Unheard

matters of fact, the sounds that matter. The sign on the door reads the last archive. Step through the door and into an apartment in Harlem. For the writer, Ralph Ellison is packing a suitcase while listening to the radio. This is the mutual broadcasting system. Keep listening, Paul cliff Edwards jukulele I. The White House as an aust that we are still at war with Japan. Smoke and dust clods still roll up from what once was one of

Japan's greatest cities. August tenth, nineteen forty five. The United States has just dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In New York, Ralph Ellison was packing his bags. He'd been in the Merchant Marines during the war, but sick in seven different ways, he was put on leave to get some rest. He had other plans for the time off, though, he meant to write a great American novel. I know that Ellison left New York that day. I don't know for sure that he listened to radio while he was

folding his shirts and bawling his socks. Historians talk a lot about the historical imagination. You can't make things up, but you do have to try to picture things. You have to try to put yourself in the place of your subject, in the mind of your subject, as best you can. If I'm interested in a person and a person's story, I want to know that person's whole story, the evidence of anyone's story that was patchy. That's where

your imagination comes in. So I don't know that Ellison was listening to the radio that August day, but I like to think he was, and I have a pretty good reason to think he was. Ellison listened. He was super interested in sound. What you can know by hearing by listening. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know? How we used to know things and why sometimes lately it feels as though we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This

season I've been asking who killed truth. One way truth dies is when the kinds of things taken as evidence shrink. A lot of people tend not to think about novels or poetry or any kind of literature as evidence, but I think they should. This episode is about a novel. The novel Ellison was packing his bags to go off and write, and it's about how he came to write it and why. Ellison decided he needed some quiet to write, and for that he needed to get out of the city.

He had some friends who owned a farm in Vermont, so later that day he added north to the little town of Waitsfield, where a friend of his, Emily Bates, had a farm. Every summer she took her kids there. She found a farm that had no electricity, no running water. We lived very naturally. The rainwater. The rainwater would come down and fill a barrel. We use that for washing dishes.

That's Emily's daughter, Diana Bates. She's a great grandmother now, but back in nineteen forty five, she was seven years old. It was a front room. That was probably the dining room in this farmhouse, and there was that's where our little tables were, But that became where he was going to work. Ellison got to Vermont and settled into write. A friend shipped him four pounds of Maxwell House coffee. He was ready, But then he found out a bitter truth.

The country isn't as quiet as city people think. Dan's little sister Grace, who reminded me about that. It would have been noisier than because there was more bog life, and so you have the humming and the buzzing and the birds tweeting. And at that time there were no cars on the road. It was a dirt road, and the old man just once a day, and there's a certain time in the heat of the afternoon when the crow lets off. It's like to transport. It just transports

you into another place. And I'm so oh, I don't want going to do that. I do at a home though, because they're they've taken it. That's fine, awful, beautiful, perfect, That's exactly it. Yeah, But the girls weren't really the problem. The kids were the problem. Their mother told the girls to hush, but they just couldn't Diana was irrepressible. She still is. I have to say then, I wasn't very happy about it because we had to be quiet. Oh yeah,

so I do remember trowing. I always think of oranges, but I think it was probably something else at the door where he was writing. I don't know why I think it was oranges in my head now, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Because she were in Vermont, and this was the early time. You know that there wasn't any orange trees around, So it might have been apples, or it might have been stones, for all I know it was. But I flung up at the door and

I ran. Ellison, exasperated, moved to the barn. He put some distance between himself and that bates girls the width of the road. In the quiet, he began to write. His imagination began to soar, fly like a bird to the clouds. And then right then, right there, he heard another noise, a voice in his head, the voice of a black man from the South. He did say things is sometimes advantageous to be unseen. He tried to ignore it,

but he couldn't. He couldn't shake it, so he threw away the book he'd been writing, and he started writing a different one in the voice of this man, an American man, a black man. Grace Bates read me its opening lines. I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Powe. Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids. And I might even be said to possess

a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me, like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows. It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves, or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me that

