JAKE TAPPER: I guess we're all really lucky that you decided when you were having your quarter-life crisis not to become a criminal mastermind.

STACEY ABRAMS: You're very welcome.

[Theme music plays]

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Hey all, welcome back to Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio arm of the Chicago Humanities live Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m Alisa Rosenthal, and I hope you had one of those great summers, filled with music festivals in the park, hot dogs without ketchup, and that one day when it was nice enough to jump in Lake Michigan. Ah.

Today, we’re looking to our Chicago Humanities speakers to give us insight into capturing what it is to be human in two different art forms. You’ll hear from Stacey Abrams - history maker, voting rights activist, and #1 New York Times bestselling author on how she writes characters drawing from political history, followed by the Oscar winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter - best known for costume designing Black Panther, a multitude of Spike Lee films, and collaborating with Steven Spielberg and Ava Duvernay.

For more information on these incredible women, head to chicagohumanities.org, where you can also grab tickets to our upcoming fall 2023 events - including Zadie Smith, author and philosopher Naomi Klein, and African-American literature professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, and check out a bunch of other upcoming events and other fun stuff to read and listen to.

Up first, Stacey Abrams - who spent eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Minority Leader, and became the 2018 Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia - nourishing her creative side and speaking of her new political thriller Rogue Justice. She’s interviewed by CNN chief anchor Jake Tapper, also a fiction writer who recently released his book All the Demons Are Here, a thriller set in 1970s post-Vietnam.

So grab a warm cup of tea, get in your big cushy reading chair, and cozy up to a front row seat in Stacey Abrams’ brilliant mind.

[Theme music plays]

[Applause]

JAKE TAPPER: Before I begin, is it okay, Leader Abrams, if I call you Stacey just for this evening?

STACEY ABRAMS: Absolutely.

JAKE TAPPER: Okay. I just wanted to make sure.

STACEY ABRAMS: Can I call you Jakey boy?

JAKE TAPPER: You can call me. You know you can. That's what you were calling me backstage. It's a delight to be here. I have read and enjoyed very much Rogue Justice. It is a really, really great read. It is an exciting, smart thriller. And not everything that's smart is thrilling. And not everything that's thrilling is smart, but it is that. Let me start with just the basics. When do you write?

STACEY ABRAMS: So I first of all, thank you, Jake.

STACEY ABRAMS: No, I. Look, I sleep. I am. I'm very organized about the things I want to do. And I believe in what I call work life Jenga. Work life balance is a lie. And so instead, I take all the things I want to do. I stack them up and then I follow, Eisenhower had this taxonomy for what you do. He said, There are things that are important and urgent, things that are important, but not urgent. Things that are urgent, but not important, and things that are neither important nor urgent. And you give primacy to the things that are important and urgent. And for me, writing is one of those things. You give. Your next thing should be things that are important, but not urgent unless the urgency is your fault. And so if it's important, but not urgent, you do that for things that are urgent but not important. You figure out whose fault it is. You can either help them or blame them. Those are my words, not Eisenhower's. And then in the last corner, it's things that are not important and not urgent. And I try to do some of those things, too. And if you stick enough of those in sleep becomes optional.

JAKE TAPPER: Do you write every day?

STACEY ABRAMS: No. Nope. So I write to deadline or to idea. And so if there's something I just have to say, I will sit down and write it down. If I have a deadline, I will figure out which days I need to write. So, for example, I've got a children's book that's due. I've done the first draft. Well, thank you. Now the editor wants the actual book, so I've got to make the revisions. And so I pick the day I'm going to get it done. And on that day it will be the only thing I work on. But I, I am not disciplined in the sense that, you know, there, you know, Toni Morrison would wake up every morning at 5 a.m. and write, I'm not waking up at 5 a.m. on purpose ever. It's just wrong. But I know, I know how much so I know how many words I can write in a day. I tend to lay out my book enough that I know how long I can write a chapter in a day. So I know I've got to, so I know how much I've got to write. And so I figure out. I lay out the number of days it will take me to write, how many chapters I'm going to write, how long my chapters are going to be on average. And then I plot it out against all the other things I've agreed to do where someone either wants their work or they want their money. They want their money back. And so I sort of map all of that out, and then I get a book.

JAKE TAPPER: And so this is going to we're not going to get to everything if you clap for everything she says. Let's just, can we just assume everything is brilliant? We'll just do it all at the end, because I have a lot of questions. It's what I do. So and also, just so you know, like I said to Stacey earlier, it's like, is it okay with you if I don't ask about, like, the debt ceiling? Is that like, so like, I really would like to talk about your book and there's a lot of, there's a lot of politics in the book. I mean, so don't get me wrong. But but, all right. So George R.R. Martin, the Game of Thrones father, said that there are two kinds of writers. There's architects and gardeners. The gardeners just go out and they grow it and the architects come up with the structure and then fill it in. Which are you?

STACEY ABRAMS: I'm an architect who likes landscaping.

JAKE TAPPER: Okay. So when you, do you write an outline first?

STACEY ABRAMS: I do. So while I write a synopsis. So I tell myself the story I think I'm going to tell. Then I do an outline to figure out if I've actually figured out enough of the middle. And you know this as a writer, the beginning and the end are the easiest parts. It's the middle that kills a book. And so I make sure I've got enough substance and I figure out what I need to know to write that middle. Then I lay it out in the storyboard. So I lay out the chapters as I think they're going to happen. And then it all goes to hell. But I at least have a sense of how I'm going to get to the end when I start. And then I get surprised by what my characters say or do by something I learn along the way or by some, you know, some, you know, prestidigitation of thinking that has me doing something completely different than I imagined. And I've got to figure out why I did that. And, you know, slows the book down.

