Behind the Scenes Minis: Susie and Rip

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we talked about Susie King Taylor on the show this week. Yes, indeed, she is somebody who I discovered. Sometimes when I Google something, there is often over on the left a little thing that's like people also searched for, And I don't even remember what I was googling, but under the people also searched for, I saw this very striking photo and I was like, who is that person? And I clicked on it and it was Susie King Taylor, and I was immediately captivated, and like, I want to do an episode on this person, not just because her memoir is, as far as I know, unique in the world of like first person writing about civil war, but also because it shows in so many different ways the resourcefulness and ingenuity and determination of enslaved people and freed people and people who liberated themselves. I feel like sometimes there is a perception that there was like a passivity among enslaved people of like begrudgingly accepting what was going on, which is not correct at all, and her story just has so many ways that she and her family were pushing back on all of that. There was, you know, little things from having been able to maintain these connections among themselves and having a family history that they knew that went back generations, to her forging passes for her grandmother at the age of like thirteen. I'd feel like we should also note that they're an ongoing and very troubling thing that happens is like black children being interpreted as adults rather than children and news reporting and stuff. So I don't want to fall into that trope. But at the same time, the idea that she was forging passes for her grandmother, who could not read or write, at the age of roughly thirteen, I found that incredible, amazing and just such a good example of the kind of things that people did do to try to push back and make a better life for themselves in a world that was set up to not allow that. Well, and all of it leading up to her ability to do that, right, like that entire community effort to have a secret school. Yeah, is enthralling to consider. How incredibly the thing that I bring to mind is not a good correlation, which is that It makes me think of when kids are on movie sets and they're not allowed to tell anything about it, right, It's very hard. That's like one of the things that people will say, like, I can't believe nothing leaked same. I mean, it's a bunch of kids being told to read, being taught to read and write, which is illegal, and no one can know about it, and they all kept the secret, which is amazing to me. Yeah, I wish I knew more about what happens to the rest of her family during the war, because her memoir makes it sound like it was her and her uncle and her uncle's family who all escaped ultimately to Saint Simon's Island, as she clearly still had connections to her grandmother and other family members, But I am less clear on like her immediate family, her parents and siblings, like what happened with them during the war. I did not read her memoir as you did, but I found myself wondering, and this is strictly conjecture. What made me think about it was when we got to the part where she talked about her son, but she doesn't mention him by name. It almost feels like things that are painful she distances and doesn't talk about Oh sure, yeah, so I can imagine whatever happened to separate her from her immediate family, probably she didn't want to think about. I also tried to find more information about him, what his name was, what his date of birth was, and that maybe information that exists somewhere. There's a lot, like a lot of records of enslaved people, previously enslaved people that like the records are just not there, things were destroyed during the war, or they were never kept in the first place, or like the records of a family might have been an inventory of the household of the people who were enslaving them, and you know, if if their house was burned down during the war, just may not be there anymore. Like there's it's hard to know whether that information exists. It seems as though her son, being born after the war was over, that information might exist somewhere. I was not able to track it down. If so, and that I just I found the story of her trip to to go look after him and not being able to bring it bring him home just to heartbreaking. Yeah. In my original draft of the outline, I had ended with her quote from the chapter on her reflections on the current time. And then I was like, I think that is not the note that I want to end this episode on, because while to me, that whole paragraph is still so relevant today, so much of her story to me was about resilience and ingenuity. That that like, I wanted to include that, but I didn't necessarily want to end the episode there. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. I do want to mention I'm presuming that the picture that you're talking about that caught your eye is the only one I've ever seen of her, a photograph where she's in that black it looks almost like a morning suit with a veil. Yeah. Yeah, I'm in love with that jacket. Yeah, I've only seen it. I've only seen one other picture that is was labeled as being of her, and I really it can be hard sometimes to tell whether two different pictures of the same person are the same person. Like there's so much about lighting and camera angles and how people's faces change at different parts of their life, Like it can be hard. But I was like, I'm not This picture is the picture from her book with her signature under it in a lot of places that you find it printed, But like this other picture did not have that kind of framing, and I was like, I'm not sure if that's the same person or not. Maybe maybe not, don't really know. One story that I had had in the outline that I took out just because it was it wasn't central to the story and the episode itself was sort of ballooning, was that she and other folks like from the camp had been moved to a new location and she had left some of her things where they had previously been stationed, and she went back for her stuff, and she and a friend caught a ride with the commissary wagon to get out there, and then they were just going to walk back, and the walk back turned out to take way longer than they thought, so long and so tiring, and she was like, our feet hurt so much that we took our shoes off to see if that would help, and that actually made it worse. And it got dark and we just everybody, we were like, what's going to happen. We got to the camp, we didn't have the pass code to get back in because we didn't know we were going to be gone for that long. We you know, the guard though, knew who we were, they you know, and let us in and from that point on the soldiers would make jokes about her being a deserter. And I just found that, like the finding humor in this whole situation and it continuing to find humor in it. I loved that. So I was like, I'll talk about that on Friday instead of having it sort of an aside in the middle of this otherwise not focused on that exact thing episode. Yeah, I love it though. Yeah, I'm sure grateful. She wrote her autobiography Me Too. It is digitized. You can read the whole thing online. There's been kind of a push in the last few years to make her better known, which I think is great. We talked about Old Ribbon this week. We did. We did. I Yeah, I did not know what this was at all when you sent this outline to me. Oh, I'm so glad. I'm like, we're getting along. And I just got to the part where and then they put a horrid lizard in the time capsule and I was like, I'm sorry, you did what I'm at now. Yeah, I mean that part is tricky, and it's interesting because some of the modern retellings try to soften what that is, where they're like, no, he explained to his son that lizards live for a hundred years, and so it was okay to take his pet. But none of them contemporary accounts I read ever discuss him just taking his kid's pet. I mean, aside from you know there, they're they're multiple prongs to this fork of problems, right, Like one is you put an animal and sealed it in a thing, yeah, in a building. And the other is you took your kid's pet, yeah, which is a jerk move too. All true. When I was a kid, I had a textbook. I've talked about this textbook on the show before, and people very helpfully tried to send lay were like, was this the textbook? And none of them were the textbook. It was a textbook that I remember having a section that was about like, here are things that people used to think about life that they don't anymore, And one was people thought that goose barnacles could become geese through spontaneous generation. And I remember one of the things that they're being that frogs and toads could live for a hundred years. And when I was a child, I was like, why would anyone think this? And I was very annoyed and perplexed. Yeah, humans have thought some crazy things over the years. I will say, if you like me, we're a cartoon kid. You may be going, is this where the idea for Michigan Jay Frog came from? And the answer is yes. Okay, So have you remember Hello my baby, Hello my honey, being sung by a frog who was found in a building that was being taken apart. I didn't remember that part of it. Oh, yeah, that's his original. His original cartoon is where he is found by a construction worker in a building and the construction worker is so excited to show people he found this frog that dances and sings. Yeah. Every time you would show the frog to somebody, the frog would just sit there and go rib it and it was amazing. I remember that part, and as soon as you said the name, I immediately saw, like the Hello my baby, Like I saw that whole sequence in my head. But I did not remember the other part. Yes, the other thing that is sort of related to a cartoon, but not. I don't think that they got it from this story, but I could be wrong. Is that apparently will Wood called his horned lizard Blinkie, which is also the name of the three eyed fish and the Simpsons that Marge cooks for mister Burns when he comes to their house for a photo op dinner, because her point is that his nuclear power plant is poisoning the water and causing mutations in the animals, and she makes him eat this three eyed fish. There is another thing. I didn't realize it until I was like two thirds of the way done with the episode, but Memory Palace did a one of their short episodes on Old Rip last fall. Yeah, you know, Nate to Mayo tells the story in such a beautiful way that I was crying about horned lizards by the end of it, and my husband was like, are you okay, And I was like, no, yeah, very Nate to me, I can absolutely I have not heard this particular episode of the Memory Palace, but I'm like, oh, it absolutely makes sense that Nate would do that. Uh yeah, so also excellent if you want sort of a very beautifully told, more artfully shortened, an edited version of this. Yeah. He tweeted recently like a description of the show that was something like, it's not a poem, but it's very