is so beautiful, That is so incredibly beautiful. The opening lines of one of the most famous novel of the twentieth century, Invisible Man, a story about what it means to be unseen and unheard. Out of Ellison's imagination, came proof. Ellison had a theory of history. He once explained it to his good friend, the writer Robert Penn Warren, who is working on an oral history project called who Speaks for the Negro Ellison called Warren read what you want

to talk about? Oh? I don't know. Rather if it's the bath. The irony of American history is such that we're always trying to discover ourselves. People create themselves in the spectorating himself. This is very hard for some people to crash in writing a novel. Ellison set out to discover American history, to create American history. It took him seven years, all told, to finish the book he began up in that barn in Vermont. Invisible Man is a

work of extraordinary literary imagination. But it's also a work of historical imagination, and it's also a piece of history. It rests on evidence, and it is evidence. Invisible Man tells the story of a man who leaves the Jim Crow south and heads north. It's often taken as an allegory for the entire African American experience, for the entire American experience, but it also comes out of Ellison's own life.

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in nineteen thirteen. Later, when he got to be famous, he talked about his early life a lot often to white interviewers like Red Warren, and even to studs Turkle, the celebrated oral historian. Where did your whatever it was that urge come from to be the right? Well? I always love to read, and my father was a great reader, although he died when I was three. I, as a young kid, dreamed a lot, loved to be told stories, and found a way of

extending my environment through reading. And my mother was always bringing home books and magazines as she brought home Clasgow phonograph recordings from places where she worked. Ellison only knew his father through his words. A book of poems he left behind the letters the family kept a voice from beyond the grave. Ellison grew up working odd jobs to make ends meet, making ice cream sodas at a pharmacy,

delivering newspapers. On the way to one of his jobs at a dentist's he'd pass a ku Klux Klan office. He had a vision of a life he wanted to lead. Maybe it was because of all those records his mother brought home from work, but he fell in love with music. He took up the trumpet. He loved sound. He built crystal set radios, made them out of doorbell wire, broken old telephones, and ice cream cartons. He wanted to write symphonies, a mishmash of classical and folk music, high and low,

the music of everyone. He didn't have the money to go to college, but music got him there. On invitation to Tuskegee to be the first trumpeter in their orchestra in nineteen thirty three, he snagged a ride on a freight train headed for Alabama, but he never finished college. He ran out of money and left. This time he headed north. Now about what point in your life had you switched some music to writing. Well, actually I switched nineteen thirty seven. I left college and came to New

York in thirty six to earn money. I which to go back, and as I as often happened, I found my plans change. That's Ellison on the NBC radio program Favorites of the Famous. In New York, he bounced around odd jobs, the Harlem YMCA, a psychoanalysts office, factory work. Sometimes we need didn't have a job, he'd sleep in the park. It was the Great Depression, a hard time for everyone. Nineteen thirty six, the year Ellison moved to New York, was the year after, FDR founded a massive

new government agency known as the Works Progress Administration. It put people who'd lost their jobs to work building roads in parks and dams, and also writing literature. The WPA included something called the Federal Writers Project and employed about seven thousand out of work writers. They wrote plays, in poems and symphonies. They collected stories oral histories from Americans all over the country. Ellison started working for the Federal

Writers Project in nineteen thirty eight. His job was to collect stories about black New Yorkers. The WPA paid around twenty five bucks a week, saved his life. All of the girls would have been hopefully taking courses in business and so on, went right into into the wa and they found a place in the society. So it was a moment of optimism for us. But for instance, either game right because I could get work with the WPA,

wor research and learned to practice of my crowd. The WPA was the great patron of twentieth century American literature. Saw below, Zoraneil Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright. All of them worked for the WPA, which also often equipped them with cameras and tape recorders. Big heavy machines to make a record of American culture. The WPA was gathering a whole new body of evidence about the nation's past and its people, the evidence of history, the evidence of story.

