559: Captain's Log

Ira Glass

I don't know when I got this idea that a captain's log be pretty interesting to read. Probably it was from watching Star Trek as a kid. You know, they do that whole captain's log star date thing. But in fact, in real life, here on planet earth, most captain's logs--

Ira Glass

That's the story on Erik Larson. He ran into this when he was writing a book about this hurricane that destroyed the city of Galveston in 1900. He thought that ships at sea might have interesting observations about the formation of this historic weather event, this storm. So he looked at lots of ships' logs.

Ira Glass

A ship's log does record anything unusual that happens on the ship itself, any damage to the ship. But really, it's about legal and administrative responsibilities. If cargo's damaged, insurers are going to need a record, that kind of thing.

Which is why this one captain's log that Larson found really stood out. He was researching the sinking of the Lusitania for his book, Dead Wake. And he got his hands on the captain's log for the U-boat that sunk the Lusitania in 1915.

The prose is businesslike and direct, just like most logs, even in translation from the German. But this captain just includes way more stuff, like way more detail than other logs that Larson had read. When Captain Walter Schwieger spots the Lusitania at 2:20 submarine time, he notes four funnels and two masts.

Ira Glass

That human drama doesn't make it into the log, even this one. 2:35 PM submarine time, the ship that he's chasing turns starboard towards a town called Queenstown. He runs at the ship at high speed, which Larson says was actually not very fast at all. 3:10 PM submarine time, the log says he takes a clean bow shot at a distance of 700 meters. He names the kind of torpedo he uses and the depth adjustment he makes, the angle.

Ira Glass

This is actually happening as they're filling with water, capsizing, sinking. It is a grisly scene-- people throwing themselves off the ship into the water and getting sucked underneath the sinking vessel, people getting crushed by the lifeboats. 1,198 died.

Captain Schwieger watches through his periscope, and he can't actually hear anything. What he's seeing is like this terrible silent movie. 3:25 PM submarine time in the log.

Ira Glass

But if you think about it, even this, it doesn't totally add up. Like, OK, sure, the rest of the world was horrified by the sinking of the Lusitania. But Schwieger lived in Germany, where this was celebrated, a huge victory.

Did he want to change the log because he thought like, OK, maybe they would actually lose the war and he worried about how this was going to look? Did he just not want this to be his legacy, how he'd be talked about 100 years later as, you know, I'm doing right this second?

Well, today on our program, we bring you captain's logs of various sorts. For every story in today's show, we found a terse, businesslike record of some kind of some event in the past. Some of these are historic events. Some of them are small and personal. And what we're going to do is we're going to go back and reconstruct what really happened, which is way more complicated and emotional than the logs.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us, mateys.

Ira Glass

Act 1, "Cookies and Monsters." So part of what's interesting about reading captain's logs is then going back and piecing together the true story that they're only sort of telling. And that is what PJ Vogt does in this next story. He starts picking something apart and asking questions, and he ends up somewhere very different from where he starts. Here's PJ.

Pj Vogt

I've got a friend, let's call him Dale. Dale has a Gmail address that's pretty generic, like dsmith@gmail.com. And people with email addresses like these get a lot of emails that just aren't meant for them, like email wrong numbers. And this happens to him all the time.

Last time I saw him, he'd just gotten an email written completely in Spanish from a kid somewhere asking if he could turn in some work late. Dale's a nice guy, but he likes to play pranks. He likes to mess with people. So he answers the emails. Here's one he got a while back.

Pj Vogt

The emails continue. And Dale learns that the world of professional cookie advising, it's surprisingly bureaucratic. At the top, there's a national cookie adviser. But beneath her, there are provincial cookie advisers who report up. And then beneath them, there are district cookie advisers.

Dale has no idea what's going on here. But he decides the best thing he could do would be to reply with an intentionally stupid email, detailing a bunch of asinine solutions to the stale cookie problem. He suggests the advisers Sharpie over the expiration dates on the packages. He suggests they eat all the stale cookies themselves.

Pj Vogt

Cynthia, who's the Calgary area cookie adviser, responds to Dale's email with complete polite cheerfulness. She sends him a cookie freshness calculator to help him sort his stale cookies from his fresh cookies. So Dale responds with even stupider messages. He was trying to make it more obvious that he was just kidding.

Pj Vogt

Rather than clarifying, Dale asks her, why are we even in the cookie advising business? He says, his clients, they're all about chocolate bars now.