poetic and has some of the same goals as poetry. And I was like, Yeah, that's that's what we Todd describe as a listener. That's how I would describe it short. Yeah. There is another thing that comes up that I think is fascinating in all of this, which is at various points in time, and I didn't include them because they often contradict one another. There have been interviews with old timers who were part of either no longer I mean they've I presume most of them are gone at this point, but in the you know, the earlier part of the twentieth century, who were there in eighteen ninety seven when the building was put together and the frog slash lizard slash toad was put inside, or people who were there in nineteen twenty eight when it was all opened up, and their accounts of it are fascinating because in some ways they have just picked up and the legend, but in other ways, in the midst of that, they will give details that are completely inaccurate or just completely different from the way that like the newspaper printed stories are Like several of them mentioned that when the judge first held him up for the crowd to see, which is reported in all the papers as him being held by one leg Many of the accounts from people that were alive then are like he picked him up by the tail, and it's like it's a small detail, but it's one of those things where I'm like, this kind of you know, offers insight into how much this is just like a legend, a shared false memory that everybody eventually had. They would tell you with complete integrity. I don't think any of them were trying to fib about it that they had seen this happen. And it's like, well, yeah, well, our memories are sieves. I mean, they just are. They're sieves, and they're also easy to reimprint with things that you will believe or that you saw or that you remember, but they're not really correct. I mean, I don't know if you and your beloved go through this, Tracy, but I know Brian and I have now been married twenty six years. There are things that we'll talk about and we won't get the details right, and one of us will be like, that is not how it went, yeah, and it'll be like, no, this is exactly what I remember, and it's like, no, that's not quite right. And sometimes there's photographic evidence to show it. No, no, we've both done it. Memories change shift. It's fascinating. Please don't put animals in construction. Don't do that. Please don't seal animals in anything. Shouldn't be No. I was upset, I mean, and so I thought, I'm the kind of person that catches bees and spiders and takes them outside. We're having an ant problem right now. I feel very guilty about smashing the ants in my house. Me too. I do eat meat, but I try to eat less meat, and I try to get the meat that I eat from farms where I know that the animals are treating kind. I know there's some like contradiction in there, but man, I just found the whole idea of like and then we put this in there and sealed it up. I was very upset. Like nobody was like, this is cruelty. Nobody, nobody, not even for a second. Yeah, it's weird. But then I presume I'm not trying to justify or explain or excuse any of that. But I think if they genuinely thought it was gonna live a hundred years to them, it might not have seemed cruel. They're still wrong, but I could see where they could justify it in their heads. Is going, well, they go underground and they go to sleep, and they go into this hibernation type state for months at a time. Surely that's what will happen here. Yeah. Well, still, jerks, don't do that to animals. Don't ask as a person who has two pets who were found in a sealed box. No, no, don't do that. Just don't do it. I mean it's okay now they're very spoiled, but at the time very scary littles. Don't do that makes me a real mad Yeah, I uh. If we get to doctor Hornaday's biography, I'm just gonna warn everybody now, it's awful. Yeah, it involves a story that we all know. It's awful. It never stops being awful. That's all I'm gonna say. Just racist and awful, exactly what you expect. But on lighter news though, again, please don't please don't put animals in sealboxes. Also, this is my call to all listeners. I know some of you have lizards as pets, and I want to see the pictures because I love lizards, but I'm always I would be too scared to keep one because I feel like there's a delicacy to them. That I am scared to mess up, you know what I mean, like in terms of their heat needs, and they're understanding what they need is a whole other job unto itself. And I love them and think they're amazing, and I don't get to spend enough time with them. So I would like all the pictures you have, please thank sounds great, sounds great. If you are headed into your weekend, we hope that you get to spend time with whatever animals delight you, and that they are well treated and hugged and kissed in the appropriate ways. If you don't get to have time off this weekend and you have work or other responsibilities, I hope those go smoothly. And maybe if you have a pet, you get some time with it to you know, rest and relax. They're very curative for people's mental states. Often. I know I feel soothed when I can hold a kittie for a little while. It makes everything better. So do whatever it is that makes you feel better this weekend and helps keep you buoyant and as you know, happy and healthy as possible. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday you'll get another new piece of old history. Stuff you missed in history class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.