It would really seem that we had finally on up with the nation. But we can spend a day recording such folklore as we have heard today. And this is only a beginning, only a beginning. Voices that can be heard, reels that can be unspooled. Here in the last archive. In the nineteen thirties in Harlem, Ralph Ellison collected amazing oral histories. No one's ever found tape of those interviews, though, but a lot of recordings from the WPA's work do survive.

They're scratchy and garbly, but they're fascinating. I think this one from Texas made with a machine that weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. It's a little difficult to decipher. So listen, hard, lady up the mat and that what if you want to antymbastic flags? You know, bank I remember that's a woman named Harriet Smith talking to a man named John Henry Fok in her house in Texas. Fock was a white man and collecting oral histories for

the government and Smith. She'd been born into slavery. It's hard to understand this tape, but she's just told him to ask her whatever he wants. Well, ain't her about how old are you? Well, I don't know, miss, we don't know my age. On the buy that the childs I'm telling me my mom died, and she she didn't know want much about idea, But the children traced back from me that they explained up the math. Well, how old you when you were? Well, I was about thirteen

years old. That's the breaks you can't remembered slavery days. I remember all our white school, and all the name of all the children called everyone, the children's names. The baby's boy. Harriet Smith belonged to the baby boy. She'd been thirteen. At the breakup the Civil War, the WPA had been trying to capture a vanishing archive, the stories

of people like Harriet Smith. Four million Americans had been held in slavery before emancipation, and by the nineteen thirties the last of them were dying, and when they were gone, the evidence of slavery from the memory of people who endured it would disappear forever. The WPA set out to capture those memories. At first, the state offices of the Federal Writers Project oversaw the work. Then the Library of Congress took over. Interviewers would send transcripts of their interviews,

more than two thousand of them, to Washington. These life histories, taken down as far as possible, in the narrator's words, constitute an invaluable body of unconscious evidence. Eventually, these interviews were published in a collection whose value is hard to describe, but the editor of the project once did a pretty good job of it. For the first time and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves, many of whom have since died, have been permitted to tell their

own story in their own way. Interviewers who collected these oral histories were supposed to send tape recordings to Washington. Those reels as big as tricycle wheels. In ten cases. Sometimes they recorded with phonographs. The historical record in some cases was an actual record record how many, how many of how many slaves did he had? Man? He had my grandma and my mom. I'm always cool and them, you know, and then they've worked in the seas and everything.

I remember when she used to float often, I've floud, I've thought often, my fa I'm very awful car Rolls dreammain is that right? As a historian, when I listened to Harriet Smith telling on Henry Fok about her life, I first thought is it's amazing that all this is now in the Library of Congress, because in the historical

record words spoken by black people are rare. Probably that's because in the era of slavery, enslaved people couldn't ordinarily give testimony in court unless it was to testify against other slaves in cases of conspiracy, when they could give a special kind of testimony called negro evidence, but only

after swearing a terrifying oath. You are brought hither as a witness, and by the direction of the law, I am to tell you, before you give your evidence, that you must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that if it be found hereafter that you tell a lie and give false testimony in this matter, you must, for so doing have both your ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and receive thirty nine last is on your bare back, well laid

on at the common whipping post. The most notorious use of negro evidence in early America was a set of trials held in New York in seventeen forty one, when hundreds of men black men were accused of conspiring to burn down the city. I got really fascinated by this story years ago. I wrote a very long book about it. It's called New York Burning. Ralph Elson in the nineteen thirties, when he was working for the WPA, he got fascinated by this story too. He tracked it down. He found

out all about negro evidence during those trials. In seventeen forty one, a New York judge complained that it was impossible to take negro evidence seriously. Many of them have a great deal of craft. Their unintelligible jargon stands them in great state to conceal their meaning. The law of negro evidence lasted a long time. Nearly a century later, when Frederick Douglas was growing up in Maryland and some white men beat him up, an assault witnessed by dozens

of slaves. Douglas's owner tried to get a magistrate to press charges, but the magistrate said he couldn't do anything unless there'd been a white witness. Douglas later wrote about this in his autobiography. If I had been killed in the presence of a thousand colored people, their testimony combined would have been insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers.

