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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your.
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Home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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Hey, this is Nate and we are.
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In the waning days of our annual fundraiser here at Radiotopia when we turn to listeners like you to, to support directly with contributions, what we do here. Independently owned and operated podcasts, banding together to make the art that we want to make, the way we want to make it on our terms, for our audience, the way that hopefully you want to hear it. And I'll tell you something, I was looking at the calendar this year with the fundraiser coming up and I love the fundraiser. I believe in the fundraiser because I believe that Radiotopia is an oasis. It is sort of a utopia of radio, if you will, in a cultural desert. And it is not that I think what we are doing here is always better than what others are doing elsewhere. You can decide that for yourself. But the thing I am sure of as an artist and as a business person is that this is the way to do it.
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This is the model.
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Owning your own intellectual property, calling your own shots, deciding what your show should be and then trying to make that show and try to find an audience. And then when you are lucky enough to have done that, not letting anyone, I don't know, investors, some whack corporation, people who care more about profit than making beautiful things and making them well, not letting anyone get in between us, me and you. Me and this thing that I love.
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To make and the people who like to listen to it.
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But this year there was a small voice in my head, which is a rare voice of doubt right there in the back. Not doubting the mission, because I believe in this mission in my bones. Like, this is who I am. But I looked at the calendar and I said, wait a second, I also have a book coming out right now. It's like right at the same time. And I'm going to have to be here promoting that book. And will that be too much? Will these be mixed messages? Will people get annoyed hearing these messages? But then when the calendar and the time came around, not only did I realize that hopefully, no, the audience gets it, they get how this show works and they'll be forgiving of more messages in their feed than usual for a bit. I also realized that these two things, the memory palace book and the Radiotopia fundraiser.
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These things are one and the same.
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Radiotopia has made this book possible, just like it makes this show possible. It works because of Radiotopia. It is the place that has let me all these years make this weird thing work.
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Make it weird.
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I think it works because it's weird. Make it beautiful. Make it the memory palace.
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And if you want to help make.
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It work, then you, my friend, have arrived here just at the right time. Donate at Radiotopia fm. Donate. And if you write in a little note that pops up after you do that, if you write in that little box, TMP book, you will be registered for a chance to win an autographed.
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Copy of the book.
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So help keep this project. Help keep the memory palace strong by donating today at Radiotopia fm. Donate. And he says, risking mixed messages but trusting that you can handle it. Also, buy yourself or someone on your.
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Gift list a book. It's the best time of the year. This is the Memory palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. A postcard from the road to Chancellorsville, December 2024. Pass the church of the Messiah in the Zoan Baptist Church in the Faith Baptist Church, across from the Salem Baptist Church in the Home Depot, in the Chick Fil A in the Macy's that has seen better days in the Mall, of which one could say the same. Past the Long John Silvers in the Starbucks, in the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble, past AAA pools operating on winter hours, Adirondack chairs out front, the same chairs in many colors. Past vape shops and gun shops and pawn shops where you can buy the guns of people who needed money more than they needed guns at one point. Past Battlefield Dental, past grocery stores, past El Pino, the family owned taqueria by the Taco Bell, up from the Chipotle, past the appliance store or maybe it was a place that sold convertible sofas or plush chairs that leaned back, but now houses, pickleball courts. Past the CVS and the CVS and the CVS & the McDonald's and the McDonald's and the McDonald's across the street from the Burger King, out past the middle school home of the Mustangs, in the point where the commercial district yields to fields blanched and frozen in tract homes just beyond stands of trees, a new community built where fields once were.
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And out toward the battlefield where 30,500.
