Episode 55 features Dr. Robin Bernstein. Robin is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present, and is the Dillon Professor of American History at Harvard University. Her first, award-winning book was Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, and she has written essays and articles on a wide range of subjects. Her new book is called Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and it’s truly remarkable. I had a hard time putting it down, so I was especially delighted to find out more about how Robin researched, wrote, and revised to reach the finished product.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
- Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit
- Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members
- Robin's Chronicle of Higher Education piece, "Can You Reverse a Defeatist Habit that Sabotages Your Writing?"
- Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
- Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Note that books purchased through bookshop.org links above earn a small affiliate commission for Drafting the Past, which helps to support the show.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Hello and welcome to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter. And in each episode, I get to interview a historian I admire to find out more about their writing process.
In this episode, I was fortunate to spend time talking with Dr. Robin Bernstein.
Robin Bernstein:
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Robin is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the 19th century to the present and is the Dillon professor of American History at Harvard University. Her first award-winning book was Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. And she has written essays and articles on a wide range of subjects and a wide range of venues. Her new book is called Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit, and it's truly remarkable. I had a hard time putting it down, so I was especially delighted to find out more about how Robin researched, wrote, and revised her way to the finished product. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Robin Bernstein.
Robin Bernstein:
I started out as a freelance writer and journalist. After I majored in creative writing in college and after I graduated, I worked for two years as a freelance journalist. And I also worked in a library and I worked in a bookstore. I did a whole bunch of part-time jobs, all of which were either minimum wage or close to it. And this was in the early 1990s, and I worked primarily for what was then known as the Gay and Lesbian Press, and it was an amazing time. I published a lot and I was actually able to pay my very cheap rent by being a journalist from 1991 to 1993. I got published over a hundred times in two years.
So that was possible back then. It was a long time before the internet. So that's when I really formed a conception of myself as a writer and as somebody who really cared very deeply about writing and who cared about writing in a lot of different genres. So I was publishing articles for newspapers. I was publishing poetry. I was publishing short fiction. I just was publishing every single thing I could think of because I was trying to figure out who I was. I was trying to figure out what it was I really wanted to write. And then somewhere along the line, I figured out that what I really wanted was to go to grad school. So that was its own twisty journey, but that's really what my trajectory is. I was a writer before I was a scholar.
Kate Carpenter:
Somehow I'm not at all surprised to hear that based on this book. Well, let me start just by asking some nosy questions about your writing process. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Robin Bernstein:
I like to write in the morning. I used to write at a local coffee shop. I wrote my first book at one particular table in a coffee shop, starting usually at 5:00 in the morning. And then the pandemic happened and I stopped going to the coffee shop and I started making my own coffee shop in my house, which was at my dining room table. So basically, every morning I set up at my dining room table. And then usually by about noon I migrate elsewhere, but I write first thing in the morning.
And the other thing that I do is I write with an online writing community of friends where we do Pomodoro sets, which I'm sure many of your viewers are very familiar with, but the way we do it is whoever is hosting the Pomodoro set, usually we start at the top of the hour. And first we all go around, we gather at the top of the hour in whoever is hosting it in their Zoom room. We go around and very briefly state what our intention is. Then we turn off our cameras and our microphones and we do whatever we said we would do ideally for usually 45 minutes. Then we come back and we state very simply whether we honored our intentions or not. Then we take a break. And then either we quit for the day or we do another set.
Kate Carpenter:
How has that helped?
Robin Bernstein:
Oh, it's helped so much. I mean, it's accountability. It's also a community. I started doing Pomodoro sets during the pandemic. Like everybody else, I was isolated. Like everybody else, I was lonely and the Pomodoro sets were just so comforting, and then I realized that not only were they comforting, they were also really helpful for productivity and for just keeping me honest. If I say I'm going to write for 45 minutes, now I'm going to write for 45 minutes, or I'm going to admit that I didn't write for 45 minutes, one or the other.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize yourself? What kind of tools do you use?
Robin Bernstein:
I'm very old school. I do a lot online, but I also do a lot in hard copies. So I'm going to actually show you. What I do is I keep massive notebooks of primary data and sometimes secondary data too. So I'm going to show you one, just one of my massive notebooks that I use for Freeman's Challenge. So this is it.
Kate Carpenter:
Oh my gosh. Wow.