And over a century after that, in nineteen forty one, John Henry Fox asked Harriet Smith to serve as an eyewitness to her own life and yours blade remains same time. What would to preach a bridge about then? To say, now that you go recordings like these, they seem at first to upend centuries of evidentiary and justice. But then listening to this rasping record, he started to have questions, what really is going on here? Well, then the traits that you might helped to treat you good bye, They

was good to us. Really it isn't just her and a bunch of these recordings. People interviewed say basically the same thing. Hey, slavery wasn't that bad, But that testimony contradicts just about every other possible type of evidence that survives. There are a few explanations for this discrepancy. Most of the people interviewed for this project were in their eighties. There were children before slavery ended. Maybe they'd been spared the worst of its miseries. But there was something else

going on too. A couple of years back, the writer Debbie Nathan went sleothing and figured out that John Henry Fox and Harriet Smith were neighbors. Fox family lived only four blocks from Smith's. She'd known him since he was a baby. On the recordings, he calls her aunt Harriet, she calls him mister Falk. He was in his twenties, she was in her eighties. Falk, like Ellison, was interested in sound. Later he became a successful radio broadcaster. He

was also a prominent liberal. He joined the NAACP and fought for civil rights. He was a famous storyteller. He used to tell a Christmas story that NPR broadcast every year. He's not the bad guy here, but he's not an innocent bystander either. Debby Nathan went through Fox files at UT Austin's Briscoe Center. One day she noticed an MP

three mark Harriet Smith. Somehow John Fox had forgotten to submit that one recording to the Library of Congress any Us John Good High School, Slahama Cab Did you hear it? He asked her. Some folks were awful good to their slaves. Weren't they. Of course, that's what's known as a leading question. This wasn't just a personal dynamic between Harriet Smith and John Fog, though, between Aunt Harriet and mister Fogg, the

problems with these interviews were often a lot worse. Some of the people asking the questions were actually descended from the owners of the people they were interviewing. Use your historical imagination sit on that porch. Harriet Smith wasn't going to give John Henry Fock real answers to his questions about slavery. He was a white man in Texas in nineteen forty one, lynching Texas. She told him some things. She didn't tell him everything. Mainly, she told him what

she thought he wanted to hear. But Ralph Ellison, back in New York, he wasn't John Henry Fowk. He was a black man interviewing black people, a lot of whom had only lately come north from the Jim Crow South. They were part of something called the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the South. Ellison was part of that migration too. Black people who left the South went most off into cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia,

Los Angeles. Isabel Wilkerson appealed surprize winning reporter wrote about the Great Migration in a book called The Warmth of other Sons. Her book is beautiful and the way she put it together is incredible. She became a one woman WPA. She began working on the book in the nineteen nineties when she realized that those people who'd made the Great Migration, they weren't going to be around for much longer. So she began interviewing them as many as she could, you know,

just the passage of time. And I was really running, racing against the clock. You took to like a thousand people or so when you were first doing you know, just finding people, hundreds and hundreds of people I did. I can never say that I'm going to take the easy route towards something, and this was a case in point. I went to Senior Citizens centers, I went to AARP meetings, I went to pensioners reunions and meetings that they have, the postal workers and the you know, the CTA bus drivers.

I mean all of this. How conscious were you of the legacy of the you know, the Federal Writers Project At the WPA work of tracking down people who lived under slavery before they all passed on in the nineteen thirties. No. I absolutely felt that I was in a position to get testimony, you might say, from the surviving people of an entire era that was passing away, with each one

of them going. It was like a mission I was on, and I was determined and felt that this was the last chance to get to hear from some of the people. And those stories just hadn't been written down. They hadn't been recorded at all. Really. No Wilkerson structured her book like a novel, writing together the stories of three lives. She'd started interviewing more than twelve hundred people, and then she narrowed them down to three. One of these three