Pj Vogt

It actually seemed like Dale had maybe touched a nerve. Because after that, cookie advisor world went completely quiet. Dale was bothered by this.

The original email he'd gotten had been meant for a woman named Debbie. What if he had gotten Debbie in trouble, or even just made her look bad?

Pj Vogt

I reached out to the woman who'd been trying to email Debbie, Cynthia, because I wanted to find out if Dale's prank had hurt anybody.

Cynthia has multiple sclerosis, and it can be hard for her to talk. So her friend, Sheila, volunteered to help out. I read them the emails.

Pj Vogt

If you know anything about Girl Scouts, you won't be too surprised by this. But Cynthia and Sheila have a way of talking that is just unrelenting positive. It's just the Girl Guide way. That's why Cynthia was so patient with Dale. It was her job.

But she was also very patient with me, even as-- for reasons that I don't quite understand-- I found myself explaining to her the entire pattern of events that had led Dale to email her.

Pj Vogt

This helpful sunny tone, this Girl Guide voice, is hardwired into their original mission statement, which reads, quote, "A guide smiles and sings under all difficulties," end quote. Smiling and singing under all difficulties.

This sounds ridiculous to me, or at least it did, until I heard a truly crazy story about this exact thing, Girl Guides smiling and singing through incredibly extreme circumstances. I first heard about it from a woman named Janie Hampton. She's kind of a Girl Guide expert. She wrote a book about them.

Pj Vogt

She says laughing at Girl Guides is pretty easy, because most people think of them as not particularly cool, too sincere.

Pj Vogt

So Janie sets out to tease some nerds. But then she starts researching. And one day, she's deep in the Girl Guides' archive in their London headquarters, and she finds this old notebook.

It's small, 7" by 10". And the book's a handwritten log of nearly everything one Girl Guide troop did years ago.

Pj Vogt

Janie does not know where Chefoo is. But she's sure it's not in England, so she looks it up. Chefoo is-- was-- a place in China, a coastal city. It's a good 7,000 miles from London.

According to the guide's logbook, the song had been written and performed by a group of Girl Guides for a concert on Christmas day, 1942. The Christmas concert, Janie discovers, was held in Chefoo, but not at a school. The Girl Guides sang their song in a concentration camp. Janie was baffled.

Why would a concentration camp in China have a singing Girl Guide troop? So Janie starts digging. And she finds someone who was there, an actual witness, born in China, who ended up in the same camp as these Girl Guides, this Belgian guy.

Pj Vogt

The problem is, it turns out he has absolutely no memory of his time there.

Pj Vogt

Nothing, except for this nightmare he used to have when he was a kid. At the time, it hadn't made sense to him. But later, he thought it must have taken place at the camp.

Pj Vogt

Leopold grows up. And as an adult, he wants to know about this place that he used to dream about, and so he builds a website. He invites people to write in with memories of the camp. And the story he learns is pretty crazy.

Pj Vogt

So I did not know this, but during World War II, when Japan occupied China, they built concentration camps that were filled with American and British and other European civilians.

Pj Vogt

Civilians who had been living in China. One of those camps was called Weihsien. That was Leopold's camp.

And among the inmates at Weihsien were a group of children. They were American and British. They were mostly the kids of missionaries. And they'd been studying at a boarding school called Chefoo. Japanese troops invaded Chefoo and captured the kids and eventually brought them to Weihsien.

Pj Vogt

And of course, one more thing.

Pj Vogt

In the Japanese camps, there was very little food. Prisoners died of starvation. In Weihsien, imprisoned monks would smuggle in eggs, and then everybody would share them. And then they'd also have the kids eat the ground up egg shells just to get some extra calcium.

The log book Janie had found was the record kept by one of the Girl Guides' leaders. The leaders were called Brown Owls. This one was a woman in her 20s. And the tone of her writing was the exact same, cheerful, impervious to bad news tone that Dale's cookie adviser email thread had had.

This is the entry from the day they were marched into the camp. "Hello. What's this? Behind bars. Yes. It's Weihsien camp. Well, I guess there's a good deal of fun to be got out of this. Just the place to earn some badges."

According to the logbook, the Brown Owl ran the troop as if it were any other Girl Guide unit, concentration camp or not.

Pj Vogt

Obviously the grim sadness of life in a concentration camp should have overpowered this miniature world that the Brown Owls were trying to build for their young girls. But according to Janie, that's not what happened.