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Men died over the course of a week of fighting in the spring of 1863, as I am told by the Wikipedia page that lists the major battles of the American Civil War in descending order based on total number of casualties. The fields give way to forest to assign advertising lots where one can build homes in the woods. These woods through which armies tens of thousands of men once marched on their way to engage the enemy, to feign or to flank 15.7% of them to die, which seems so high but is nothing compared to Gettysburg or Chickamauga or Shiloh. Out to the visitor center closed today to maps and plaques, earnest entries that speak of troop movements and tactics but little of people, and then an audio driving tour so balanced and factual that it can do little more than guide you from field to field on a frigid day where one can sit and stare through the windshield of a rental car and try to see the forest for these trees and fail to see men on the road to Chancellorsville. A postcard from the Frederick Douglass National Historic site in Anacostia, Maryland, December 2024. There's a tree by the walkway to this house in a hill, a tall evergreen, one of two that you will not notice until you are inside the house, until you are up on the second floor by the bedroom where Frederick Douglass once slept, and you are standing at the bay window at the end of the hall, the last of the late afternoon light coming through cold and flat, a pewter gray that will give way before long too soon to sudden nightfall so early this time of year. The tree partially blocks that view now. It didn't then, when Frederick Douglass lived here, though it is still majestic, the tree and the view looking through that window, down the broad lawn, past the row houses, out across the Anacostia river to the confluence of the Potomac, the District of Columbia spread out before you, the Capitol partially obstructed by the tree. But not the Washington Monument. You can see it clearly, Frederick Douglass could. The ranger from the park service will tell you. It was being built when the Douglass family moved into this house called cedar Hill in 1877. He says Frederick Douglass, once enslaved, once watched the monument rise, marble block by marble block, from that window, or when sitting in a rocking chair on the long low porch that stretches the length of the first floor of the house. But there was no tree there then, because his wife was still alive. Anna Murray, who had met her future husband, tall and handsome Frederick Douglass, that mane of hair, the piercing eyes. She met this man on the docks where she worked as a laundress. He was enslaved, she was not. She sold her own clothes and her bed and gave him the money and stole a sailor's uniform so her husband could Escape to freedom. She was ill from the moment they moved into that house some 40 years later, and she was sick every day for four years. And then she died. And they planted a tree, a sapling, to remember her. It is so tall now, in the front hall where the tour starts, you and five other people, three African American women, two sisters and one of their wives, and two white men in their 60s. History friends, it seems insurance executives gather, who like to see Civil War sites together. They might well know the added significance of the print in the wall by the door, a scene cut out from a magazine and frame from the battle of Fort Wagner. But you might not. And it will only be later, when you'll put it together, that of all the battles depicted in illustrations in Harper's Weekly or other magazines that brought the Civil War home, that this was the battle that Frederick Douglass wanted to hang in the hallway in his. Because two of his sons fought in that battle with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. And what was it like for them to be them, to have survived that battle a decade and a half before and stand in their father's entryway in a home that he bought, breaking the law to do so as a black man, but he could do so because he was Frederick Douglass? What was it like to look at that illustration in the hallway by the door, maybe marvel at the gap between representation and lived experience, between history and memory? There's a room off the hallway where you are told Frederick Douglass met with dignitaries in his capacity as advisor to presidents, in his role as a community leader, as an ally to the women's suffrage movement, to any number of causes. You will miss the names of those leaders, if they were mentioned at all, if their names mean anything still, because you were looking at the wallpaper, or rather the border above the wallpaper that runs throughout the rooms in the first floor, so different than the wallpaper below it, which is all staid and dignified and drab. But up top by the ceiling is a band of bright yellow with tropical plants, lush green. Because Douglass had loved, you will learn, his time as the United States minister to Haiti, loved that country founded by people who had liberated themselves from slavery, was intoxicated by the thought of it, this place of possibility in that moment in history, wanted that spirit in his home. So he commissioned this wallpaper. And so it is here in the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, a bright flash amidst the gloaming of a late December afternoon. And there is something to it. That half dark. It helps you picture. It helps you see Frederick Douglass in this place on this day, which is hard to do, which you are so often asked to do in places like this, in historic homes and battlefield parks, from your car window. But there's something about the half light. That's how it would have looked with no electricity yet, oil lamps, candlelight. It would be dark like this a lot. And it helps the place feel alive in a way, with the dead. And so when you are