people was item A Brandon. She'd been born in Mississippi in nineteen thirteen and grew up picking cotton and hating it. When she was about six, two white boys grabbed her and held her by her ankles over a well, just to watch her squirm. She went to school only to eighth grade, you couldn't go any higher. When she was thirteen, two black boys she knew talk back to some white

lady and they were lynched and so. In nineteen thirty seven, after some end with guns came to their house in the middle of the night looking for someone who stole some turkeys, Idemy and her husband, a man named Gladney, packed up everything. They went first to Milwaukee. They ended up in Chicago. Idem Brandon Gladney was eighty three when she spoke with Isabel Wilkerson. There's a moment in the book when she's sitting in a chair gazing out a window.

She says, a half ain't been told. Ralph Ellison he was born the same year as Idemy, and I think he must have felt that same way too. For all the things we think we know, they are all these people whose voices are silenced, whose half hasn't been told. If that's true, how much do we know really? Ellison looked for people to interview the same way Wilkerson did. He went to street corners and bars and apartment buildings.

He knocked on doors One day and night thirty eight, on the corner of one hundred and Lenox Avenue, he met a man named Leo Gurley, who come to New York from South Carolina. I hope to God to kill me if this ain't the truth. All you got to do is go down flooring South Carolada and ask most anybody you meet, and they'd tell you it's the truth. Currently told Ullus in a story about a man named Sweet that he'd known back home. His name was Sweet

the Monkey. I don't forget his real name. I can't remember, but that was what everybody called him. He wasn't no big guy. He was just bad. My mother and grandmother used to say he was wicked. He was bad, all right. He was one sucker who didn't give a damn about these crackers. Fact is they got sold. They stayed out. His wife. I can't ever remember here telling them crackers balling that guy. He used to give him trouble all over the place, and all they could do about it

was to give the rest of us hell. Girly must have told Ellison a lot of stories. This one particular story about Sweet, though, is the one that Ellison wrote down, the one that's in the Library of Congress. It was this way Sweet could make himself invisible. You don't believe me, Well here's how we've done it. Sweet the Monkey cut open a black cat and took out his heart. The White boats started trying to catch Sweet. Well, they didn't

have no look. Police will come up and say come on, Sweet, and he say, y'all want me, And they put the handcuffs on him and started leading them away. He'd go with a little piece show like he was going. Then all of a sudden he would turn himself invisible and disappear. The police wouldn't have nothing but the handcuffs. They couldn't do a thing without Sweet the Monkey. Evidence like this a folk tale that gets written down. That's rare as Hen's teeth and what stuck with Ellison most in girl's

tall tail. Sweet could turn himself invisible. Once they found a place he looted with footprints leading away from it, and they decided to try and trap them. This was about sun up, and they followed his footprints all that day. They followed him till sundown. When he come partly visible, it was red and the sun was shining on the trees, and they waited till they saw his shadow. That was

the last or the Sweet the Monkey. I like to think it was Sweet who came back to Ellison a few years later up in Vermont, in that barn, the sunshining voice rising let the voices that echo along the narrow corridors of the mind. When Invisible Man was published in nineteen fifty two, Ralph Ellison became a celebrity. Here he is again on the show Favorites of the Famous, And may I add my congratulations on the National Book Award.

Quite an honor from first novelism. Yes, it's quite an honor and quite a frightening You know, you keep wondering, Well, now, guess what went wrong? Everyone wanted a piece of Ellison. Photographer Gordon Parks collaborated with Ellison on a series of photographs for Life magazine, depicting the most important moments in the book. The photos are haunting, surreal, black and white and shot wide. In the most famous picture, a black man emerges from a manhole. You can see the blur

of the street in the background. Only the top of his head is in focus. So remember Diana and Grace Bates who was little Girls through Oranges at Ellison while he was writing, or maybe they were rocks. Anyway, they knew that guy in these photographs. Yeah, that's our dad. Daddy would have been friends with Allison and Gordon Parks. They would have all known each other. So when they were doing this photo shoot, I mean he was a

