Into America

A podcast that gets the story at the source

I never heard of Trymaine Lee until I met him. The producer of his podcast, Max Jacobs, called the Louisiana State Archives one day last year and I happened to answer the phone. He wanted to visit the State Archives to look at some death certificates, which are on microfilm, and he wanted to know if he might record the experience. I thought he meant video, but in any case, I said, “Yeah probably, I’ll just have to check with my supervisor.” It turned out that there was no policy against recording in the library, so they came by and set up their equipment. I remember joking with my coworker about making sure they recorded us on “the good side,” but when they assured us that the recording was strictly audio, we were relieved! Trymaine and Max were totally down to earth and unassuming. They were just working on a podcast, they said, following a historical trail about a black family in Louisiana whose ancestors had been enslaved. Trymaine mentioned that they were down from New York to follow this trail. Max handed me his card only as they prepared to leave, and that was when I noticed that the podcast was actually an MSNBC production headquartered at 30 Rock. Trymaine Lee, this modest, unpretentious person, had actually won a Pulitzer in 2006 for coverage on Hurricane Katrina. You can listen to our whole interaction on the third episode of the series Uncounted Millions: Things Fall Apart. I’ll embed the episode links (for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) at the bottom of this article. You can also read the transcript here. (I’m amused at the transcript’s misspelling of my name, “Rivera,” instead of Rovira. No doubt the transcript was processed by an AI generator. It’s phonetics; it’s not personal.)

This series is great because it reminds us that reparations have been done many times in history. Reparations are a way that a nation can try to make amends to, perhaps other nations that it wronged, as in the case of Germany for World War I and World War II. There were American reparations to Native American tribes after the Second World War. The Into America podcast tracks a single isolated case where a former slave, Gabriel Coakley, got reparations and used them to build wealth that ended up being passed down to his descendants, up to the present day—not just money, but everything that money can money can buy, like education and power, or at least a seat at the table. Coakley was able to buy the freedom of his relatives and, thus, open up the door for all of them a legacy of dignity that they could pass down to subsequent generations. Tragically, there was one branch of his descendants, the Flateau family, in Louisiana, whose fate took a turn for the worse. It is that sadder story that is covered in the episode featuring yours truly as the clerk who powers up the digital microfilm reader. What they discovered on the death certificates, and through a newspaper article that my coworker found, was the very thing that explained why the Flateau wealth, so short-lived and precarious, never got passed down in the Flateau line. It reminds one that, even in a family that did receive reparations for slavery, their fates, like those of so many who inherited the awful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow injustice, hung by a thread. One wrong move was all it took to unravel everything.

The Into America is available wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple, Spotify, or Amazon/Audible.