led across the hall to stand behind a rope and peer into the family room and you see a bookshelf built just a couple of feet off the ground, a single shelf, and you are told that Douglass built it so his grandkids would love books like he did, so they would be able to see those books at eye level, pick them off the shelf themselves and bring them to their grandfather so he could read them a story, so they could sit on his lap in that chair over there, so they could be read to by one of the greatest orators of the 19th century, maybe the greatest American there ever was. There will be something of that there in the air. You can almost see it. His bedroom is upstairs by the end of the hall, the bay window where he watched the Washington Monument rise, watched the tree grow after his wife died in the room across the hall. That was common then, separate rooms for husbands and wives. There was another room, too, for his second wife, a white woman who worked for him, which outraged people, which would divide his family for a while. She would be the reason you would be in this house, taking a tour 130 something years later. She made sure it was preserved, kept it as it was, almost everything in its place. There are a couple of things missing, though. You're told a broom handle that he would keep in his room to use to knock on the ceiling to let his grandkids know that it was time to keep it down in a set of barbells that he used every single day to stay strong and maybe just as importantly, to appear strong because he was Frederick Douglass. People knew him at a glance, and many of those people hated him. And some would want to fight him. It had happened for years, and he would have to fight back. And he did not want to have to fight back, but was far better to win when he did. Out back there is a small building, a reconstruction, you're told, but it will not matter, because the idea that this shack, a building of stacked stones, a single room, a wooden roof, a chimney not far from the house that he had bought at a time when men like him were not allowed to buy homes, just 12 years after men like him, human beings, were still allowed to be bought. The shack was a room of his own. This place he would go to read and be alone. That if he was in there, you knew not to bother him. Everyone did. People came to call it the Growlery because Frederick Douglass historians think, they speculate though, how could they really know what it was really like to be in the head of that real man? They think Frederick Douglass suffered from ptsd, from any number of traumas, documented or not, from his time enslaved, that he wrote down or didn't, but that somehow inscribed themselves in his body. And he figured out at some point that to feel better, to push all of that away for a while, to calm himself, to reset his system or whatever, to cut through the pain and the overwhelm, to quiet the noise and get back to himself, whatever that meant. However Frederick Douglass experienced being Frederick Douglass, he would go into that shack and he would growl, literally growl. And he found that it made him feel better. And there is something in all of that. There in the half light, the guide rushing a bit to finish the tour before he loses delight. And he stands by the door by the framed image of a battle where a man's sons once fought. And so he put a picture up to remember that, a point of fatherly pride perhaps. And he tells you, the tour guide of a night that Frederick Douglass came home, a cold one, in late February 1895. He was 77 years old and he came home in between meetings. He was always at meetings, pushing causes forward, putting in the work. He stopped home for a bit, change his clothes, check in, eat a sandwich, what have you. And his heart stopped and he fell right there and he died right there. You can almost see it. SA this episode of the Memory palace was written and produced by me, Nate DiMeo in December of 2024. The show is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independent podcasts that our listener supported that are artist owned from prx, a not for profit public media company. If you want to help out what we do here, head over to Radiotopia FM and donate now. Thank you guys for listening this year. Those who have been with me all.
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Along, thank you for sticking with the.
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Sometimes occasional or more occasional than usual release schedule. It has been a very busy year finishing a book and releasing a book.
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For those of you who have bought.
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The book, thank you so much. For those of you yet to buy it, we what are you waiting for?
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I have to say this thing is.
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Good and it's beautiful. It makes a great gift. If you want to follow me on.
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Twitter and Facebook, I am Hememory Palace.
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If you want to follow me on.
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Instagram and Threads, I am Hememory Palace Podcast.
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If you want to follow me on.
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Bluesky, I am aiddemeo.
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If you want to send me an email, you can do that.
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NateMemoryPalace US oh yeah.
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And if you want to sign up for my newsletter, you can do that@thememorypalacepodcast.substack.com I will be talking to you guys again.
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Radiotopia from PRX.