Robin Bernstein:
No, I mean they really are massive. So you can see that it says Auburn State Prison number 1. This is one of four volumes. And this is only primary data, no secondary material at all. So I mean, it's not good for the environment to be printing out so much stuff, but I'm kind of old school in that way I can think on paper in a way that I can't think on a computer screen. So I'll actually show you some more of my notebooks.
Kate Carpenter:
So listeners, since you can't see, here I'll just interject that Robin is moving the camera to show me at least a couple of full shelves of these massive binders.
Robin Bernstein:
So there they are. There's quite a few of them. And that's really how I organized my data for Freeman's Challenge. I also of course had secondary materials. I had books obviously that I was referring to. But how I really think is through printouts, which I then write on, take notes on, that's really my core organizing force.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you find things then when you are going to write? You just showed me a massive binder, one of four. How do you find the sources that you're looking for as you're drafting?
Robin Bernstein:
Well, they're in strict chronological order because they are primary sources. So strict chronological order day by day. And I take notes on them. So I usually have massive timelines going. So when I was writing Freeman's Challenge, I had multiple timelines that tracked multiple things that were happening in Auburn New York in 1846 and before and after. So if I needed to know where to find something, what I would do is if I didn't just know it off the top of my head, first, I would go to my timeline on my computer and I could very quickly search for whoever or whatever I was looking for. Then I would know the exact date and then I would know where to find it in the notebook.
Kate Carpenter:
Wow, that's amazing. Do you outline then when you write? How do you sit down to draft?
Robin Bernstein:
I do outline. I absolutely outline. And I also, a really important part of my writing practice is walking. So I outline and then I take a walk and I tell myself the story that I'm telling as I walk. And what I find is very often as I walk, I figure out what parts of the outline actually don't matter and don't need to be there. And so often, what I'll do is I'll outline. And I don't outline all at once of course. I'll outline a portion of a chapter, for example, and then I'll print it out because I think on paper, and I'll tuck it in my pocket with a pen and I'll go for a walk.
And then as I walk, I'll pause and I'll refer to the outline and say, "Oh my goodness, what is this doing here? Why did I ever think this was important? This doesn't matter at all." Oof gone… Or I'll say, "Oh, I left out something really important. I'm going to add that back in." So this is some of what I do.
Kate Carpenter:
Where in your research process do you start writing?
Robin Bernstein:
Well, I've been very influenced by Robert Boyce. Have other people on your show talked about Robert Boyce ever?
Kate Carpenter:
I don't know that they have, no.
Robin Bernstein:
Okay. Well, I'm going to show you my very favorite writing book. And I have to say it's such a pleasure to talk to you about writing because I really love writing and I love writing history, and I love talking about the writing of history. So it's so exciting to be with you here.
So this is my very favorite book about writing, about academic writing. And I recommend this to people all the time. So it's called Advice for New Faculty Members, but it's actually not just advice for new faculty members. It's actually really great advice for anybody who does academic writing, including grad students.
I have on my web page, which is robinbernsteinphd.com, I have a page of advice for academics, which includes grad students. And my very first piece of advice is, to read this book by Robert Boyce. And just for the record, he's not my uncle. I don't get any kind of kickback. I've never met him. He doesn't know who I am. But what Robert Boyce says that is so helpful is to write in brief, regular sessions is one of his key ideas.
But going back to the question that you just asked about, when I start writing, Robert Boyce has this very good piece of advice, which is, "Start early before you feel ready." And I really take that to heart. I start writing early before I feel ready, which means I throw out a lot. I throw out massive amounts of writing. But just getting words on a page, start early before you feel ready can refer to outlining. It can refer to free writing where you're just writing any old thing. It can refer to the kind of writing where you say, "I'm trying to figure out what this chapter is about. What does this chapter about? What really matters? What doesn't matter?" But just getting words on a page is really, really helpful.
Kate Carpenter:
I know that you use paper a lot in your process. Do you write by hand also or do you write on the computer?
Robin Bernstein:
I do both, and I often go back and forth. So often, my very first drafts will be handwritten. And those will be super messy, really free writing and outlining. Then I put it onto a Word document. And that process is not just transcribing, it's also editing because as I put it onto a Word document, I realize what matters and what doesn't. Then very often I print it out and then I edit it by hand, shove it in my back pocket while I take a walk, go back, put it on the computer again so it's very dialectical.
Kate Carpenter:
It sounds like you do a lot of revising as you go. Is there a point at which you sort of take a step back maybe after a finished draft and do big picture revisions? What does that process look like for you?