JAKE TAPPER: And a lot of people this is, oh, in case you didn't know, Rogue Justice is on the New York Times bestseller list. It's just made The New York Times bestseller list.

STACEY ABRAMS: Thank you. Because you guys bought some books. So thank you so much for sure.

JAKE TAPPER: Oh, and it is is her her fifth New York Times bestseller. And so, you know, that's awesome. Congratulations on that. You wrote a lot of fiction under a pseudonym. Romance. Romance? Is that okay? I didn't know if that was considered a pejorative term in any sense or no.

STACEY ABRAMS: Yeah. Harlequin would tell you no.

JAKE TAPPER: Yeah.

STACEY ABRAMS: So technically, I write romantic suspense. So in the, so in the romance writers universe, I am, I kill too many people to be straight romance. So I'm romantic suspense.

JAKE TAPPER: I've heard that about you.

STACEY ABRAMS: Yes.

JAKE TAPPER: It was in the oppo file.

STACEY ABRAMS: Exactly.

JAKE TAPPER: Leaked to me. And. And why did you write them under a pseudonym?

STACEY ABRAMS: So I started. So my very first publication. And this all goes together. So my very first publication was when I was in high school. I slept through a test in physics and had to convince my my teacher to not give me a C because, you know, I had, I would have to explain that to my parents and why I was sleeping through test. And so he let me write a paper. I'm a pretty good writer. And so the paper I wrote, he was a student, a grad student at Georgia State University, and he turned he showed my paper to his team. And so as a high school student, I got published in the Journal. That's the Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic for Georgia State University, a paper I wrote on Mesopotamian astronomy. Now, that is important.

JAKE TAPPER: I mean, who of us has not done that?

STACEY ABRAMS: I say that to say,

JAKE TAPPER: I did that in fifth grade.

STACEY ABRAMS: So fast forward. This is relevant. So I write this paper, I get it published, and I'm like, Oh, yay! And I think for a minute I'm gonna be a physicist. And it turns out I just want to watch Star Trek. (audience hoots) but I, thank you I. So in law school, I write two things at the same time. In 1999, I wrote my very first romantic suspense novel called Rules of Engagement. But I also wrote my very scintillating tax policy treatise called The Devolution's Discord, resolving the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax. Now, they were both being published in the same year, and Google had just become a thing. And so one of my friends called and said, Stacey, put your name into this thing called Google. I'm like, What's a Google? So I put my name in and up pops my article on Mesopotamian astronomy. And it occurs to me that if I'm writing romance and tax policy because at the time that was my future. No one is going to read romance by Alan Greenspan. And so you can write romance under a pseudonym. You cannot write tax policy under a pseudonym. And so STACEY ABRAMS became the tax writer and Selina Montgomery became the romance novelist. And that is how I came up with a pseudonym. But my name is in all of my books, my pictures on the book. I've never denied, I've always talked about it. It's just much easier when people are looking for you, for them not to be distracted by the fact that you also like to, you know, pontificate about the inequities of the income tax structure and how it underfunds communities of color. So, you know.

JAKE TAPPER: Avery Keene is the main character of Rogue Justice and also, of course, While Justice Sleeps. Avery Keene is a law clerk. Brilliant. Demanding. How much do you see, and this is a trite question, but I had to wonder while reading it, how much of do you see yourself as Avery Keene or vice versa?

STACEY ABRAMS: So Avery is an amalgam of lots of different people and things I wish I was. Or pretend I am. I love the fact that she is both, you know, intellectually smart and street smart. I really wanted someone who had, you know, at this moment in her life, had responsibility, but no authority. I spend a lot of my time there, and it's an important place to be. It's important to understand the choices you make when there are things that have to be done. But you don't have the authority to make anyone do anything. But you feel a sense of responsibility to make it so. And there's a moment when you're, you know, 25, 26, 27, where that sense of where you fit into the spectrum becomes even more acute. I didn't have a quarter-life crisis in the traditional sense, but I did have to decide whether I was going to stick with being a tax attorney or if I was going to go into the direction of public policy. My mom calls it my trajectory of downward economic mobility. And so I wanted to, you know, in hindsight, I'm like, let's see what happens if someone else has to make these choices. So she, she is, she is me, but she is so much more than I am. And she's pieces of other people. Like, I was never a clerk, never had any interest in being a clerk. But she pulls from the person that I think I could have been and the people I really admire and like.

JAKE TAPPER: And how did you come up with her name?

STACEY ABRAMS: I, I like names. I mean, when you write novels, though, because I'd written, by the time I wrote Avery, I'd written eight novels, and you just start collecting names and you start thinking about what names resonate. The I just like the idea of Avery Keene. It wasn't, she wasn't named after anyone. Like, my my pseudonym is from Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched, and it's Elizabeth Montgomery. And if you remember, her evil cousin was Serena. I don't like my Rs, but I like my Ls. So I became Selena Montgomery. Yeah. See, So it wasn't that, but it was just a name that when it popped into my head, it just made complete sense that that would be who she was.

