Cell phones and other devices should be turned off. That would be very much appreciated. Tonight is the sole event so tonight there is one event. If i could just ask everyone to pull fold up their chairs at the end of the event that would be greatly appreciated. Last thing, the q a session, if i can ask you to step to the side, to my left we have a microphone and we do record this and cspan is here as well. If we could get this all on recording, that would be wonderful. Thank you. Without further do it like to introduce tonights author. Be free or die, the imaging story of escape from slavery to union hero. Its her second major work. Nominated for the 2014 edgar award for best fact crime and number one wall street bestseller. They chronicles the heroic journey of robert small who in 186 1862 seized a confederate steamer and sailed to Union Blockade freeing himself and his family. As all of you will soon see and learn, he i his mission did not and there. He would later become the first black captain of an army ship and enjoy a lustrous career as a state and national legislator. Usa declared that reading this is like recovering a national heirloom that was lost, stolen or buried for decades. They commend her ability to commemorate history with her narrative. She currently resides in raleigh North Carolina. She is with the greatgreatgrandfather of mr. Smalls. He is an accomplished businessman and serves as ceo of the African Museum in South Carolina. Please join me in welcoming kate and michael. We decided before i am going too. [inaudible] i just want to do my part to welcome you all here. Its great. We had a chance to this once before and this looks like a great crowd. I hear its a friendly one. How did Robert Smalls come across your radar. Youve written before, why robert small. Thank you so much for being here. It means the world to have the support of his support of his family in writing this book. That was very important to me and it has been wonderful. Thank you. Im sorry to my friends from National Geographic who i have my backed turned to a little bit. Nothing personal, i promise. But i was looking for my second, an idea for my second book after the secret rescue came out and its often a difficult task because youre trying to find a subject that youre bringing something new to the table weapon that can be hard depending on how many books are out there. Youngest brother sent me an article about Robert Smalls swallows in this process and i was fascinated by him and particularly fascinated by the idea that i had never heard of him because through my work at National Geographic and other places, i had read a lot of stories about the civil war and i was amazed to find that he was not a betterknown figure. In looking at that article, i just decided i wanted to know more, i wanted to know what could help him take such a great risk in seizing the ship and taking his family with him and risking everything after having a life of being told he was not equal. I was hooked from there. I felt like there was room in the marketplace for a book about him since it had been a while and the non Academic Book for mass audience so thats when i get started with this. Of course, the most obvious question is what impacted having a greatgreatgrandfather who is an American Hero have on you growing up. Its almost hard to know where to start on that question. From a metaphysical level, it has been profound in the sense that, as a young person, you grow up and i think were all insecure to a certain degrees about different things. I had the benefit of growing up in the 70s in boston, which while boston massachusetts is a progressive liberal place, i can assure you, we but deployed to prep school in new england back in those days. Thank you for coming. So, a couple levels, as a child, at first it just was. I grew up with Robert Smalls grandchildren. My grandmother was his granddaughter. She was born in 1897 and lived with robert up until her teen years and further, roberts daughter lived with my mother and my grandparents for the past 22 years of her life. They had the benefit of living a long life. She died in 1959. My mother grew up with hearing firsthand stories about robert. She was maybe three or four years old and she didnt remember much about that night, but she remembered being scared and remembered the experience being very scary and obviously was able to be much more detailed as she was growing up and ended up as his secretary in washington. To make a long story short, it really sustained me. It filled and supported my sense of self. I would not be president of the museum in charleston had i not had this connection to robert small. So, its the gift that keeps on giving. I think for me, my challenge. How do i continue that gift to my children. I have four children. One of them whose name is robert. I feel an obligation and im expressing that obligations some degree in my work im doing at the museum, but most important in passing that along to my children and hopefully someday my grandchildren. Its been wonderful. s when you are thinking about robert small and thinking about hey, thats a cool story, to some degree there had to be something of a business decision about relevance and how. Walk us through that process and why you thought the story , and under told story, why that could be relevant today. Certainly people in buford know Robert Smalls name. Thats the town in South Carolina where he is born and raised until he was 12. There is definitely a marketing decision when youre picking a topic, you want to make sure you are bringing something new to the table, like i mentioned, but i think in order to really appeal to modernday readers, you want to do something thats relevant to their lives today. You cant pick up a newspaper or turn on tv regarding race in our country. It permeates every part of our society. His story is extraordinary on its own, but if you combine it with his story. It appealed to me. It was telling a small story during the civil war, the focus of the book, and also telling the story and so many issues