Robin Bernstein:
Yes. Yes, I do do that. I have a very important practice that I do when I think the project is pretty much done. I mean, this sounds onerous, and it is onerous, but I really believe in it.
So this is for the penultimate draft, and I want to really emphasize that I would never do this for an earlier draft because it would stymie me, it would prevent me from moving forward. But when I have a draft that I think is basically done, I actually go through it sentence by sentence. And for every sentence, I ask myself two questions. One question I ask myself is, "Do I understand this sentence?" And it is surprising how often the answer is no. And if I do not understand my own sentence, nobody else is going to understand it, so that means I have to make it understandable. That's the first question.
And then the second question that I ask myself for every individual sentence is, is this true? And again, it is amazing how often we sort of give ourselves a little out, like, "Okay, this isn't 100% true, but I'll explain more in the next paragraph. That in the very next paragraph, I'll qualify this sentence." And my feeling is, no, no, I don't want to do that. I never want to mislead the reader even for one sentence. I don't even want to correct one sentence later.
Now, of course, no sentence can tell the whole truth because if I could tell the whole truth in one sentence, I would write a sentence instead of a book. So it doesn't have to tell the whole truth, but whatever fragment, whatever facet of the large project is in that one sentence, it has to have total integrity. It has to be true.
The way I think about a book, I picture it as a giant disco ball, and the giant disco ball is covered with tiny little mirrors. Each mirror has to be a perfect mirror of something that is true. And a mirror is not the same as a disco ball. We're not going for one mirror. But each mirror has to have total integrity, and that's what I want every sentence to be in my book.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that analogy. Sounds like so much of your writing process has a lie. This sounds like a stupid thing to say, but there's a lot of thinking about. But you do a lot of reflection on your drafts and on your work. Is there also a point in your writing process where you seek feedback from other people?
Robin Bernstein:
Oh, yes, yes. Feedback is so important. I like to get my work up in front of other people as early as I feel I can. And I like to subject myself to the hardest, most exacting critics I can find. Sometimes this is painful. I have gotten feedback many, many times on many projects that has hurt, but it has made my work better. So yes, I seek out responses from a of different kinds of people.
So one thing that I do is I share work pretty early in conferences. Basically as soon as I feel I have something that has integrity, even if it's not perfect, but I feel like it is a worthwhile whole, I will present it at conferences and I'll be very interested in the feedback that I receive. And then I also have a writing group that was incredibly helpful that read many, many drafts. I have some dear friends who were very generous. And I also presented in some forums within my university. So yeah, I presented this material many times and got a lot of very valuable, positive and negative feedback along the way.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you keep that painful feedback from halting your progress or discouraging you too much?
Robin Bernstein:
Yeah, I mean there are sometimes when it's hard. I guess I have a little bit of a thick skin, and this is something also that I developed as a freelance writer. I mean, when I was paying my rent as a freelance writer, I was getting rejected every week, and you get used to it. It's okay. So for a long time, I used to have a running tally that was written on paper on a wall where I had all of my submissions. Everything I submitted, whether it was a scholarly article or a grant application or at a certain point, a job application earlier in my career, everything I submitted for that was the slightest bit competitive, I put it on this sheet of paper on a wall, and I kept it for years and years.
My concept was that I was trying to have a rejection rate that was somewhere between… I was trying to have an acceptance rate, rather, that was between 25 and 75%. And anytime my acceptance rate got close to 75%, I would figure that that meant that I wasn't applying for things that were competitive enough. And I would start applying for things that were more of a stretch. And anytime that my acceptance rate got down toward 25%, it was the opposite. I would figure I was applying for things that were too far out of reach, and it was time to apply for some things that were a little bit more sure bets.
So for years and years, I tried to have a minimum of a 25% rejection rate and sometimes significantly more than that. So that helps. I mean, I just accepted rejection as part of the process of being a writer and being a scholar. And I think it helped me when I was getting some pretty strong critiques early on in this process. It helped me to know, "Okay, I'm doing something right. I am subjecting this work to the smartest people I know who are very generously telling me what they think, which doesn't mean that I have to agree with them." Sometimes very smart people would offer critiques that I knew were wrong, but I knew that if very smart people were misinterpreting my work, very smart and well-intentioned people were misinterpreting my work, that was on me. That meant that I had to rewrite, that meant that I had to reframe, and that that was a painful gift that they were giving me.