Instead, it was the Girl Guides who started to exert an influence on the adults around them. They lead by example.

Pj Vogt

This is the point where I wondered, was this true? I didn't think that anybody was necessarily lying to me. I just thought probably the Brown Owl had left the bad stuff out of her log book. I figured she'd put the best possible spin on an awful situation. That's what Girl Guides do, right?

Pj Vogt

Fortunately, there's a woman who's still alive and remembers Weihsien. Her name is Mary Previte. She lives in New Jersey. I visit her with my producer, Phia Bennin.

Pj Vogt

Mary Previte is a small, beautiful 82-year-old woman. She's also one of the happiest people I've ever met. I don't know if anybody I've interviewed has ever fully broken into song unprompted. Mary did-- seven times.

Also, unlike Leopold, Mary has a phenomenal memory. She told me about the day that Japanese troops arrived at her boarding school.

Pj Vogt

The girls were eventually transferred into Weihsien. Mary became a concentration camp Girl Guide. This was over 70 years ago. But when Mary talks about the camp, she sounds like she's still there, like she's 12 years old again.

She said this story about the Brown Owls insisting on good table manners, absolutely true.

Pj Vogt

Mary was separated from her parents, unsure of when she'd BE released, surrounded by pack dogs and men with guns. She says that she spent a lot of her time just thinking about earning merit badges.

In the winter, it would get cold, freezing. But no heat was provided to the prisoners by the guards. Instead, Mary and her friends had to go collect leftover coal shavings from the guards' quarters.

Pj Vogt

Like making a new pencil from pencil shavings, except the coal is heavy. And it had to be passed bucket by bucket in a line of Girl Guides. Then the shavings were mixed with dust and water and dried in the sun. It was long, hard work.

And then at the end of it, you still had to go use that recycled coal in a pot-bellied stove and keep the stove lit so that everybody would be warm. It sounded horrible, like a childhood from a Charles Dickens novel. Except Mary remembers it as being surprisingly fun, a game she could win.

Pj Vogt

There's reference in the logbook to the trouble the adults were having keeping it together, but you'd have to know to look for it. A scout leader writes one entry that reads, "Dear me, what a tragedy. Brown Owl had an attack of neuralgia. Let's hope he's better for our meeting.

Neuralgia's a nerve disorder. But what that actually meant was that the Brown Owl was having a nervous breakdown. Years later, Mary went and tracked down one of the grownups.

Pj Vogt

Japanese soldiers went door to door, systematically raping and killing tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.

Pj Vogt

So there were two sets of prayers. At night, the grownups, many of them not much older than the kids themselves, prayed grimly for a fast death. And then they woke up in the morning and they sang songs with the kids, set the bouncy camp melodies.

Pj Vogt

There probably aren't many places on earth where you have less reason to be cheerful than a concentration camp. But it turns out, in a place like that, being able to be cheerful, to have a positive outlook, it's not dopey or silly. It's how you survive. How you tell the story matters.

Pj Vogt

The first Chefoo brownies warded off despair for four years, until finally, on August 17, 1945, they were rescued.

Pj Vogt

Mary remembers the American plane flying low over the camp.

Pj Vogt

Leopold says that the nightmare that used to haunt him is just his memory of that day, of being a four-year-old, lost and wandering around a riot of freed concentration camp survivors. Most of the people who are there on liberation day are now dead.

One of the dormitories at Weihsien's a memorial, but mostly this place exists as a footnote in some books on a website designed by a Belgian man and in the memories of the remaining survivors. It's a half disappeared world with a strong pull on the people who do still remember it.

A couple weeks ago at the grocery store, I watched a gang of Brownie Scouts rush down the pet food aisle. They had their uniforms on, covered in merit badges for public speaking and backyard astronomy. They were happy and safe in their own world, a million miles from Weihsien. I wondered if they knew what they might be capable of.

Ira Glass

PJ Vogt. He's the co-host of the podcast "Reply All," where this story came from, and which I am a big fan of. You can subscribe to "Reply All" on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On July 28, "Reply All" is going to be appearing in Cast Party, which is a podcast festival broadcast live to movie theaters across the country. It also features "Radiolab" and "Invisibilia." Info and tickets at castparty.org.