that there facing. I learned so much in the Research Process of this book because i had no idea how much decision it was. When he sailed to freedom he was considered contraband, technically speaking. Mostly they did not see themselves that way. They consider themselves free but technically the government of the United States had not decided what they were going to do. In order for our country to heal from some of the racial issues were dealing with we have to fully understand the whole story. He was in the center of everything. He was born in beaufort which was near port royal and was taken over by the union in 1861 and when the union took it over, the whites in the area fled leaving women and children who had no food and have not been able to care for themselves. It was the first time that reconstruction happen there. When he was 12 he went to charleston South Carolina and that was the place where they signed the ordinance into secession. It was the capital of the confederacy. He was really in the middle of it all and that was an important aspect of the story. There is a picture of you that ive seen several times, i think it was in the 70s at tabernacle church. Can you explain what the relevance to robert is at the tabernacle church. Ive been blessed to have an opportunity to talk about Robert Smalls many, many times over the course of my life, hundreds of times, but the first time i spoke publicly about him was april 1976. I was 13 or 14 years old and had just come back from a trip to d. C. It was loosely his day in South Carolina that day. I got up opportunity to unveil the best of him there. Its interesting, i remember being quite terrified up to the moment thinking about speaking in front of people and something literally washed over me as im sitting on the stage and sort of took that anxiety away and ive never felt anxious about speaking in public. I wouldnt say do it well, but whether that was robert moving his hand over me or whatever, that was a great opportunity and our family has a traveling exhibit that travels around the country and has artifacts and papers and typically whenever that opens someplace i go into a little talk. Its wonderful having an opportunity to talk about somebody youre proud of and if that person happens to be connected to you, all the bette better. Tell me about the Research Process. You found out about it, you decided this is someone you would be interested in exploring further. What is the Research Process like. Im talking to an audience full of researchers. I was trained by the very best at National Geographic many years ago. The way i start in the first few weeks and months of reading a story. I picked the low hanging fruit, if you will to see what i learne can learn from there. Typically you find other angles of research. Of course i knew he filed for the national archive. Once he sailed the ship to freedom, the union ended up hiring him as a civilian vote pilot. He couldve been enlisted but Samuel Dupont who was the admiral who took the ship from him needed him as a pilot in the only level that he could be enlisted as would be boy which is the very lowest, not a wellrespected position and he certainly never would have been allowed to be a vote pilot. He was very impressed with his navigational skills and Everything Else he had done. He served in numerous battles and in every way he was an enlisted man but technically he was not. It was very amazing to see the handwriting in these notes that are still in the archives when he turned over the vote they had the order book that was on the vote and confederate passes. Theres nothing like seeing that in person. It makes the story so real. One of the most impressive documents i came across was a bill of sale for smalls future wife haner when she was still, she was young, they hadnt met yet. It was in the 1840s. She was sold along with her children for 800. Seeing that on a piece of paper just brought this history to life. It hit home and away that i hadnt realized it would. I never thought i would find family members that i could count on. I certainly did not think there would be people actively preserving and willing to hold. [inaudible] michael is a speaker for the family, now the president of the museum and takes this subject very seriously and is passionate about it. That made it a lot easier. When you see the impact, i can see through your families impac impact. Your mom has a phd, you have your mba, smalls was illiterate until he was in his 20s. Education became very important to him. He passed along to his children. I think that was really and build in the family. Heights high to turn over every leaf i can while doing research. You never know what that screen to be. There is a small mention he was working in a confederate hospital and he had just lost two children from his illness. It wasnt the big aha moment but it was important to notice what kind of reaction he had. So much material is being digitized and that helps a lot. Part of the reason why the story is not better known, there is an effort to mute the story. In 2012 we had assessed quit centennial celebration commemorating taking the vote to freedom and someone came up with me after words, very emotional, very upset and said im angry with you because robert small defied history and Robert Smalls and bears the confederacy. [laughter] im not quite sure what response he expected of me, and i wanted to be sure not to disrespect him personally, but i just wonder, if you were doing a book about abe lincoln, in addition to regular research, with Robert Smalls the probably wasnt a whole lot of that and i just wonder how that played in your research. Its one of the challenges i think people are doing nonfiction. We can only write what we can validate you can throw in only so many possibilities, which i certainly did. Its definitely an issue. The fact that he was illiterate until he was in his 20s, there wasnt a lot of writing to go back on, his grandmother did a lot of writing for him later in life. Something i had a think long and hard, do i have enough material to make