JAKE TAPPER: So Rogue Justice, and I said it was a smart thriller, there is a lot in there about real life things. I'm, I'm really trying to walk a line so that I don't spoil anything for you. Okay. For, for you people. But it's not spoiling it to say that the FISA court, which is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which is the court that allows people in the intelligence community to spy on various individuals who may or may not be Americans, who may or may not be in this country. But it's all done through the auspices of no, no, we're, we're spying on this guy in Pakistan. And who knows if he's talking to somebody else. I mean, and it's a very secretive court and the things that are told to them are not always accurate, as we've learned. And the things, the decisions they make are not always right. But it's a secret court. And the FISA court and the vulnerabilities in the FISA court, theoretical, are a big part of this book. And first of all, reading this book and reading all the ways that are very real, you know, when you see a movie or TV show and you're like, well, that would never happen. That could never happen. It's like everything in this book could . And I guess we're all really lucky that you decided when you were having your quarter-life crisis not to become a criminal mastermind.

STACEY ABRAMS: You're very welcome.

JAKE TAPPER: How much were you worried that you were, I mean, what went through your head when you when you were, like pointing out all the incredible, vulnerable positions where, well, if I like, if, you know, if you wanted to blackmail, again, I don't want to spoil too much. But this is very early in the book. You want to blackmail members of the FISA court. You could do that and you could really wreak some havoc. How worried were you at all?

STACEY ABRAMS: So I write, I do a lot of research, not to become a criminal mastermind, but I write things that are entirely possible, just not highly probable. And that's always been how I have enjoyed my romantic suspense novels. Everything I write about could happen. And I think it's really important because if you want someone to believe, you want them to be able, you don't want them to suspend disbelief, you want them to be in disbelief, but then be like, Oh God. You don't want people to be terrified, just a little worried when you're done. And I also want experts who actually know what I'm talking about, to, to respect the stories. And so when I was thinking about it, my, my younger sister, one of my sisters, I'm the second of six kids, so one of my sisters is a federal judge. And she was at a conference and brought home the brochure from the conference. And I'm flipping through it and there was a mention of FISA, and I thought, huh, what if? And then it spun out from there. And then I started thinking, What if you could blackmail federal judges and what if you could do this? And so for me, it is it's how do we send up a flare and say, this is something we should think about? I mean, and while justice sleeps, it's premised on the fact that the Supreme Court and that our federal judges, but especially the Supreme Court, they cannot be removed from office for simply not being able to do their job. You can remove a president under the 25th Amendment. You can not reelect someone in Congress, but a federal judge has a lifetime appointment and they can only be removed for high crimes and misdemeanors or death. And when we say misdemeanors, it's misdemeanors with a capital M and so not jaywalking. You've got to do something really bad and you've got to be impeached. Otherwise you get to keep the job. And we've not fixed this in 246 years. We've never really thought about the fact that maybe someone could go into a coma for 30 years and you can't take them off the court. And so when I thought about the FISA court, it was similar. It was there's this vulnerability to an area of the law that we don't think about very much. Most people don't. I mean, you've done you did some excellent reporting on the FISA court, but most people don't wake up thinking about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But it governs and it can it's designed to protect national security. So it's critical to who we are. And yet most of us have no idea that it exists. And so I want you to pay attention.

JAKE TAPPER: And it's shrouded in secrecy. And they change the judges every few years.

STACEY ABRAMS: And their opinions are not subject to public disclosure. You cannot go online. You can go to the FISA court. You can find out who's been appointed. You cannot see their opinions unless they choose to release those opinions. Congress gets a report and they can get some information. But it is the most secretive court in America, and it has the right to wiretap us, to surveil us with the, I mean, it has to be connected to national security. But as we know, in recent years, that has became a much broader net than it was when the FISA Act was actually, when FISA was first created.

JAKE TAPPER: You talked about Congress. Politicians in this book are not particularly admirable characters regardless of party. Democrats, Republicans. Evil, feckless, only concerned about elections, only concerned about power. It's an interesting choice.

STACEY ABRAMS: I would not call them all evil and feckless.

JAKE TAPPER: And or feckless, but one or the other.

STACEY ABRAMS: They are. I mean, look, politicians by their nature. It's a job and politics is a job. Let's be clear. And for most of us. Our mission is to keep our jobs. And so we then get surprised that politicians will take actions to keep their jobs, that they will strategize to keep their jobs. Again, what I talk about is possible. I go closer to probable with these characters than may be comfortable. But I think it's also important when I when I was writing this, it was. I didn't want to close. There's a tendency to want to make people either too righteous or too noble, and they're not. And I will actually say, I'm reading your book, The Hellfire Club. If you understand this, the politicians are people and they're people who've been given remarkable power and the ability to make decisions with very little oversight. And when you think ab out what they have to choose to do, that and the the decisions they're faced with and that these are just average, these are normal people, I would say average, but some of them are painfully average. Some of them some of them are extraordinarily gifted. And some of them you're like, did you win the lottery? Like what happened? But they all get there and get the same title and the same job. And so I think part of it for me is to humanize, but also to reveal some of these conversations I use in this book are echoes of smaller conversations I was either a part of or tangential to at the state level. I mean, we weren't dealing with, you know, national security, but we were dealing with important life altering decisions. And you're sometimes surprised by how little the people are actually a part of the conversations.

JAKE TAPPER: I shouldn't say that all of the politicians are either feckless or evil, that's that's not, that's not accurate; the Vice President Slosberg is, is not. And most of the cabinet is not. But the main characters who are politicians...

STACEY ABRAMS: Oh, he's he's a jerk.

JAKE TAPPER: Yeah.

STACEY ABRAMS: The people with the most power who want to keep that power and leverage that power are willing to do a lot to maintain that power.