Kate Carpenter:
You also wrote this wonderful piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I will link to it for listeners so they can read it for themselves. But you wrote that thinking about your book manuscript as a gift you were writing for the world, rather than thinking of it as a test that you could pass or fail, made a huge difference for your writing process. I loved this. Can you talk about how that affected your writing process?
Robin Bernstein:
Oh, it was amazing. So that was something that was said to me by a friend and my acupuncturist. My acupuncturist who was also my friend, who I'm very sorry to say is now no longer with us, and I miss her terribly, her name was Lynn. And this was when I was writing my first monograph and I was going up for tenure. My tenure depended on this monograph, everything. My career depended on this monograph. And it was very stressful, very hard. And so I was going to acupuncture a lot to help me keep the energy flowing, to help keep me balanced.
I would talk to my acupuncturist about my writing process and about how hard it was and about how stressed out I was. And one day she said to me that my metaphor was wrong. And she had never read anything I'd written. All she knew was my body and how I talked. She said that I was using the wrong metaphor. She said that I was thinking of this book as like a life or death kind of situation, that everything was depending on it. It was a test that I had to pass. It was a mountain I had to climb. It was a hurdle I had to jump. And she said, "Those are all the wrong metaphors." She said, "Your book is a gift. You are giving a gift to the world."
And again, I want to emphasize that she had never read a word I'd written, so it wasn't about me. It was about what writing actually is. And she encouraged me to think of it instead as a gift I was giving the world. And boy, was that hard. That was really hard to do, but I thought she's right. And I thought, "I'm going to try to think of my writing as a gift I'm giving the world." Not because my writing is so amazing, but simply because it is writing and it is something that is coming from my heart. It is something that is coming from my very hard work. It is something that is coming from my research and my knowledge, and simply that makes it a gift to the world.
And since then, I've given this advice to a lot of people, and it's helpful. It's easier to write with a sense of well-being and generosity and love and excitement when you are thinking of it as a gift rather than some sort of mountain that you're onerously climbing. We're going to do what we do anyway. Why not think of it in metaphors that help us?
Kate Carpenter:
To see how all of Robin's thinking and revision came together on the page, as well as talk about some of the challenges specific to this book, I asked Robin to read an excerpt from Freeman's Challenge. In this passage, which comes from the start of chapter 2, William Freeman has been sentenced to prison for a horse theft that he insists he did not commit. Here's Dr. Robin Bernstein reading from Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit.
Robin Bernstein:
"Immediately after William Freeman entered the Auburn State Prison, an assistant keeper took him to the prison's machine shop where his shackles could be knocked off. There, an extraordinary site commanded the attention of newcomers, a steam locomotive under construction. The gleaming machine, nearly complete, dominated the workplace."
"Soon, the locomotive would roll out of the prison yard and onto the tracks across the street, whistling the industrial might of the Auburn State Prison. This outer show of power contrasted with the inner disintegration. The prison was barely two decades old, but the machine shop's walls were decayed. Its leaky roof, timbers, and floor rotted beyond repair. Trash piled about. Dust and mold hung in the stagnant air, along with smells of smoldering metal, sawdust, oil, and sweat." The machine shop featured modern equipment; punches, grinders, blowers, cutters, and more powered by the dam across the Owasco Outlet, which was the river right outside the prison. But all was in hazardous disrepair with the blades dull and dangerous." The sound was as striking as the site. Machines clanked. Metal ground metal, chewed wood and punched through leather. But no human voices, no communication, no instruction, no banter among workers, only machines and 32 men moving among them, like them."
"Freeman surely knew that Auburn's prisoners were forbidden from speaking. He likely learned about this silence from his Uncle Sidney and other former prisoners in Auburn's Black community. And when Freeman worked at the American Hotel, he must have overheard the chatter of tourists who traveled long distances to goggle at the silent laboring prisoners. But nothing could have prepared him for the reality of almost three dozen men working shoulder to shoulder in endless silence. 'To be duly felt, it must be seen,' one tourist wrote. No one was permitted to look up from his work to regard the new boy in chains."
"The only sound from prisoners mouths was deep coughing, lung disease, the reported cause of half the prison's deaths. Most of the prison's men were white, but one in 11 was Black. They were as old as 68 and as young as 12. They looked worn and pale."
"On witnessing Auburn's factories, one visitor wrote, 'So miserable, jaded, desponding, a row of faces I never beheld. Such sunken, lackluster eyes I never encountered'."
