You say in God’s Ghostwriters that your process as a historian involves reading into the gaps. You call it a form of history telling that is imaginative and not untrue. Why do you approach your subjects this way?
When I first became aware of enslaved literate workers, I wanted to try and figure out what they did, who they were, and what their lives were like. But our historical archive hasn’t preserved that information in detail.
Then I ran across the work of Saidiya Hartman, who talks about a responsible imaginative method of recounting history. For me, that meant protecting my subjects from the accusation that I’m just making everything up. So I read widely about the history of slavery, the history of people writing books, histories of labor, and the history of psychology. I looked at inscriptions and at manuscripts in libraries.
