Brendan Greeley

That's exactly right.

And so often, you know, I looked at, I sort of constructed...

sort of a brief story about an enslaved woman in St.

James Parish based on some promissory notes that sent her around the parish from one plantation to another.

You can sort of, you have to, nobody kept those records on purpose so that we could get her story, but it's possible to read, they call it, you know, reading between the archives.

So you have to do a lot of that work.

I really think that, I almost don't want to say it out loud.

I think that ledgers are an incredibly underused tool

resource.

They give us a picture.

I was in London last month, and I found the complete financial records of John Locke.

It wasn't this big archival discovery.

They're there.

They're in the catalog.

But nobody looks at them.

I can tell you exactly how he paid for everything.

And for a man who didn't believe that credit was a good form of money, he sure seemed to use a lot of credit.

I'm great.

And I have to say those in the darkness of you writing your book and me writing mine, those were incredibly productive conversations.

Like, what a blessing to have one other human struggling with the history of money when you are.