"As per the standard intake process, a guard would've searched Freeman's pockets and then led him to an anvil, instructing him to lay his foot on the metal slab. Another prisoner would've raised the sledgehammer, then slammed it down, shattering the clasp of the shackle around Freeman's ankle. If Freeman cried out in pain or fear, the guard would've responded, 'Stop your noise. If we break legs here, we do not care. We can mend them again.' Three more blows were needed to crack the irons from Freeman's other joints."
"Next, Freeman was taken to the kitchen to be shaved, shorn, and uniformed. The shave, always performed by an African-American prisoner, could be an ordeal. One man described the barber tearing out the beard by the roots. Freeman's shave was likely less painful because he had little facial hair, just a shadow above the lip and chin. The barber removed what was there and then clipped Freeman's hair close to the scalp. Not a word was permitted between them. A guard ordered Freeman to strip, most likely threatening to whip him if he dawdled. Freeman relinquished his hat, pantaloons and vest. A Black prisoner would've dunked him in a barrel of water, a 'severe ceremony,' admitted one prison administrator."
"As the new prisoner dripped nude, an officer threw clothes at him, one cotton shirt, two pairs of wool socks, leather shoes, a cap. Then the prison uniform, canvas trousers and a jacket all in broad horizontal black and white stripes. Austin Reed, an African-American, who entered the Auburn prison four months before Freeman called the outfit 'robes of disgrace.' Reformer Samuel Gridley Howe called the stripes 'poison' that dissolved self-respect. A lucky few received new uniforms, but Freeman likely received one that was patched, too big for his small frame, and [inaudible 00:26:48]. As he put it on, he wept."
Kate Carpenter:
So what went into writing this passage?
Robin Bernstein:
Well, a lot of research. A lot of research. I mean, there's a lot of detail there. It's all true. I mean, I think one thing that I'll point out is that I was very interested at all points in what Freeman could see, what he could hear, and what he could touch, and what he could smell.
I was very aware that I did not have access to Freeman's interiority. William Freeman never wrote about his own life. He never dictated an autobiography or a confession like Nat Turner did, sort of. So I did not have any kind of direct access to what he was thinking or feeling at any moment. So what I tried to do always was understand what he was experiencing externally. So I was always chasing the facts about what this place smelled like, what it sounded like, what he could see.
And the other thing that went into the writing of this was understanding what the standard procedure was. One of the advantages I had in writing this book is that the Auburn State Prison was a prison factory. It was very interested in mass production. That's how it was working. It basically existed to serve productivity. It worked in order to manufacture consumer goods that were then sold for profit. So this is the origins of profit-driven incarceration in the United States. And one of the ways that that was expressed was that the prison officials wanted each prisoner to be treated exactly the same way. They wanted the prisoners to be as interchangeable as parts in a factory system. They wanted everything. They wanted the parts to be interchangeable. They wanted the people to be interchangeable. And what that resulted in was a lot of uniformity in prisoners experiences.
So I was able to gather a lot of different perspectives from very different kinds of incarcerated people in the Auburn State Prison. So people who were Black, people who were white, people who were there at the same time as Freeman's, people who were there in decades later than Freeman. And what I found was so much uniformity, so much consistency. And what that enabled me to do was to, even when I didn't have very specific information about Freeman's exact experience, I was able to know what happened to him because it happened to 100% of everybody, including regardless of race.
And I actually have a lengthy footnote in that passage where I really explain exactly what my resources are and exactly how I can know what happened to Freeman even when Freeman did not say, "I was shaved," for example. But I know he was shaved because everybody was shaved. There's no way he wasn't shaved. So this is how I built that passage. And the detail about him weeping, that he did say. Or actually, the person who said that he wept when he was forced to put on the uniform for the first time, that was a guard who later said that he wept. So that was primary eyewitness testimony.
Kate Carpenter:
In addition to that footnote and other extensive footnotes, you also have a really lovely author's note in this book. So you talk a little bit about how you worked with sources. And I will encourage listeners to read the whole book and the author's note themselves. But I especially want to talk, as you've just mentioned, you mentioned drawing inspiration from Tiya Miles' work and this idea of using parallel figures to try to reconstruct the life of the person you're talking about, especially when we're faced with massive archival gaps. Can you talk a little bit more about how that approach came into play in this book?