JAKE TAPPER: In addition to Avery, the world that you create in Rogue Justice contains a lot of powerful women. There is the Chief Justice, Teresa Roseboro, to the enemies that she has, one of whom is an assassin and one of whom is the mastermind. That's also interesting, interesting choice. And let me say also, I love the evil mastermind. She's great.

STACEY ABRAMS: I do too.

JAKE TAPPER: And was that important to have the two of the worst bad guys in the book be bad gals?

STACEY ABRAMS: In a lot of thrillers, the protagonist, we've seen more women protagonists. We rarely see women villains. And if you really believe in diversity, we should be everywhere. And I do the same thing with, with race. I want it to feel normal. It doesn't change the story, but if representation matters, it matters everywhere. And so for me, it was, it was important. Yes, you can clap for that. Go ahead. Ignore Dick. It matters to me. And I also like just the juxtaposition of, of Hayden and Avery and you find out Hayden's name early.

JAKE TAPPER: Chapter two or something.

STACEY ABRAMS: But I wanted the juxtaposition to be both relevant and a bit chilling. And just sort of watch their evolutions and figure out what they're going to do with who they are.

JAKE TAPPER: You know, honestly, it didn't even occur to me until like today when I was thinking of questions about the idea that Hayden and the assassin are women. It just it just it felt natural and they were very credible.

STACEY ABRAMS: I'm concerned that you think it's natural for women to be assassins, but, okay, go ahead. But I'm glad I did that for you. So, yes, I love writing. I think words are fascinating and I think storytelling is not just an art. It is an exercise in community, in community. It is how you can connect with people who don't think they have anything in common. It's how you can explore ideas, but it's also just a fun thing to do. And I you know, my mom was a research librarian. My both my parents are ministers now. My mom was a research librarian. My dad used to just tell us really fun bedtime stories. I love storytelling and I love it in all of its facets and all of its forms, whether it's on screen or in poetry or in a book. And so I'm going to keep writing as long as I get to do it.

JAKE TAPPER: It's amazing. And President Obama writes in longhand on yellow legal pads. How do you, where do you write? How do you write?

STACEY ABRAMS: If it's the first idea, I will sometimes write it out in longhand. If I know the story, I will usually just type on a computer. I will often outline by hand, so the children's books I've written, they start on paper. So because I just want to feel the story and think about the kids. But it's also fun just to kind of, because when you're writing for kids, when you're writing for, um, young children, you really want to think about the words you're giving them. You want to think about the length of a line and the cadence of a story. And so doing that in longhand is actually easier. And then I translate it to typing, and then I start editing something like Rogue Justice. It starts on a computer.

JAKE TAPPER: What advice do you get our audience, so it's not just that one word on the page. It actually ends with a published work.

STACEY ABRAMS: Don't think about it as a book. Think about it as a story. Stories tell themselves, you help, you help them along. But the minute you make it a book or a project, it becomes work. And when it becomes work, it becomes hard. And when it becomes hard, it's easy to walk away from it. I tell stories, and sometimes the stories are fiction. Sometimes they're nonfiction. Sometimes they're for kids, sometimes they're for teenagers, sometimes they're for adults, sometimes they're just for me. And other people can eavesdrop if they want to read about it. I've written many of the men I need to meet one day and marry. And so, the point is, tell your story in whatever form it takes, but do not make it so complicated in terms of its outcome that it never becomes reality for you.

JAKE TAPPER: Do you, when you write your fiction, do you adhere to the three act structure? And for those who don't know what I mean. Act one: chase your hero up a tree. Act two: throw rocks at your hero. Act three: get your hero out of the tree.

STACEY ABRAMS: I call it: create a problem, complicate the problem and then solve the problem. And the books that you hate create a problem and solve the problem, but instead of complicating the problem, they just keep restating the problem. So the books that get really frustrating, you're like, just call him, or just turn over the rock or, you know, when you're really annoyed, it's because they didn't complicate the problem or they complicated and solved it too soon. And then you've got another 200 pages to go. And by the time you get to the end, you're just like, I hate you, I hate the characters, and I don't ever want to see you in my house again.

JAKE TAPPER: How much, this is, so I find editing to be something that I need and want more of than I get. And I go out and I hire editors because I want the book to be as good and as tight as possible. And no matter how good the publishing, the editor of the publishing house is, I want more, I want more eyes, I want more feedback. I think some of this comes from television because it's so collaborative. What's your experience and what's your what's your take on that?

STACEY ABRAMS: I have brothers and sisters. I'm the second of six kids and my siblings love me, but they are, they have no problem telling me what's wrong. So, and they all have very different, you know, different approaches to things. So I have siblings. I give my nonfiction to siblings, I give my fiction to siblings, I give my children's books to, my, they are, my parents did a great job of just creating a nice little factory for me. And so I don't have outside editors. It's usually, like when I was writing Rogue Justice, there was a moment where the characters did something and I was like, there's something wrong here. And so I gave it to two of my siblings to read, and they both came back, they're like, oh, it's boring. This is why. And, but they were both able to tell me why they didn't like it. And it was exactly what, it wasn't, I hadn't been able to articulate it to myself, but I was like that, if that's the problem, I now know how to fix it. But when you're so deep in a story, because, because of the time frame within which I write, I write fast and tight. And so I don't have a lot of sort of pontifi, pontificitatio, good Lord, pontification time. So having their eyes is incredibly helpful. But it's also helpful. I mean, I've written a lot of books, so I've learned how to edit myself as I go along and between them, and then my editor, Jason Kaufman, who's my editor at Doubleday, is amazing, incredibly patient and very, very comfortable telling me, this is stupid, take it out. He never says it that way. But, you know, if you read between the lines and the strikethroughs, you're like, that was a bad idea to take it out. So I think wherever you can find the support, you should find it. If it's the writer's group, if it's taking a course, find the help you need to help you get better at what you do. I just happen to have it. They live with me or, you know, my parents made them. And so, you know, I don't have to pay for outside support.