this book come to life but i hope i did. Sadly consideration thats why its important to find as many sources as you possibly can. And asking that question, it reminded me, i met one of the descendents who was the captain on board the night he sees the ship. He decided the officers would go into town and spend time with family which was against confederate orders which left the window open for smalls to do what he did. Its still miraculous that happened. Weve met his descendent and he told me when i interviewed that he was really the first generation to not be embarrassed by the story and hes very open and came to our reading in charleston and embraced it but i think it speaks volumes to the legacy of the south and of the division in the country in some ways. My question back to you would be about the descendents and what it was like for you to meet and who did you meet and what was it like to meet them. Its been really surreal to meet these descendents of other people. I had a chance, i met this gentleman, and met a descendent of the family that owned the planter, i met a great, great grandson up in philadelphia at the museum event, and i sort of think of it abstractly. To some degree. 150 years ago, all those peoples lives were intersecting and then they broke apart and 150 years later those lives kind of came back together. Its interesting. Its odd how that happens, but i would love to get as many of those descendents together around the table and just talk about what to do here. What did you grow up hearing. The dupont descendent really didnt know much about it at al all. I think with dupont you probably have lots about things to think about. Its been interesting and fascinating and we picked up Little Things here and there. Robert smalls is sort of been under told story. Where there things as you did your research that sort of surprised you or what surprised you most about the story. What surprised me the most was how i thought i knew a lot about what had happened during that time beyond Robert Smalls, beyond africanamerican relationships to their owners, et cetera and i found that a lot of it was not exactly as i thought. I was certainly aware of it but i think how much the lives of the people were intertwined, and i found that robert was in such unique position because his mother lydia was born on the plantation and at the age of nine years old she was taken to the buford house in town to raise children, to taken from her mother, but she spoke the language spoken by a lot of the west african slaves who had their own languages and were put together on these plantations and how to come up with a way to community with each other. He had the benefit of knowing the culture as well as being privy to a lot of information because he was working as a house slave which i didnt realize the extent of the difference between not. Certainly no one would ever wish anyone to be an enslaved person but compared to life on the plantation, it was a far better wife. There was a killer food and close and you were aware of lot that was going on. I think that was one of the most shocking things that i was also really shocked to find out in the aftermath of the civil war, the extent to which the south tried to reinstate slavery. I kind of knew it but i didnt know to the extent and it was quite shocking. I think thats kind of the history i was talking about that we all need to understand more to fully grasp the history. I would ask you, was there anything in reading that book that surprised you. I think i read the first book about robert smal smalls, there is a Children Book back in the 60s and i love books. This kind of environment is home for me. I love being around books. I think for me it was an incremental experience. Every time you hear a new detail or you read about something you didnt know, it almost feels like you are opening a door to some information, maybe that information was there but for some reason you just havent accessed it or something. For me it was broadly, there were lots of details. I think the research was fabulous, but i think holistically it was this uncovering of new information and it also, to a certain degree, because i feel linked to him, its like learning a bit more about your own identity and to some degree thats kind of odd. Kate and i are just getting to know each other and shes telling me something about who i am and i had to get used to that over the years. Its fascinating. In thinking about writing the book and the story, you made a strategic decision to stop at a certain place. Talk about that point and why you decided there as opposed to continuing. Is of course, youre referring to the fact, after the war, Robert Smalls went on to have an incredible career. He served as congressman for five years and did some amazing things, faced a lot of trials and relations and the aftermath of the war, but for me, i felt that the civil war was what made him the person he was. His childhood as well as the civil war, and it launched him into this political career. Test test you know, that was important to me and that is what i felt like made him the man he became. I wanted to focus on what made him the person we want to be. I think i will ask one more question and then move to questions from the audience so be thinking. That was a decision we made and i know thz a preferred term for you as well. I think there has been a long journey from those daysdays for africanamerican for africanamericans to kind of seize the narrative of our lives, our existence, our identity, and so broadly i think it fits into that stream of sort of evolution, identity evolution, more personally, its been sort of passed down through the generations that lidda, roberts mother, said to him when he was young, that robert, you may be enslaved but you are not a slave. And i think the distinction that she was trying to offer was this may be the condition youre in but this doesnt define who you are. Theres a difference between an adjective and a noun. And so the combination of this and i dont know. The last decade or so people have been st