her sons they lived in a community of free westons and talked about the free westons and said they

were her kin. people asked how much could we take away, she was elderly? then you go into the sources of the family she talks about, the mckinley family, for instance, a prominent family in washington, d.c. whose papers are at the library of congress, and they are talking about the westons. i think taking -- looking at sources and not thinking that because someone was enslaved or someone was black or supposedly illiterate that the records do not exist. and then following that up by looking at multiple places where additional aspects of that are. there is a wealth of information talking about nancy weston that are in other people's papers.

even if nancy weston does not have the paper, a rich family of westons that ended up migrating, they have papers. not just going into one archive and sing this archive exists and i did not see anything so it does not exist. going into multiple archives and trying to reconstruct the world -- particularly black women say so and so was my cousin, or someone so was so-and-so's daughter. traditionally, historians have said, how would they know that? they are talking from their community, you should take it as something that could be true. >> exactly. i took that -- one of the foundations of the book was an oral history from family members. it has been slightly contested but it is a -- rigorously

recorded history. because i was coming at it as a creative writer and a poet, i wanted to create different forms of knowledge, including the emotional. the banneker family has a lot of documentary evidence for their family. there are gaps in the archive. i think it is important to note they are not just there because someone failed to keep track. benjamin banneker's cabin was burned down on the day of his funeral. this was a common act of racial violence, especially for families that had achieved a lot in the community. those things happen. it is very painful to confront those gaps, confront those

moments where you see people listed with property. it is heavy to do the research. when i listen to everyone speak, there is so much to be said about creative research and treating our attention as a resource. once you bring your attention to the people, you find things. we still have benjamin banneker 's published almanacs, his letter to jefferson and one journal that is filled with brilliance. accounts of his dreams, mathematics, poems. we have ample evidence of genius. i was struck by how often people would say, there is not enough. there actually is. we actually have written evidence of these families. they were keeping careful track of one another. it is exciting to hear all of the wily ways that people have

found to get that on paper and honor that. >> as i am listening, -- take seriously our own families. the stories that are told. the documents that sit in the shoebox, the trunked, the attic. get them out of the attic and put them someplace safe. those kinds of materials are so critical to you all being the extraordinary work you do -- you all doing the extraordinary work you do. i have one more short question before we turn to the audience. we thank everyone for being here. i will ask you in a moment to raise hands for questions. there are microphones in the room. while folks are gathering their questions, let me ask one last one.

it is sort of a big one but let's try to take a short pass at it. one of the things that has been running through the conversation this weekend at the festival has been the kind of strife to which history, and particularly black history, has been subjected in recent months and years. you all are writing important and challenging history in challenging times. when we sit on a panel like this , there are many folks out there, whether they are the teachers of high school history, the students who aspire to tell their own stories, and more, but i will ask you to speak a little bit to folks about how you think , as we see our history being rewritten by pundits and

lawmakers -- i will put that in quotes -- lawmakers and opportunists, where are you in your own thinking? i imagine this is not where you thought you would be when you started this work, but here we are. would you get us started, rachel, and tell us about what it is been like to tell us about this work in challenging times? >> it is a big question. books are being banned. books about black history -- history -- not opinion, not ideology, history are being banned from libraries and curriculum every day. i feel honored to share these stories of my ancestors but i also feel a special urgency to share them right now for several reasons. the first, they found ways to

survive and resist in times much like these, when things were getting worse before they were getting better. people were losing their rights. we are in a time when democracy is being eroded and civil rights are being taken away. what is amazing about the books today, all of us write about people who were living through similar times. they did not give up. the used whatever measure of freedom they had to work for freedom for others. in a lot of cases, ucs to people had freedom, they were trying to protect their own family and their people. as an educator, i try to very honestly acknowledge that these are difficult times to be alive. these are difficult times to be a young person. i try to connect us to our

literal ancestors and our cultural ancestors because we have so much information there about how to keep going and i think we have guidance and we also have tools to connect to our own courage and our own clarity. >> thank you. >> what you just said so deeply resonated with me. especially thinking about william ellen craft. as soon as they arrived after this harrowing journey and a lifetime in bondage, they could have just disappeared and went to canada. they had dreams about starting a family of their own. instead they are invited to tell their story and they come to halls like this one where they are packed sometimes with thousands of people. it is like putting a target on their back. they do not change their names, they go on the road and traveled 1000 miles. they settled briefly in boston

and then slave hunters come after the passage of the slave act where they were urged to leave the country but they stand up and tell their story and it is that standing up and telling that motivated so many people then, and i think is an inspiration now. >> thank you. >> i will go. i think there are a couple things in a couple points that have been made. african-americans, one of the things they have done was ba history-centered people -- was be a history-centered people and passing that legacy on. that is why you have this rich and broad history that families passed on before kids even get into school. yes, we do need to fight the bans on history education and school.

we need to remember earlier generations of african-americans did a lot of that work and they were assisted by a lot of teachers who did that work, particularly in the time of slavery. a lot of states are passing laws banning literacy did not mean black people did not learn how to read. they did on a regular basis because there were a lot of insurgent teachers out there. we can look to the past to understand ways we did not just get through the moment but fight it. fight it in a way we are able to win. i am inspired by the past and often try to continue working with teachers providing resources and helping them think through strategies for how to teach this history when their livelihoods are at stake in how to encourage students to do the work. we have a lot of work to do. we have a lot of rich resources and we should not overlook that.