JAKE TAPPER: Do you think that there is any part of them that enjoys telling you: this is boring, Stacey Abrams.

STACEY ABRAMS: Yeah.

JAKE TAPPER: You know what I mean? Yeah.

STACEY ABRAMS: They are my younger brothers, I have one older sister.

JAKE TAPPER: Is that the judge?

STACEY ABRAMS: No. So my older sister is a college professor. Yeah. So she's like, she's,

JAKE TAPPER: So you got a professor, a judge.

STACEY ABRAMS: So Andy's the vice president of a college and an anthropologist. Leslie's a judge. Richard's a producer. Walter is in medias res. And Janine is a computational biologist. I'm telling you, they're incredibly useful. It's like having your own encyclopedia set at home and they can all do stuff.

JAKE TAPPER: So imagine this incredibly brilliant family, these other five. And all anybody wants to talk to them about is their second oldest sister. I'm a judge, for God's sake. No, I'm not going to pass on a message to my sister. I'm a college president. I think they love telling you when stuff's boring.

STACEY ABRAMS: They are very comfortable telling me when stuff sucks.

[Applause]

[Theme music plays]

ALISA ROSENTHAL: That was Stacey Abrams and Jake Tapper, recorded live at Chicago’s Vic Theatre in spring 2023. Check the show notes for links to both of their books, and the YouTube video of their full chat.

Coming up now, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, in conversation with the Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles Jacqueline StewartSmith. Ruth E. Carter made history as the first Black person to win an Academy Award for Costume Design and earned Marvel Studios their first Oscar recognition. She’s received Academy Award nominations for Malcolm X and Amistad, and received an Emmy nomination for her work on the miniseries reboot of Roots. Her other films include Do the Right Thing, What’s Love Got to Do With It, and Selma.

[Theme music plays]

[Applause]

RUTH E. CARTER: Hey everybody.

JACQUELINE STEWART: I mean it’s mind-blowing, the work that you have done. Just incredible.

RUTH E. CARTER: I've always been a storyteller. So if you sit at lunch with me, I'm going to tell you a story about some movie that had some incredible experience, experience. You know, just going to Egypt with Spike Lee and recreating Malcolm X's hajj in the middle of the desert. I mean, we couldn't go into the holy city of Mecca because the whole crew was not Muslim, but so we recreated it in another part of the desert. And here I am, 30 years old, in the middle of Egypt with, you know, on a Spike Lee joint. You know, it doesn't get much better than that. So I wanted to tell people about those experiences that happened on my journey before I forgot them.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Fair enough. So some people might think a costume designer is somebody who's interested in fashion. Are they kind of making a connection between fashion and costume design? And one of the things I've been learning from you, because Ruth is very active with the Academy Museum with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and not only as the only Black woman who's won two Oscars. Let's just pause there.

RUTH E. CARTER: Thank you.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Incredible. But also, Ruth is a governor of the Academy, so she's part of the leadership of the Academy representing the costume designers branch.

RUTH E. CARTER: Very important.

JACQUELINE STEWART: And it's really important for people to recognize what costume design is. And so maybe you could talk about how you came to it because you came to it through theater.

RUTH E. CARTER: I came to it through theater, yes. And through theater I learned how to break down a script and to find a character's arc and to come up with a color palette. And, you know, the the the pace of of a of a piece. You really do experience that in theater. You go from start to finish. And, you know, there's this timing and there's this pace. You know, when you work with a theater director, you're you're dissecting not only the relationships of the actors on stage, but you're also examining, like the impact of the pace of a piece. And so I brought that into my film world, creating character arcs for the film characters. And, you know, I used to want to be an actress at one point. A thespian to the core. Yeah. I took my sophomore yearbook picture with the comedy tragedy mask. Yeah, I was I was one of those.

JACQUELINE STEWART: So this is at Hampton Hampton University? Yes.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had a whole like, you know, I had a whole I was one of those kids that could spend a lot of time in their room, like, create and stuff. And so I never wasn't, you know, people think that, you know, I got into this because I like fashion and I had dolls. And there certainly are a lot of costume designers that are, you know, successful and their origin story was fashion, you know, but mine wasn't. I just liked storytelling. I loved to read prose. Lorraine Hansberry, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin. I could read those works and I could see those characters. Those characters represented my my neighborhood or my past. And I thought they were incredible. And so I went into this wanting to work for companies and also act in some of these classic plays. So I was Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun. I was Alberta in Sty of the Blind Pig. You know, I landed some roles and I got to understand the journey of the actor. So I feel like becoming a costume designer made sense for me because at home as a kid, I was creating stuff I was drawing. I have brothers is a long story. I'm sorry.

JACQUELINE STEWART: It's ok.

RUTH E. CARTER: I have brothers who are artists, visual artists. And so I was drawing and I was creating stuff in my room. And then I went to college and I was acting and understanding the actors journey of, you know, embodying a character. And so now I get to play all the characters. I get a script and I get to do an arc for every single one of them and and create their world.