natural model for that, you know, his handsomeness. Yeah, I'm just amazed that this image is becomes so iconic, you know, it's all It hung outside the MoMA in New York City for a season, a huge poster of our father. Yeah, it brings me great delight to see that. Ellison, meanwhile, was everywhere interviews in the Paris Review, lectures and visiting professorships, cocktail parties, chit chat with the president. He became much more than a literary celebrity. It was as if he

were the great seer of the black experience. It was as if he were a radio playing the voice of every black person in the country, as if he alone were Negro evidence. If you listen for it, you can hear it. His self consciousness about being asked to speak for the negro Sir, Ellison, how do you feel about being interviewed? Well, naturally, you feel quite mixed about it. Later on, Elson was called to testify before the Senate

on the subject of social conditions in Harlem. But really he was asked to explain what black people thought of the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act In the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act. How did the Northern Negro or the Negro at Harlem and regard these laws? Well, I was paid for one myself. The senators kept pressing him, asking him questions about Harlem, but also asking him in a way, how can a black man talk like that? Would you get your voice? You're so articulate? How did

you get to be you? Oh? What was life like for you as a boy growing up in Oklahoma City? Well, it was a life of the average poor family. Ellison was most often in demand when things were worse for black people. Robert Penn Warren allegedly said Ellison was every white man's favorite black man, but he wasn't every black

man's favorite black man. Ellison's biographer once told the story of a man who went to the library of a black studies program and asked for a copy of Invisible Man, only to be told they didn't have one because Ellison wasn't a black writer. He kept trying to write another novel. It was always close, just around the corner, but he

never finished it. He explained it a few ways. He lost some of it in a fire or a history moved too fast for him to comment on it, But I think he was also daunted, daunted by having become evidence. At one point during his congressional testimony, the senator asked him about his upbringing. My mother had some sense of the advisers of excellence, and she used to say that she didn't care what I'd became, as long as I tried to become one of the best. He'd been the best.

Maybe he came to the end of his imagination. What could he possibly do next? People started talking about him as if he were a failure. He kept trying to write that novel. He'd read passages into a teape recorder and then listen back to them. They cut out our tongues. They left the speechness. They cut out our tongues. Lord, they left us without words. Amen. He died in nineteen ninety four, author of a slew of brilliant essays, one published novel, and more than two thousand unpublished pages of

another one. So far as I know, he never went back to that barn in Waitsfield, Vermont. I do know that one of the obligations of being an American has changed to me is that you get to know other Americans, and one of the massassdiasm that we should not be afraid. Ralph Ellison and the WPA opened a door, a door to an entire archive. But somehow that door keeps slamming shut and getting locked again, and still people keep trying

to pry it open and record the evidence. In twenty thirteen, a century after Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma, George Zimmerman was acquitted for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and Black Lives Matter began. It's the next chapter and the long history of Negro evidence. Black Lives Matter is

about justice, but it's also profoundly about evidence. The capturing of video and sound recording showing what to whites had been unseen, hearing what had been unheard, knowing what had been unknown, bodycam, dashcam, iPhone, periscope, Facebook live record, play listen. More voices means more disagreement, and that can make it harder to know what's true. But that's okay, because hard

has to be okay. At the end of Invisible Man, the Invisible Man is hiding out in a basement, siphoning electricity, listening to Louis Armstrom records, talking about what he knows, straight to the reader unseen but heard. I love the book's last line, so we thought it was only right to ask debait sisters to read it out loud. Who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you, some truths still can't be spoken. Some frequencies haven't yet been heard, but you can still set them down for

the record. You listen, you record, and you're right, because the half still hasn't yet been told. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mccabbon and Bennette of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Jason Gambrell and Martinin Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Sinfinett. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Janette Foundation.

Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, Andy Lancett at the w NYC Archives, the American folk Life Center at the Library of Congress, Alex Allenson at the Bridge Sound and Stage, and Simon Leak at Pushka. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carly Migliore, Emily Rustick,

Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henriet O'Reilly alive, Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector I'm gillipour