Coming up, Aziz Ansari thinks you don't know how to text. And when he makes the case, I have to say, I think you're going to believe him. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme. We bring you different stories on that theme. Today's show, "Captain's Log," stories where we take the unemotional facts in logs and records of various sorts, and we look behind them at the much more emotional, complicated stories that they are so stoically documenting. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, "Romancing the Phone."

Recently, my wife and I, we were texting some things to each other that were so intense that at the end she suggested we just delete all of our texts that we had ever written to each other ever. And it wasn't like we thought that anybody else was going to see our texts. It's like we just didn't want them to exist in this world any more.

We wanted that history of our conversation to vanish forever from the face of the earth, never think about it again. You know, it's like text messages are this little history. It's like they're our logbook of our interactions with people.

And of course, usually they're not so emotional. Usually they're pretty terse, which totally makes them perfect for today's program, because their terseness behind it, there can be a whole story.

And recently, a sociologist started to study this. This was not very traditional sociology. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg at NYU teamed up with a comedian, Aziz Ansari, to examine the texts that people send to each other right when they start dating. And they put out a book with her findings. It's called Modern Romance.

And what they did, they spoke to a few hundred people. Their research was conducted in focus groups, like 10 to 20 people in a room, in eight different cities. And then sometimes they would do a version of these focus groups on stage in front of audiences, in New York and Los Angeles.

What they would do is Aziz would get up, and he would do a little stand up. And then he would introduce Eric, like Eric was the next comic who was coming on stage.

Ira Glass

So Eric would come up, and he would talk a little bit about previous work that he'd done. And he would drop this statistic, that in 1950, 23% of American adults were single.

Ira Glass

Several people in the audience go "hmm."

Ira Glass

Now what Eric and Aziz were interested in was exactly what it is that people say to each other when they want to ask somebody out on a date. So at these shows, Aziz and Eric would ask people for their phones, and then they would take their phones, and they would read their text messages out loud to the crowd.

Those texts, that log, that was the raw data for their research. And if you think about it from a research perspective, texts are great, because they are a real time record of what actually transpired, which is way more reliable and accurate than asking people later on to recall what happened. One of our producers, Jonathan Manjivar, dove into that data, and he now explains how those shows would go.

A quick warning before he starts, we're talking about dating. So there's nothing explicit in this story at all, but we acknowledge the existence of sex. Now here's Jonathan.

Jonathan Manjivar

This particular focus groups slash comedy show was recorded at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York. The room had been split up so that all the guys were on one side. The girls were on the other.

And pretty quickly into the show, Aziz asked for volunteers to come up on stage. He and Eric specifically wanted guys who had recently made first contact with a woman they were interested in. How had the guys made their initial approach?

So four guys get up on stage. And then, one by one, they hand over their phones to Aziz.

Jonathan Manjivar

Aziz starts reading texts. And the first guy, he'd been set up by his boss, not over text but over email. The email was sent to both him and his potential date. And it just said, "Cocktails, go get some." So this guy emailed the woman.

Jonathan Manjivar

No hands go up.

Jonathan Manjivar

So the guy wrote back.

Jonathan Manjivar

OK, so Aziz moves on to guy number two, because what's about to happen is that we're going to hear all of their initial attempts. And then the women in the audience are going to vote on who did it best. Guy number two met a woman on the train one night.

Jonathan Manjivar

Moving on to guy number three, he had met a woman at an NYU alumni event.

Jonathan Manjivar

Guy number four got someone's number at a wedding. She left the wedding. And then not long after, he texted her.

Jonathan Manjivar

So four guys, which one did this best? Aziz and Eric turn to the women in the audience.

Jonathan Manjivar

So the clear winner, the guy who wrote about Thanksgiving. "Hey there. How'd your Thanksgiving feast turn out? Here's a shot of the spread I put together."

Jonathan Manjivar

A woman in the audience, who's a little off mic, says it gets the conversation going. You asked a question. And he said something about his Thanksgiving, and it made you want to comment on it.

Jonathan Manjivar

It was personal, another woman says. He remembered what you talked about.

Jonathan Manjivar

The woman in the back doesn't like the "what's up" guy who met someone at a wedding and texted her after she left. In fact, no one liked that text. It got zero claps.

The woman says, it sounded like he just wanted to have sex. He's saying, I don't live here. But I'm going to be back. Let's hang out. And I don't want to talk to you until then.