JACQUELINE STEWART: That’s a beautiful, beautiful way to think about it. So let's talk about how you met Spike and what you learned through the process of working with him on so many projects.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, I was in Los Angeles. I was working in South Central L.A. for a little dance company. I was doing their costumes and they were performing in the dance studio so people all over L.A. would come to see their performance. One, which was very popular, was to the music of Stevie Wonder and people in the music in the film industry, TV industry were coming. They were trying to figure out how to take this performance to television, you know, And I was their costume designer. And if you're in theater, you know that every performance you're there when you're the costume designer, you're also the wardrobe person. You're also, you know, doing the laundry. You're doing everything. And Spike Lee came with my friend Robbie Reed, who I went to Hampton with, and she was casting and I was talking to a friend about, you know, I'm in Los Angeles and I can't seem to get any theater work. But, you know, L.A. is not the place you would be looking for theater work, really. And so Spike Lee started talking to me after the show. We all hung out. We're all peers. We all hung out. And he was like, you know, go to USC or UCLA to the film studies department and sign up to do a student thesis film. He said, You'll be on a set, just like a Hollywood movie set with all the same equipment, and you'll get some experience doing that. And I thought, Why would I do that? I'm a thespian. I'm in the theater, you know? And what I did, I tried it. And on Saturdays I was volunteering on a senior thesis project at USC. And I thought, you know, there's two people sitting on the porch. I can barely hear them. Like this medium is odd compared to the English Cat or, you know, all of the classics I was doing in theater, but I thought it was something I could do. And Spike invited me to a screening of She's Gotta Have It. And I went to the screening. It was shot in black and white, and Nola Darling was walking down the middle of Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, and she had on a a regular top and a pair of shorts. Here I had been making bucket boots and doublets. I thought, I can do this.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Uh huh.

RUTH E. CARTER: And one morning, very early, before the sun came up, my phone rang. I answered, Hello? And the person said, Ruth. I said, Yes. Ruth? Yes. This is the man of your dreams. I said, Denzel. And they said, No, this is Spike. I want you to do my next film, School Daze. And that's how we got started.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Amazing. Amazing. Wow. So you got your first Oscar nomination for Malcolm X.

RUTH E. CARTER: I went by myself. I, we, we had shot the whole film in New York, you know, in the middle of the winter. And then when it was time to go to Egypt, you know, we ran out of money we the bond company came in on Malcolm X. You might have read about how Bill Cosby and Janet Jackson and people put money together for us to finish the film. And that was the part where we went to Egypt and Spike said, Ruth, you're the only one in your department that's going. And I was like, What? And I picked up an Egyptian crew. They were incredible. And I had this experience with them there in the desert.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Wow.

RUTH E. CARTER: That's why I wrote a book.

JACQUELINE STEWART: I mean.

RUTH E. CARTER: Oh, B.A.P.S. So Halle Halle Halle wears this rubber catsuit, right? So I read Robert Townsend's script, and I saw the scene where there's a bidet and I thought, Wow, wait a minute, water is squirting everywhere in the bathroom. So she should have on like, some rubber suit that she can't really get her balance in. So that was the start of that costume, just to just to make it even funnier.

JACQUELINE STEWART: I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay. So one of the things we can say looking across your work is that you have covered some of the major periods of Black history. Slavery, period. Also the civil rights era. And so it would be great to hear you talk about just your your background as a researcher because there is so much extensive research that you need to do in order to make these characters feel authentic to the time period.

RUTH E. CARTER: Well, I fell in love with the African-American history. I really wanted to see representation and I wanted to see. I worked at Colonial Williamsburg. I was an actress on the street. And I recreated the life of two real people that lived in in Colonial Williamsburg.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Wait, so you're saying you were one of the actors when you would go to Colonial Williamsburg and tourists come.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah you see the the Living History?

JACQUELINE STEWART: So you were portraying one of these historical figures?

RUTH E. CARTER: Yes, I was a free one woman was free. Her name was Betty Wallace and she was a seamstress. And she made the dresses for the Jefferson, the the, you know, the big people. And then the other character was Ginny, and she was a tavern maid. And she was behind a tavern in a garden. And you're you're assigned historians at Williamsburg. And the historian help you do the research on the character, and then you portray this character. And so as I was reading about my characters, I was like, wait, you know what? She's never going to be able to buy the freedom of her children selling these dresses. The. I was like, Wait, I have to tell the real story here. And as Ginny, the tavern maid, I was like, Oh, no, she didn't have shoes. She can't wear shoes. And I was wrapping my hair in a rag every day. And I was like, She's only going to be in the garden because she's probably cooking nonstop. You know? And so when the cook when the you know, this is a long story again, but when the guests came around, they would find me in the garden picking beans. And then I would do my monologue and I would tell them about this girl who worked for a tavern. Can you imagine? And those stories and more just really connected me to the humanity and the struggle and the triumphs of of my community, of the Black community. And also, I really wanted to tell the truth. I really wanted to be one of those people who could dig deep into the research and pull out the things that I think would be intriguing for the viewers to know about. And so that continued with Roots. And I have so many stories with Roots, with Selma. You know, Martin Luther King, David Oyelowo played Martin Luther King in Selma. And I made his collars a little bit tighter because King had this little bit of flesh that hung over the top of his collars. And I wanted David to sort of have that have that as well. So I tightened up the neck of his shirts. Yeah. And that, you know, part of like Dolemite, even just realizing that you're telling sometimes a story that you've lived, you know. I was a teenager in the seventies and I remember all of the nuances of the seventies, the Nik-Nik shirts and and the matador pants and the not only like the platform shoes and the bell and the bellbottoms. I remembered everything about it and I wanted it to totally come to life. So when you watch Dolemite and you see those scenes in the crowd, you know, that is all a part of the research.

