Economy Hall: Interview with Fatima Shaik

The twists and turns in how Fatima Shaik’s incandescent new book, Economy Hall, came into being are as remarkable as those within its pages. Economy Hall was a free Black brotherhood in 19th century New Orleans. Its members were genteel, extremely educated, and tireless in their fight to make a more just society. When the old Treme building that served as its most recent headquarters was torn down, it contained 24 books of handwritten minutes from a century of their meetings. spanning from 1836 to 1935. Shaik’s father was best friends with one of the last remaining Economy Hall members, and after receiving a call from him that these precious archives were on their way to the city dump, her father rescued the books. They sat unopened until a fateful visit home in 1997, when Shaik went to the shelves to rediscover Economy Hall and the vision of American history these documents represent. As Shaik writes in her introduction, “the books contained a history that revealed the multiracial character of New Orleans and a Creole identity that had been prized and debated… The records expanded the narrative of Blacks as active participants in the major social and political events of the United States.” 

With writing experience ranging from journalism to fiction, Shaik applies her mastery of the craft to a rare historical account that comes completely alive on the page. In Economy Hall, history takes place on a human scale. Readers become intimately acquainted with historical figures like Ludger Boguille, the primary narrator of the Economy Hall journals. We watch them navigate their worlds from the edge of our seats, cheering them on as they wrench lives of integrity from the dehumanizing racial hierarchy of nineteenth century Louisiana. But seeing historical processes unfold in real time can also be an agonizing experience. It is a historical fact that the Mechanic’s Institute Massacre occured on July 30th, 1866, and was symptomatic of the escalating white supremecist terrorism that characterised the Reconstruction period. But to witness the men of Economy Hall, who by now you’ve come to care for deeply, undergo the trauma of racial violence leaves you shaken and bereft in a way that history books seldom do. 

When an author manages to break major historical and artistic ground in just one book, it is impossible to resist the temptation to call her up and ask her about it. Fortunately for the Iron Lattice, Fatima Shaik was gracious enough to accept. 

Holly Devon: Thanks so much for speaking with me. Your book is such an incredible achievement. I just finished reading it, and I have to admit that by the end I was in tears. 

Fatima Shaik: Oh, good. Yeah, you know, that was really my point. I really wanted people to feel history, rather than read it in this kind of distant academic way.

HD: That really came across- the writing is so rich that you feel like you're moving through time with these characters, even though they are real historical figures. How did you reach such an intimacy with your subjects?

Cover of Economy Hall by Fatima Shaik, 2021

FS: It grew on me. [The Economy Hall archives] were basically my dad's books. But then when I started to read them, I started to intellectually take possession of them more. And then with some of the people like Boguille, I started to feel like I knew him because his writing was in such detail. I really understood some of his emotions, and when I was able to locate him on the map, you know, walking around the Marigny, I really got into it. That's when I started feeling like it was a little bit more like destiny. 

HD: So what has it been like to have this overlay of 19th century history in your mind’s eye as you move around the city in the present day? How has that affected you? 

FS: It's fascinating- I'm constantly passing buildings and saying oh, you know I’ve passed this place a million times but now I know this is Boguille’s corner, you know? Or the sight of the mechanics [massacre]. Or I’ve passed a building a million times that now I know was a slave auction. I'm constantly discovering these places as I'm walking along the street. And then at the same time, it's kind of painful personally knowing the site of a slave auction. I always had a sense of it because, you know, if you live in New Orleans, you always see these slave quarters behind the house, right? So I had that sense before, but now I have a totally different feeling. It's a little painful to incorporate the fact that New Orleans was such a big slave center into my thoughts. Kind of took me aback for a little while. 

There was a point at which I saw my children's names in the records of enslaved people and that just kind of stopped me cold for a few months, you know? I just couldn't wrap my head around people selling children. I found out that one of my children, actually, both of my children have names of my slave ancestors, which I had no idea when I was naming them those names.

HD: Reading historians can be so powerful, because it's almost like they recreate a reality that you can then walk in on your own. You don't have to live in someone else's impressions. I think that the power of the historian is something you never lost in this book. No matter how elegant the writing is, you also have this real loyalty to the facts and the archives.

FS: I think that's the journalism training, you know, journalists don't tell you what to think. I was trying to just put the facts out there and let people come to decide what they think for themselves. Though as I've gotten older and more conscious, I realize that the facts that you choose can absolutely influence a reader's perception of an event. If you read newspapers you can see what facts they chose.

HD: That reminds me that one thing I really loved in the book is when you're talking about an event and you include excerpts from five or so different newspapers to contextualize it, and it really gives you a new perspective on journalism and its influence. The casual white supremacist writing in the papers is horrifying. It makes you realize that one of the reasons that something like the Mechanics Institute Club Massacre happened is because there's a buildup in which respected voices are increasingly legitimizing such vicious prejudice.

FS: Right! I mean, you think, newspapers were the major communication- -the mass media-- of the day, right? So if they're all giving a particular kind of slant on the information or you see a particular way they choose their facts-- though some of them went well beyond that-- you're going to be influenced by that picture that they've painted, right? So, my job was to look at what they're saying as well as what they’re not saying. Because there's so much that’s not being said that needs to be said so that we can live with a little bit more discernment. 

It took me a little while to just sort of parse through all of the writing in the newspapers, because it was subtle. A lot of what was in the newspapers were these subtle kinds of jokes. Like the Negro who was fined for putting his felonious feet in shoes. Mhm. It's a kind of joke, you know, but then when you look at the same day in the paper, they say this woman was let off for killing her Negro servant, then you say okay this is a joke but it's not really.

HD: It's like you create this tension between the narrative of the time and the reality of people that are living it, and it becomes an invitation to do that with our own lives. It's easy to get our noses pressed to the glass of the present moment we’re living through. But we are also living through a historical moment, right?