Jonathan Manjivar

Other than asking questions, Aziz and Eric have some very clear advice about the kinds of texts their research shows works when you're trying to ask someone out. Number one, invite the person to something specific at a specific time.

Two, say something that refers back to an earlier conversation you had, so it's clear you were listening. And three, say something funny.

Aziz and Eric say most guys, surprisingly, do not instinctually get this. They don't do it. But after dropping this knowledge at the show, women were invited to come up on stage to share texts they'd gotten from guys. And coincidentally, the very first woman received a text from a guy that followed two of the three rules.

Jonathan Manjivar

That guy got a date. Another woman got a text that was at the opposite end of the spectrum. The guy pretty much does everything wrong, from the start.

Jonathan Menjivar

OK, so to review, there are three rules. Ask a question. Make a specific plan. Be funny.

In fact, this night at the UCB theater, Aziz asked guys in the crowd to text someone they were interested in, right now, armed with this new knowledge. And just before the end of the show--

Ira Glass

Aziz Ansari. The book that he wrote with Eric Klinenberg is called Modern Romance. Jonathan Menjivar is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "On A Quiet Street in Richmond." So all through this hour today, we have documents that describe big dramatic things in the most "just the facts, ma'am" language possible, like a captain's log usually does. And we found this article from 1853 that's a good example of this.

In the article, a writer named William Chambers went out to witness and report on slave auctions. Apparently enough people had written about these in a very melodramatic and sensationalistic way that Chambers felt like somebody needed to go out and give a true, factual account.

John Ellison Conlee

Everything is described precisely as it occurred, without passion or prejudice. It would not have been difficult to be sentimental on a subject which appeals so strongly to the feelings but I preferred telling the simple truth.

Ira Glass

Our excerpts of Chambers' article were read for us by actor John Ellison Conlee. By 1853, slavery was controversial, and Chambers opposed it. He was a Scottish guy, an outsider.

And so he spent a couple days going from one auction shop to another in Richmond, Virginia. Chambers explains that he's seen advertisements for slave sales. And when he went to the addresses, he found a narrow short street between two main streets in the city, brick houses on either side where there were a few small auction shops.

On this particular day, it was pretty empty. Shops were identifiable by little red flags that hung outside their doors. And pinned to each flag was a piece of paper listing the men, women, and children who were going to be sold that day.

John Ellison Conlee

Conceive the idea of a large shop with two windows and a door between, no shelving or counters inside, the interior a spacious, dismal apartment, not well swept. The only furniture a desk at one of the windows and a bench at one side of the shop, three feet high with two steps to it from the floor.

Conceive the idea of this dismal looking place with nobody in it but three Negro children who, as I entered, were playing at auctioneering each other. An intensely black little Negro of four or five years of age was standing on the bench-- or block, as it is called-- with an equally black girl, about a year younger, by his side whom he was pretending to sell by bids to another black child who was rolling about the floor.

My appearance did not interrupt the merriment. The little auctioneer continued his play and appeared to enjoy the joke of selling the girl who stood demurely by his side. "$50 for the girl. $50, $50. I sell this here fine girl for $50," was uttered, with appropriate gestures in imitation, doubtless, of the scenes he had seen and acted daily on the spot.

I spoke a few words but was scarcely understood. And the fun went on as if I had not been present. So I left them, happy and rehearsing what was likely soon to be their own fate.

Ira Glass

At 9:30 AM, at another store, Chambers is approached by a salesman and asked if he's there to buy a slave. Chambers explains that he is not. He's simply there to witness the sales and gather information, which seems fine with the salesman. A lanky man sits down next to Chambers wearing what Chambers calls a wide awake hat, which is a hat with a kind of low round crown and a wide brim.

John Ellison Conlee

Looking towards the door, I observe the subjects of sale. The man and boy indicated by the paper on the red flag enter together, whence, as the day was chilly, they edge themselves towards the fire in the corner where I was seated. I was now between the two parties, the white man on the right and the old and young Negro on the left. And I waited to see what would take place.

The sight of the Negroes at once attracted the attention of Wide Awake. He kept keenly eyeing the pair as if to see what they were good for. Under this searched gaze, the man and boy were a little abashed but said nothing.

Their appearance had little of the repulsiveness we are apt to associate with the idea of slaves. They were dressed in a grey woolen coat, pants, and waistcoat, colored cotton neck cloths, clean shirts, coarse woolen stockings, and stout shoes.