JACQUELINE STEWART: You know, one thing I hope you can talk about is your work with actors, because so many of them talk about how the very act of putting on the costumes is so important for their process. And so how did you develop that skill of working with the actors to really bring out the character?

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, well, you know, I also took a course in psychology in college that came in very handy working with actors, and sometimes it's a reverse psychology, if you know what I mean.

JACQUELINE STEWART: I it.

RUTH E. CARTER: And but because I was an actor, I have a lot of empathy for them because I know that, you know, through fear, sometimes they can also dive into their character. And sometimes that manifests itself as, you know, I this doesn't feel right. I don't feel like this is it. You know, I feel their pain. And so I slowly get them integrated into the costume. And we have a consultation first, Mahershala Ali has said to me, you know, the my fitting is my first rehearsal rehearsal. Hmm. Yeah. Jeffrey Wright, he played he was in Shaft, the second one with Sam Jackson, and he was like this, you know, drug kingpin. And he really wanted to feel that. He wanted the costume to feel right on his body. So it wasn't a matter of like the article of clothing. It had to also make him feel like the character. And and, you know, with Angela Bassett, you know, I consider the fitting room like a transformation room. It's it's loaded with, like, the things that I like and the things that I think may not work, but put it in here anyway. And and we have all kinds of things around. So when they come in, they we are we're doing this initial break in period of just trying things on to see when we nail it. And Angela, you know, you can see her mind ticking, you know, and she puts on the queen's costume. And, you know, usually it's in a muslin, It's not really finished. And you see her kind of looking at herself. You know, she's not saying much or wondering if you've done the right thing. And, you know, I'm circling around her like some, you know, warrior or something. But it's a transformation and it's a and it's the time that I really feel like people don't know, like the work that goes into like the multiple fittings and the multiple layers that it takes to create these characters. Even Chadwick Boseman, we put on one of his Black Panther costumes. I don't know if you remember a black coat that had embroidery down the front. And when we first made it and I said, There's something wrong with this Chad, I don't know what he said. It feels like the Commodores, that's what's wrong with it. I said, That's it. It's the Commodores, you know? And you can't take yourself so seriously that you know, you're crushed by that. You go, you know, he's helping you. You know, it's a collaborative process.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Yes. Well, speaking of Chadwick. So let's talk about how you began to approach the Black Panther project, because these are preexisting characters. There's already some iconography, obviously, from the comics, from some other appearances and films. How did you try to bring in your collaboration with Ryan Coogler? A different approach.

RUTH E. CARTER: The first suit suit was seen in he was introduced in Captain America Civil War. You might remember that scene. He walks in with Florence Kasumba and we see the suit and it was put in Captain America Civil War at the last minute. So they built that suit really quickly. And in Black Panther One, we were going to see both suits in the beginning in the in the Royal Talon Fighter. We see him in the Civil War suit. So I wanted to see that suit in my office. I wanted to really see what went into a superhero suit because, you know, I had never done a superhero film before. And I brought it into my office and they put it on a mannequin. And I was like ehh, you know, Velcro, really? And and I said, bring Chadwick in. Let's have him put the suit on. You know, that's one way getting Chadwick in your office, right?

JACQUELINE STEWART: Not bad.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah. So Chad came in, he put on the suit. He started doing all of these stretches, you know, to kind of get himself into it. And he took the helmets and he put it on, and I was like, Oh, my God, the panther lives.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Mm.

RUTH E. CARTER: It was majestic. It was unbelievable. And then he said, Yeah, but, you know, in this helmet, you know, we made it fast. I can't breathe out of my nose. I was like, What? I can't lift my arm above this. I was like, No. And I said, Well, that's the first thing we're going to do, is we're going to recreate a suit that, you know, for your film. And we made the helmet so that the front of the the the there's a little trapdoor in the front of the helmet that comes off that he wore. He wore it with the little trapdoor off for most of the film so he could breathe. And then in post, they put it back on. So you never see it without it. And then for the suit, we learn the hard way. Every time he came to set he would blow his pants. And I was like, This is not a good look for the Black Panther. And we got a girl from the Boston Ballet to come down and to re cut the suit with the proper gusset for all of the moves that he had to make.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Amazing, amazing. So, let's look at some of your research and design process.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, the Mining Tribes. You know you've all heard of vibranium, right? Yeah, it doesn't exist. But the Mining Tribe, they mined all the vibranium. And one of the things that we presented to Marvel were these tribal illustrations. And I think there's a few here. Yeah, these are the miners. And we wanted to show, you know, a different way of them moving forward because we we wanted to honor the tribes. You see the tribal elders in the front, in the mining tribes. It's a woman. And then we also wanted to show how they were a forward thinking, a nation of forward, forward, forward in technology. That's the whole part of Afro future. So there's modern. There's maybe another one here. Nope. Oh, okay. So yeah, And then we did we incorporated technology 3D printing. So this is the isicholo, which is the South African married woman's hat that was worn by Queen Ramondo.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Wow. So taking the philosophy of the characters. Yeah. And then building that into the actual process of making the costume is incredible. And your costumes also have to be able to work with in tandem with CGI. I mean, you might imagine that for some of these details, they could have just done it on the computer. Like, why was it important for Ryan for you to go to this level of detail?