>> amen to all of this. i will quickly say that we are living in a moment where one of the reasons i cannot help but thinking we are in this moment is because the history itself, would you study it, puts to shame the last 50 or 60 years of the american story itself. the lies we have been told since the 1960's or earlier, once you start to read the history, none of that story makes sense. that is a very powerful thing, the history that people do not want you to reckon with gives you an alternative to the moment you are in. that means supporting in this very moment libraries as much as you can. show up into a library, even if it is not your normal town library, tell the librarians in

there that somebody is listening. i think recognizing that a lot of this work has been done before. reading scholars who have done this work in the past and understanding that the work that is coming out in the present is building upon the work that has been done in the past. it will be here through this moment. we have to recognize the reasons it is under attack is history is -- >> let's turn -- please. [applause] >> let's turn to the audience. who wants to get us started? just ask the folks waiting for a microphone. i am looking for my microphones. i have a hand in the back.

while we are getting the microphones in place, it is a moment to say thank you to the l.a. times book festival, c-span's book tv for bringing us together. writers and readers. [applause] it is always a joy, isn't it? it is also a time of tremendous purpose. >> i want to thank everyone today. you were marvelous. in my readings, it is a scientific fact, there is a family of human history that originates in africa. we are all african. i have african genes. everyone in this audience has african genes. was that mentioned in your books? if so, how did it impact your stories? there is a science behind the

family history of genetics. without that black history, human beings do not exist. >> thank you. families? genetics? dna? we are all africans? >> i do go into this in the book and i feel it is a very important to talk about this connection to africa. there is no america without african-americans. there is no american history without black history, and there is no human history. so thank you. >> would that be important in the future to mention that? >> i think you have done that for us, at least this afternoon, so thank you very much. >> i have a hand here in the

front. >> hi. i have been aware of the bones of the craft story for close to three years. i was unaware of your story about ellen. it reminded me of a person who was given by her father to her half-sister, which affects american history on a huge level. i have been in book discussions about her. a lot of people do not understand the lack of power of white women. it sounds like you did a lot of research on her stepmother who encouraged her to be transferred out of the household. i am very excited to read your book.

do you go into the powerlessness of a lot of these white women during slavery? >> thank you for your question. they connect with the hemmings. also, her first book, there is more linkage of the lineage. in terms of the white women, the mistresses, there has been a good deal of scholarship about that and there is one book that came out, the name is escaping me. that is right. thank you. i would recommend that as a resource. what i would say is white women were far more empowered than i actually thought when i went into this. they might not have had the same legal rights upon marriage as

white men did, but they were property owners. they could also buy and sell people and they did. they could hold onto their property as mistress smith did. for me, investigating the role of these women was to see the ways in which they had considerable agency. >> i want to make sure we mentioned stephanie jones rogers' book, which was the winner here in 2019 of the book prize of history. the someone else want to come in on this question? perhaps more recent recognition that slavery as an institution and slavery as power is not the

exclusive province of men. >> that is one of the reasons i wrote that book. there is this whole idea that the white sisters were powerless against their family's slaveholding ways and they threw that off and became activists but that is not true. stephanie jones rogers' work has shown that white women profited from, benefited from the slave system. those sisters could not have made it to philadelphia and lived on the road without the money their family made off slave trading. even as they were pronouncing slavery as wrong. you go back to the complications of history, it is possible to hold those two things in the space at the same time. you could be a white woman and believe that slavery was wrong.

you could dedicate yourself to saying slavery was wrong, and yet you could have problematic relationships with actual black people, which are two different things. you could have a problematic relationship with actual black people who were enslaved to you. we have come to a moment in terms of as historians were we can complicate the stories that we think we know, even as liberal-leaning people about what slavery was and how deeply embedded the benefits of the slave system was to white people, regardless of gender. >> this is another example where listening to african-americans matter because you rarely find in slave narratives or freedom narratives as we are now calling them, you rarely find these

helpless enslaving women. they are never there in the records. a lot of the work that we are seeing today has been taken seriously. african-americans' accounts and perspectives on these relationships. the helpless enslaving woman does not exist, at least not in african-americans' minds. >> one of the things recorded of her saying -- she never says anything about her life. we have to take that seriously. what she is saying about her experiences. >> we have time for one more quick question. thank you. >> hi. it has been a long day and i am feeling very nostalgic -- i am

going to cry. i have been to every one of these book festival since they started at ucla. one of my favorite ones in 2004 or 2005 was a panel of women like you, war correspondents who had gone to iraq to tell the stories of people whose stories need to be told and nobody was telling them. i am just struck that 20 years later, still a panel of women telling stories of people who story said not been told. i do not have a question for you but just a note of appreciation for what you are doing and encouraging all of us to turn the mirror on our own families and find out where those stories are and who these people were. keep on plugging away. i love it. . . thank you [applause]

>> that is almost so good of a note that i would like to end on it. i have one more question that flows from it if i could very quickly. telus what you do to take care of yourselves in doing this challenging work, because we know the way in which this work can extract a tremendous personal toll. very briefly, where'd you go for joy, beauty, sustenance, care? >> music and family. jazz. lack original music -- black original music makes me happy, even though it might be said. >> i meditate. and i try to connect with the ancestors and get beyond the bounds of myself while also

taking responsibility for myself. i would say my relationships with my cousins, they come in and they worked with me on the book when i am feeling most doubtful or unprepared. i have had many moments of surprise that have encouraged me and i really live by those moments. >> i will say that, for me, i spend time in nature. i also come back to my love of african-americans as a people and the love they have shown others and that gives me the strength i need to continue telling their stories. >> everything here just resonated. especially the meditation and just being in the body and being out in nature and in movement, out of my head. also, sitting with each of the people i meet in the archives. when i look at that list of

names, there is something -- i say something to each person i encounter on the page, which is i see your history, i feel you in time. that mantra for me to connect to people through time and space, i find that to be restorative. >> thank you. i have one last bit of business, which is to urge you all not only to read but to come out to signing area 1 and to meet these authors, have a chance to ask other questions, have them sign your books and to support them in keeping this important work going. we all thank you so much. [applause]