Moved by a sudden impulse, Wide Awake left his seat and, rounding the back of my chair, began to grasp at the man's arms, as if to feel their muscular capacity. He then examined his hands and fingers, and last of all told him to open his mouth and show his teeth, which he did in a submissive manner.

Having finished these examinations, Wide Awake resumed his seat. I asked the elder Negro what was his age. He said he did not know. I next inquired how old the boy was. He said he was seven years of age.

On asking the man if the boy was his son, he said he was not. He was his cousin.

Ira Glass

Chambers and the man that he calls Wide Awake wait around for a while for the auction to start and then get tired of waiting. And they leave the shop to check out another one further up the street.

John Ellison Conlee

Here, according to the announcement on the paper stuck to the flag, there were to be sold a woman and three children, a young woman, three men, a middle aged woman, and a little boy. Already a crowd had met. A few were seated near a fire on the right-hand side, and others stood around an iron stove in the middle of the apartment. The whole place had a dilapidated appearance.

From a back window, there was a view into a ruinous courtyard, beyond which, in a hollow, accessible by a side lane, stood a shabby brick house on which the word jail was inscribed in large black letters on a white ground. I imagined it to be a depot for the reception of Negroes.

On my arrival, and while making these preliminary observations, the lots for sale had not made their appearance. In about five minutes afterwards, they were ushered in, one after the other, under the charge of a mulatto, who seemed to act as a principal assistant.

I saw no whips, chains, or any other engine of force, nor did such appear to be required. All the lots took their seats on two long forms near the stove. None showed any signs of resistance, nor did anyone utter a word. Their manner was that of perfect humility and resignation.

As soon as all were seated, there was a general examination of their respective merits by feeling their arms, looking into their mouths. Yet there was no abrupt rudeness in making these examinations, no coarse or domineering language was employed. The three Negro men were dressed in the usual manner, in grey woolen clothing.

The woman with three children excited my peculiar attention. She was neatly attired with a colored handkerchief bound around her head and wore a white apron over her gown. Her children were all girls, one of them a baby at the breast three months old, and the others two and three years of age, respectively, rigged out with clean white pinafores.

There was not a tear or an emotion visible in the whole party. Everything seemed to be considered as a matter of course. And the change of owners was possibly looked forward to do with as much indifference as ordinary hired servants anticipate a removal from one employer to another.

While intending purchasers were proceeding with personal examinations of the several lots, I took the liberty of putting a few questions to the mother of the children. The following was our conversation.

Are you a married woman? Yes, sir. How many children have you had? Seven. Where is your husband? In Madison County.

When did you part from him? On Wednesday, two days ago. Where you sorry to part from him? Yes, sir, she replied with a deep sigh. My heart was almost broke.

Why is your master selling you? I don't know. He wants money to buy some land. Suppose he sells me for that.

There might not be a word of truth in these answers, for I had no means of testing their correctness. But the woman seemed to speak unreservedly. And I am inclined to think that she said nothing but what, if necessary, could be substantiated.

Ira Glass

When the woman and her three children are put up on the auction block, bidding starts at $850. But it only gets up to $890. That won't do, gentleman, the auctioneer says. I cannot take such a low price. And the women and her children step down from the block.

$890 is the equivalent of nearly $26,000 today. Chambers reprints a price list. That's what one adult would sell for, not an adult and three kids.

The most interesting passage in Chambers' report is where he speculates about what the slaves feel about all this. Then in this passage he starts fine.

John Ellison Conlee

There was an entire absence of emotion in the looks of men, women, and children thus seated, preparatory to being sold. This does not correspond with the ordinary accounts of slave sales which are represented as tearful and harrowing.

Ira Glass

And then, Chambers takes a turn. He says something that is really hard to imagine somebody today writing.

John Ellison Conlee

My belief is that none of the parties felt deeply on the subject, or at least that any distress they experienced was but momentary, soon passed away and was forgotten. One of my reasons for this opinion rests on a trifling incident which occurred.

While waiting for the commencement of the sale, one of the gentleman present amused himself with a pointer dog which, at command, stood on its hind legs and took pieces of bread from his pocket. These tricks greatly entertained the row of Negroes, old and young. And the poor woman, whose heart three minutes before was almost broken, now laughed as heartily as anyone.