FS: Absolutely. I mean think about the people getting dressed up to go to the Mechanics Club Massacre.  They're saying, “I have a lot of things to do today but I want to lend my voice to protest.” They’re getting dressed, then they’re going to stop off here at this convention and then right after they’re going to work, right? Just the same thing people do right now, you know, going to vote on the way to work, you know, and now they're being met with all sorts of obstacles very similar to the ones that happened in the mid-nineteenth-century. They're having problems voting-- people are threatening them as they go to vote. People are threatening them while they go down the street, or when they express their opinions. So we're experiencing many of the same things. I hadn't planned it that way, because I started the book so long ago. But it’s definitely a chance to reflect on what's going on right now and see that the pattern doesn't change. 

HD: When people talk about the past repeating itself, they often say it without thinking. There was something about moving so intimately through this time, with all of these really special people, that helped me see that if this historical wound isn't healed, it’s never going to go away on its own.

FS: That's very true. I'm seeing that now too, you know, with investigating this takeover of the Congress. You can't just move on, you have to address what happened.

HD: Books like yours are so important for confronting the white terrorism during Reconstruction from which the Economy Hall members suffered intensely.  How would you describe the dream that was so violently taken from them by white supremecist violence?

FS: Well what the men of Economy Hall wanted all along was to be considered full human beings, to be considered for who they were. That's all they wanted. They were constantly being legally thrust into this position of color. And it’s not that they were ashamed of their color, or their African roots, it's just that they just didn't want that to be a calculation every time they tried to sign over a property or baptize their children. Why should they be banned from marrying somebody that they loved, or letting their children inherit something that they own? They just wanted to be treated as equals in their society. 

And that's why the end of the nineteenth century was so painful for them, you know, to have to accept the fact that this is not a dream that’s going to happen. There's always going to be that qualification of race on who you are. You're not going to be an American. You're going to be a Negro American, or you’re going to be a Black American, or you’re going to be a man of color, but you're never just going to be a man. 

HD: It’s exciting to see a nonfiction historical work connect to a Black American literary tradition which has made that point so many times in so many ways. How do you think your background as a fiction writer has factored into your writing?

FS: The fictional brain looks for the larger lesson. What historians do is get a thesis, you know, they say I'm going to prove such and such, and lay out the arguments on this side and on that side, right? Whereas fiction writers wonder what all this arguing means. What's the point of it? Every fiction writer has to ask about the point of every book. Right? In any particular context a fiction writer is like, what does all of this mean? You have to let that soak in for a little while. 

HD: Well then I can't resist asking: what does all this mean?

FS: What I think it means is that there are forces in people. There are spirits in people-- no let’s stay with forces-- and within those forces there are good possibilities and bad possibilities. And then people choose which ones they're going to live by. When people choose one possibility or the other as a group, they move [history] in one direction or another.

HD: That sounds so simple, but to me, you just described the clockwork of history.

FS: It basically is. Human beings can be driven to do bad things all together, you know, like the Klu Klux Klan or the Germans during the Holocaust. They can be driven to infect each other. 

HD: They get caught up?

FS: It's more than caught up. It's a conscious choice. It's a choice to be bad, you know? But in just the same way people can make a conscious choice to be good. People can be influenced to act in good faith-- and now you're moving your history in a different direction. Everybody's got a range of possibilities, but I do think that you can sway things on a human level-- we're talking about human choices. Now along the same lines, you can choose what kind of history you want to believe, or what kind of history you want to claim. 

HD: I thought that was an interesting aspect of the moment when Alfred Jourdain shot himself in Congo Square. It seems like an incredibly symbolic act, and a definitive claiming of Africa. Did you see it that way? How do you think the Economy Hall men related to Africa in general?

FS: We don't want to look at it with a contemporary lens. I think he was committing himself to Africa in the nineteenth Century in the ways that he knew-- what Africa meant to him. And at the time it was the people who surrounded him, the populace, the Black people of New Orleans that met in Congo Square. He was connecting to the spirits of people who had danced there, the spirits of people who had gathered for political rallies, who gathered for the Emancipation Proclamation celebration. He was connecting himself to the people of New Orleans.

HD: In order to unearth this hidden history, it seems like you had to do a lot of detective work. What has that process been like for you?

FS:Let's take the presumed suicide of Pierre Crocker. I'm reading it in the journals, right? I'm reading, he's in the meeting, Crocker’s getting upset with people and they're really putting all these exclamation points. Then I read later that he sent a letter to the [Economy Hall members] saying, “I'm so sorry about the way I behaved.” And then the next entry or so says something asking, “How can we deal with this thing that he published? Was it true?” And now they're saying, “we have to do an inquest”. So I’m thinking, something's really going on. I'm looking through the newspaper archives from the date of the exclamation point. Then I find the letter he published, [written to his mistress Héloïse Glapion]-- that was a big one. So then I have to find who Héloïse is. 

Well here's a funny thing that happened. I see Barbara Trevino-- she’s a descendant of Marie Laveau-- and Barbara and I went to grammar school together. I ask, do you know who these people are, Crocker and Héloïse? She says, yes, those are my ancestors. I hadn't seen Barbara for years, many, many years. I felt like that was one of those times when I felt that a hand is here somewhere, the help from a little guide.

HD:Considering the deep roots of your New Orleans community, how has it felt to have such a positive reception to the book? 

FS: Well for a writer the thing is not whether people like a book. You just write the truth. If people like it that's nice, you know, it's nice to be greeted with a smile on this one, but they’re still going to be in my community anyway. That’s one thing about the New Orleans community, they're going to claim you, whether they like [what you do] or not- they're still going to claim you. They’re always going to claim you, and that’s what’s so beautiful.