Robin Bernstein:
Yeah, yeah. So one thing that's really important was that I never used parallel figures as a source of fact, ever. I was very, very careful. I wanted this book to read like a novel. I wanted it to be incredibly compelling. I wanted people to not be able to put it down, and I wanted every single sentence to be true. Going back to that disco ball, every sentence must be true. If I say I know something, I know it. So when I say he wept, I know he did that. There was an eyewitness who said it.
And then there were other things where I know that something is likely, but I don't know it for sure. So that's when I used language like he would have, to indicate to tell the reader this is what's likely, but I don't actually know it 100% for sure.
But how I used parallel… So that's the first thing that I want to say, is that I never used parallel figures as a source of fact, ever. But what I did do was I used parallel figures to sensitize me and to make me aware of possibilities. So to make me aware of a range of possibilities that could have included Freeman. I used parallel figures to open myself up to questions that I might not have otherwise asked. So that was very helpful.
The one parallel figure who I did use as a source of fact was Austin Reed. So Austin Reed was incarcerated in the Auburn State Prison literally at the same time as William Freeman. So he was experiencing literally the same prison that Freeman was with the same guards. Austin Freeman actually talked about some of the same guards that William Freeman encountered. So Austin Reed was a kid. At the time, he was a teenager when he was imprisoned in the Auburn State Prison, as was William Freeman, also a Black and also Native American teenager in the same place at the same time.
And so Austin Freeman wrote a very slightly novelized fictionalized autobiography, which was then rediscovered in the past 15 years and edited by the wonderful scholar Caleb Smith, and then published. So what I was able to do with Austin Freeman was derive facts about the Auburn State Prison when William Freeman was there. So that was very helpful.
So to give one horrible example, there was a practice of waterboarding. There was a practice of waterboarding in the Auburn State Prison. And I know for a fact that William Freeman was waterboarded. And Austin Reed was also waterboarded, and he described the experience. So I was able to quote Austin Reed about what it was like to be waterboarded. And I did not attribute those quotes to Freeman because they were not Freeman. But what I was able to do is to say, "This is what Freeman experienced."
Kate Carpenter:
One of the things I find really remarkable about this book is how artfully you weave William Freeman's story. You not only tell his story, which is incredibly compelling in and of itself, but then it is with this larger story of the prison and the nationals or prison history and larger arguments you're making. How did you think about structure when you were drafting this book? Was that something you built into the outline? Did it kind of emerge through revision?
Robin Bernstein:
The structure was so difficult. The structure… This book took me a long time to write. From the first time I heard of William Freeman until the day I was holding the book in my hands was nine years. It took me a long time to write this book. And one of the reasons it took me so long was that I had a very hard time figuring out what the structure was.
Part of the reason I had a very difficult time with the structure was that the book touched on so many things that were so important, and it took me a long time to figure out what was not important to this book, which is different from not important.
So I'll just give you a single example. Early on in the process, I thought that the Seneca Falls Convention on the rights of women was going to be very important because it happens 20 miles from Auburn, which is the center of the book. It happens two years after the events of the book. And it also involves some of the same people who are figures in my book. So early on I thought, "Oh, Seneca Falls is going to have a huge connection. It's going to be hugely important. It's going to have its own chapter." And as I wrote and wrote and wrote, I realized that Seneca Falls is incredibly important, but it's actually not important to this story. So that's a kind of structural question. What's in? What's out? What's the spine? What is actually the spine of this book?
The structure was also difficult because the book has a very clear rising structure and falling structure. So the first third of the book is really about the Auburn state prison and William Freeman's experience of it. So it's about the establishment of profit-driven incarceration in this country, and it's about how profit-driven incarceration was not in fact a product of the South after the Civil War, which is a common misperception. It in fact was invented in New York state at the Auburn State Prison in the very early 19th century.
So the first part of the book, which I read from, is really about what is this prison, why does it matter, what was it like for William Freeman to experience it. And it's all along. It's about how Freeman resisted prison for profit. And his resistance is very important throughout the first third of the book.
Then at the end of the first third, William Freeman is released from the prison and he continues to challenge it. His position was that he was a free person, he was a citizen, he was not a slave. The prisoners in the Auburn State Prison were literally called slaves of the state because they were being forced to labor for the economic benefit of private companies and also for the state, but not for their own benefit. They were not receiving any payment. So he was challenging this. And after he got out of prison, he sought back pay what he saw as back pay that had been stolen from him, and he sought legal remedy. He was laughed at and he was dismissed. And after six months of that, he resorted to violence. So that's the center of the book, is the murder that he commits. And I'm not revealing anything because the murder is in the title of the book. So you know all along that a murder is coming, you just don't know who is going to be killed and why. And so that happens in the center third of the book.