Ira Glass

Today, this just seems wrong-headed. Of course you could be deeply affected by something you're going through and still, you know, laugh at a dog doing tricks. Of course, any of us could contain both those things at the same time. It's weird that Chambers doesn't see that.

A scholar who's written about Chambers told me that Chambers was actually not a keen observer of people in his writing. He doesn't do much character observation when he writes. So it's possible he just was not super perceptive about people's feelings.

But also, when you read more of Chambers, it's clear he thinks that white people are superior to black people. He wrote, quote, "A black man is only a kind of man. He stands upright on two legs, his hands to work, wears clothes, can cook his food, a point not reached by monkeys," Chambers writes. "Perhaps," Chambers says, "there's something wrong with his craniological development," which, I guess he means, not as smart.

So he went on a mission to document the reality of slavery for his readers. He was that enlightened. He was that against it. But that was as far as he went. On his visit to Richmond, he was not able to see the people in front of him for what they really were, which was, of course, exactly the same as him.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "A Brief History of Us." So to close today's show, we asked a fiction writer, Etgar Keret, to create a short story that works like a captain's log that's told completely through a series of unemotional facts. Here's what he wrote. It's read for us by actress Sue Scott.

Sue Scott

At first, we were a cell, then an amoeba, than a fish. And after a very long and frustrating era, we became a lizard. That was the era when, as we recall, the earth felt soft and unsteady beneath our feet. So we climbed a tree.

Up there in the treetops, we felt secure. At some point, we climbed down and started walking upright and speaking. And as soon as we began speaking, we just couldn't stop.

After that, we watched a lot of TV. It was a fantastic era. We always laughed in the wrong places. And people stared and said, what's so funny? And we didn't even bother answering. That's how little we cared.

We promised ourselves we'd find a job we loved. And when that didn't work out, we settled for a job we didn't hate. And we felt lucky, and then unlucky, and then lucky again.

And suddenly, our parents were dying. Then they died. A second before they departed, we held their hand really tight and told him we forgave them for everything-- everything. And our voice broke when we said that, because we weren't convinced we were telling the truth. And we were afraid they could sense it.

Less than a year after that, our son was born. And he also climbed a tree and felt secure up there. And he came down at some point, too, and went off to college. Then we were left alone, and it started getting cold, not like the other time eons ago when we hid in boroughs and peered out while the dinosaurs froze to death, but still depressingly cold.

So we went to a drama workshop, because our friend said it would do us good. They gave us a series of improv exercises. And in the first one, we poisoned each other. And in the second one, we cheated on each other.

And in the third one, the instructor, who spoke English with a heavy indistinct accent said, now switch partners. And within seconds, it wasn't us anymore.

The new man who was my partner said, let's do a sketch where you're a baby, and I give birth to you and nurse you and protect you from all evil. And I said, sure, why not? But by the time he'd finished giving birth to me and nursing me and protecting me from all evil, our time was up.

And the instructor with a strange accent asked if the exercise had made any primal memory surface. And I said it hadn't, because I didn't want to admit that it had brought back warm primordial memories from millions of years ago, from before we even emerged from the water.

Afterwards at home, we got into an argument over something really dumb and had the biggest fight we'd ever had since we were created. We yelled and cried and broke things, the kind of things that if you'd asked us a day earlier we'd have told you were unbreakable.

Then we packed our stuff up in a suitcase and shoved whatever didn't fit in the suitcase into plastic grocery bags. And we dragged all that behind us like homeless people to the apartment where a very wealthy friend of ours lived. And he put a sheet out on his plush sofa for us.

The friend told us that it might seem like the end of the world now. But by morning, all the rage and hurt feelings would melt away, and everything would look different. And we said, no, something had been broken. Something had been torn apart, something we would never be able to mend or forgive.

The friend lit an imported Slims cigarette and said, OK, maybe so. But can I just ask, why do you keep talking in the plural? Instead of answering, I just looked around and realized I was alone-- truly, completely alone.

Ira Glass

Sue Scott, reading a story by Etgar Keret. Etgar's latest book is a memoir called The Seven Good Years. His story was translated from Hebrew by Jessica [INAUDIBLE].

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chace and myself with Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike.

Editing help from Joel Lovell. Production help from Simon Adler, Seth Lind, our operations director, Emily Condon, who's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Elna Baker scouts stories for our show.

Research help today from Michelle Harris and Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he donated blood this week. And when it was all over, I don't know. He told me he was really feeling out of sorts.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.