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, I think James Cameron gave costumes a bad name. Sorry. Because you know those mocaps. Sure. Everybody knows what those are. The mocap suits. Um, there was a rumor in the beginning of Wakanda Forever that came to me and someone said, Oh, don't worry about doing any of the costumes for the underwater people, because they're just all they need is mocap suits, and they'll create the costumes in post. And I thought I was crushed because here we have this whole society that's based on Mayan culture. And I was, you know, into the research of it all. And so I went to VFX visual effects, the head of visual effects, Jeff Bauman, who was also nominated on this, and I said, Are you seriously going to make all of these looks in post? He was like, No way. He said, Ruth, you do you. And then we will we will follow that. So we made all of these costumes practical. All of these costumes were molded and made. Yeah, it's a lot.

JACQUELINE STEWART: It is a lot. And just hearing you talk about this, the historical research that you do. And, of course, you know, in your book, you talk about the Afro future. This was an opportunity for you to also think about indigenous futurism.

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah. Mesoamerica. And we had to have a, um, a historian with us at all times. It was not unlike my experience at Colonial Williamsburg, you know, working with a historian and going back to them and asking them questions. And they were, you know, very open to it. Now, a name was headpiece was crafted and was not shown to the historian until it was, until it was at this stage. And he said it was the wrong era, that we were showing an image of something that was predating when we should be in post classic. It was very classic. And I was like, What? So we remade it. Wow. In a week. Just the front, the nose. So it's the feathered serpent. And when you see the feathered serpent and what kind of forever it has, the it's it lands, right and pulls classic.

JACQUELINE STEWART: So we have time for some questions if you're open.

RUTH E. CARTER: How many of you saw Black Panther One. Right. And how many of you have seen the Panthers series? More than once. So you must have questions. Good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Hi, I'm Marquisha. And what I would like to know is how you how do you stay focused? Project after project?

RUTH E. CARTER: Well, uh, um, someone told me once, Ruth, when you're focused, nobody can beat you. And I never forgot that. And so even, you know, what takes you out of your focus is to not be immersed in the project. So even within the project where you're getting a thousand questions a day and you have several of the components happening at all times, I have support. I have a team there that supports me and schedules schedules me time, you know, schedules time where if I need to delve into answers through research, I have time allotted for it. And it's very strict. I didn't think I would be that that artist. But the more that even when I do my own art, I realize that the only way that you can produce something of this magnitude is to give it its due time and focus. And that's every day, every day, hours and hours every day. So what suffers, I guess, is my private life, you know? Like, oh, God, who's going to do the dishes? There's nobody around. You know, just little things like that. You know, I talked about over Christmas holiday, we we shaved 150 blankets, you know, So the thing about movies is, though, it's a it's a very finite amount of time. You know, you have a three month prep usually and a three month shoot. So it's six months of your life that you're going to do something. Hopefully, that represents you as an artist, represents your style, your signature, your voice. So you really want to delve in and give it that focus. But I, you know, and I also I breathe, I do yoga, you know, I give myself 45 minutes in the morning of meditation.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Well.

RUTH E. CARTER: Not every morning. It’s honest.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: So you basically created the foundation for what is Black Hollywood with Denzel, Laurence Fishburne. You know, all those people kind of grew up and became the stars and royalty. And then at the end, you're with Ryan Coogler, who was at the at the edge of this spirit of what the new black Hollywood is. And with Marvel, where the budget has totally sort of opened up. Can you talk about your experience or the difference between dealing with Spike and then dealing with Ryan, who was sort of more of a up and coming director? What was the difference in your experience?

RUTH E. CARTER: Yeah, thank you for your question. You know, I felt quite fortunate to have had the experience like I have had with both of those directors of 15 films with Spike Lee and the Black Panther series with Ryan Coogler. But when I went into the Marvel offices, you know, it's like the CIA, you know, they blow air in your eye and all kind of stuff. I went in there and I had amassed all of these images, like on a drop box, you know, And you cannot open a drop box at Marvel Studios. You know, they have like a firewall. And and Ryan is sitting in front of me and Nate Moore, the other executive, is sitting beside him and I'm on my laptop and I'm trying to pay attention. You know, this is an important interview and I can't open the drop box. And Ryan says to me, Ruth, I'm really glad you're here. I was a little boy when I went to see Malcolm X. I went with my dad and I sat on his lap. And he said, and I remember it was that there was an energy in the audience waiting, anticipating this film about Malcolm X and families were there, you know, kids were there. And he said, and I remembered the costumes. So I felt like I had interviewed for Black Panther when he was a little boy. But the fact that we as filmmakers at 40 Acres and a mule were saying, which was Spike's credo, representation is important. Uplift the race. That was from W.E.B. Dubois. He was saying things to us. We don't we do not see ourselves in front of or behind the camera. We have to do films that represent a new generation, a new era of filmmakers. And then look, here comes Ryan Coogler. So I was in the sweet spot. I was able to hear from his mouth that he grew up watching not only, you know, my films, but our films as as he admired Spike Lee.

JACQUELINE STEWART: Ruth, you have given us so many lessons today. I'm so grateful. Thank you.

RUTH E. CARTER: Thank you.

[Applause]

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ALISA ROSENTHAL: That was Ruth E. Carter with Jacqueline Stewart recorded live at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theatre in Spring 2023. Head to the show notes at chicagohumanities.org for a link to check out her absolutely stunning coffee table book. The images of her costumes and the writing of the history surrounding them are all gorgeous.

Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the awesome team over at Chicago Humanities. Shout out to the wonderful staff who are programming these live events and making them sound super crisp. For more than 30 years, Chicago Humanities has created experiences through culture, creativity, and connection. Check out chicagohumanities.org for more information on becoming a member so you’ll be the first to know about upcoming events and other insider perks. We’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode for you. But in the meantime, stay human.

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