And then the rest of the book is about the effects, the effects of William Freeman's challenge to America's original prison for profit. So I knew from the beginning that it was going to have that kind of a structure, but then the question is beyond that, what does that look like? And that was really, really hard to figure out.
Kate Carpenter:
I'm also interested that focusing on a single story like William Freeman's story to tell a larger picture, it has a risk, right, as a writer, because on the one hand, it's incredibly compelling and it really gives readers something to grab onto. There's massive emotional punch. But there's also the challenge that you don't want readers to just dismiss it based on the details of a particular case of like, "Oh, well, because he did this, it doesn't really matter."
So how did you sort of approach that risk of walking that line of telling a larger story and an individual story?
Robin Bernstein:
Yeah, yeah, that's hard. I think in some ways it was made easier because he was in the middle of historical events that were so important. And I was always telling the story not just of one individual who fought back against a huge system, although that's a big part of what this story is, but I'm really relocating the origins of profit-driven incarceration. So there's a common misperception that it was a result of the 13th Amendment, for example, and that profit-driven incarceration, convict leasing was a way for the South to re-enslave African Americans after the Civil War. And of course it was that. Of course it was that. But it also is really important that when the South was using convict leasing, they were not in fact inventing anything. They were adapting a system that was in fact invented in the North, invented in New York state. Invented in the wake of slavery, yes, but it was invented in the wake of northern slavery, not southern slavery.
So the really important story that I'm telling is I'm relocating the origins of profit-driven incarceration from the south to the north, from the post civil war era to the post northern slavery era, which is the early 19th century. And the reason this is so important is that when we focus on the South exclusively, when we think about profit driven incarceration, what we're doing is we're letting the North off the hook. And what I wanted to do through William Freeman's story was put the North back on the hook.
So I was always balancing between Freeman mattering. Freeman mattered because he was a person. William Freeman mattered because he had something very important to say, which is that profit-driven incarceration is wrong, profit-driven incarceration is organized wage theft disguised as justice. I mean, those are my words, but that was the point that he was making.
So William Freeman was an individual with something very important to say. And at the same time, by looking at what he was challenging, we can actually take in the origins, the real origins of prison for profit and see history in a new way. So I was trying to always balance those two things.
And then we haven't even talked about the second half of the book, the results of his challenge. And an argument that I make in the second half of the book is that through Freeman's trial, because he did go on trial, through his trial for the murder that he did commit, it was a very important moment in the coalescing of the ideology that the racist libel that somehow Black and brown people are more prone to committing crime. So that racist libel, which again, we usually, well, most historians locate that racist libel as originating in the final quarter of the 19th century. Again, post reconstruction, post civil war. What we actually see in William Freeman's life is that ideology, that racist ideology actually coalescing around and through him and then being nationally repeated, nationally printed. So I'm moving a couple of… I'm re-periodizing a couple of really important historical events, and I was trying always to balance those very big historical claims with the reality of one human being's life.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to step back just a little bit at the end or our conversation here and ask a bit about your motivations and inspirations as a writer. I noticed as I was looking at your work and the direction of your career that in recent years you've really focused a lot on writing for a general audience, not just an academic audience. This book makes strong academic arguments, but it's incredibly compelling. Everyone should buy it and read it. Can you talk a little bit more about what has motivated that shift and how it shapes your writing?
Robin Bernstein:
I don't know exactly. That's a good question. What has motivated the shift? I guess I always just pay attention to what seems important to say. And I want to say every person has an infinite number of things to say. I mean, I could tell you about my big toe and you would not be interested and nobody would be interested, but I have lots to say about my big toe. But who cares? Nobody cares.
So, of the infinite number of things that anybody can say, the question is, what do you have to say that has value to other humans and what is better left to your diary?
I guess in recent years, I've just been thinking about what I have to say that's of value to other humans, and a lot of it has been a value to humans who are not necessarily academics. I think a big part of it comes with teaching for a long time. So at this point, I've been teaching for about 25 years. And when you teach, I think part of the process that you go through when you teach for a long time is you figure out what you say is actually helpful and what you say is not actually helpful and you become more attuned ideally. One becomes more attuned to what actually helpful.
And so as I imagined my reader for Freeman's Challenge, I really imagined a reader who is similar to my undergraduate students. And what characterizes my undergraduate students is that they are incredibly smart, they are skeptical, they are resistant readers. They're not going to believe anything just because you tell them to. So while they are incredibly smart and skeptical and resistant, they also don't necessarily know a lot about what you're talking about. And you have to write in such a way that you can be fully comprehended by your students. And this is what teaching is. You take these ideas. You take this knowledge that they don't have by definition because they're taking your course, and you create an experience where they can learn and their amazing intelligence can be fully honored and fully activated.
So I think a lot of my desire to write for a general audience has actually been inspired by my interactions with students and the fact that I like teaching and I like my students, and I like writing for an imagined reader who is very similar to my student.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there other writers who you read as inspiration for the writing craft or maybe even other forms of media?
Robin Bernstein:
For my first book, my first academic book, which was Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, I had one very specific inspiration book, and that book was Manliness and Civilization by Gail Biederman. And again, she's not related to me, I've actually never met her, but I read this book when I was in grad school, and I just loved the way she used evidence. I loved the way she crafted arguments. I loved the way she wrote. I loved the way I felt when I read her. I loved the fact that she… I felt like she was teaching me.
One of the very best compliments I've ever received was when I gave a talk from that first book from Racial Innocence, somebody came up to me afterward and said, "You made me feel smart." And I just love that because that's how Gail Biederman made me feel as a reader. She made me feel smart. I don't like a book that makes you feel stupid. I don't like a book that makes you feel like, "This writer is just way too fancy for me as to understand." I have a PhD. If I am reading a book that is in my field, I should be able to comprehend it. And I want to write in such a way that anybody with a high school degree can read me and understand me and feel smart. So Gail Biederman was one of my most important early inspirations.
Right now, I have a lot of inspirations. Tiya Miles is somebody who inspires me a lot. So those are some of the people that I hold dear and respect tremendously.
Kate Carpenter:
So I know that you are in the midst of talking about and promoting Freeman's Challenge, which I'm sure is taking a lot of your attention, but I also know that you have a wide variety of interests. Is there anything new that you're working on or thinking about, hopefully not about your big toe, but maybe… But that you'd be willing to talk about?
Robin Bernstein:
I have a lot of projects that I have put on the back burner for a long time. I actually have about seven different projects that I want to move forward with, and I honestly haven't decided yet which one I'm going to move forward on. And I've given myself a great gift of letting myself not decide yet.
There are a couple of things that I do know. I'm going to be on leave next year, and I have a couple of things that I know I want to write while I'm on leave. I have a project that I want to move forward on where there is a particular Black performer who is not well-known at all, who I stumbled across when I was writing Freeman's Challenge. And I have a lot to say about this Black performer. So I have to figure out of the many, many, many things I have to say, I have to figure out what it is I want to say and to whom, but I know I'm going to be writing about this Black performer.
And then another project that I've had on the back burner for a long time that I want to move forward on, I want to write an article about how to write an introduction to a scholarly monograph. My introduction to Racial Innocence got a lot of attention because it did a lot of things right, and that did not come easily to me. My introduction to Racial Innocence was the single hardest thing I have ever written in my entire life. And I went through about, I would say, literally 20 full drafts where I wrote the entire introduction, start to finish, and then threw the whole thing away, retained nothing, started over. I think I did that about 20 times. So in that process, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about what not to do, and I learned about what to do. And so at some point, I want to write an article about how to write an introduction to a scholarly monograph.
Kate Carpenter:
Wow. I look forward to reading that. I hope you'll write it soon. Well, Dr. Robin Bernstein, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking writing with me.
Robin Bernstein:
Thank you so much for having me. This was an absolute pleasure. Writing is one of my favorite subjects in the whole world. Writing history is one of my favorite subjects in the whole world research. So thank you so much. This was an absolute pleasure.
Kate Carpenter:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. You can find a link to all the books mentioned in this episode at draftingthepast.com. This show is created and produced by me, Kate Carpenter. I am a one-woman team. And if you get as much out these conversations as I do, please consider making a donation at patreon.com/draftingthepast. If just 200 people donated $5 a month, it would pay for the expenses of running the show and the time I put into each episode. Your support makes all the difference in keeping this conversation going.
Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
