The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Writer Solves a Mystery, and Ruth E. Carter Steps into the Spotlight

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Committed during a period filled with bombings, killings, and disappearances, the murder of Jean McConville remains one of the most infamous unsolved crimes of the Troubles. The writer Patrick Radden Keefe may have discovered who killed her. Plus, the costume designer Ruth E. Carter, best known for her work on the movie “Black Panther,” talks about her decades-long career. And The New Yorker presents the second year of the Brody Awards. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For nearly 40 years, the city of Belfast was synonymous with bombings, murders, and guerrilla warfare. Police reported 56 hijackings, 17 bombings, 23 shooting incidents, and nearly 200 attacks on the security. The conflict in Northern Ireland between the British government and the IRAs, the Irish Republican Army, ended in 1998, officially that is, but the troubles continued to bubble up in unexpected places. In 2013, Patrick Raddenkief stumbled across an obituary of a woman named Dolores Price.

She was the first woman to serve as a real front-line soldier in the IRA. She was part of that civil rights movement in the Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and she got radicalized. and she ends up leading a bombing mission to England and getting arrested and going to jail and going on hunger strike. She helped blow up the old Bailey. She helped blow up the old Bailey. She led the mission. And this is when she's scarcely out of her teens.

She goes toe to toe with Margaret Thatcher. Eventually Thatcher lets her out of prison. And later in her life, after the peace process, she was very disaffected. After the troubles, Dolores Price took part in a secret oral history project. members of the IRA were interviewed on tape about the acts of warfare and violence that they'd committed. The tapes were sent to Boston College here in the U.S., and each record was supposed to remain sealed until the interviewee had died. And in 2013, when Dolores Price died, it had come out that she had been involved in what was one of the most notorious incidents in the Trumbulls, which was in 1972. There was a woman named Gene McConville, who was a mother of 10 and a woman.

widow who was taken away by the IRA and disappeared. She was killed, but her body was buried in an unmarked grave. Her kids never knew what happened to her. Why would she have been killed by the IRA? The children didn't know at the time. What we learned later is that the IRA maintains, to this day, that she was an informant for the British Army. She's a mother of 10. What could she possibly known that it would have been a tremendous value to the IRA? This is what her children who are now adults say is that they really vehemently contest any suggestion that she had been informed. They say, what would she know? She was trying to take care of us. Is there an answer to that question? There's not a definitive answer. In the book, I lay out the evidence on both sides, and there are people

who today will swear up and down that she was and that she wasn't. So I don't know. When you say they disappeared this woman, what exactly did they do to her? And when was it discovered? Well, again, And we didn't know. The children didn't know. One night in December, 1972, she's at home with her kids. And a group of people comes and knocks on the door in a housing project in West Belfast. They barge in. They have guns. They're masked. And they pull Jean McConville out. And her kids were quite young. The youngest were two twins who were six years old at the time. They're clinging to her legs. They're screaming. These intruders say, we'll bring her back. We just want to talk to her. And they never saw her. again. It was only in 2003 that her body was found. 2003, 30-odd years later. 31 years later, her body's found by a beachcomer in the Republic of Ireland, walking along a beach one day. So they're finding bones. They found bones. And there had been some storms, and so some erosion on that coastal area,

and these bones were kind of churned up from the ground. And it was only more than a decade after that that people like Dolores Price, started talking and some of these secrets began to come out about the circumstances of this death. Why would they talk? Because they experienced great trauma. So part of what I was trying to do in this book is take one violent incident and approach it as you would a novel and you've got a handful of compelling, interesting characters, real people, and you look at the way it affected them, the victims and the perpetrators alike and how that played out over the decades. And for some of them, people like Dolores Price. There was a huge amount of trauma associated with the violent acts that she had committed

in the name of the United Ireland. So she looks back as a mother herself, as somebody reaching middle age, and begins to reevaluate some of the things she's done. And what access did you have to the papers at Boston College? It was pretty limited. So they... They're not all dead. Well, there's that, but then the other thing is that there was a huge political fight. Part of the reason I thought there might be a story here initially a magazine article was that on the one hand it's a story about a terrible murder that happened in 1972. On the other hand, it's a story about how that history, far from being remote or a closed case or a cold case that nobody's paying any attention to, was incredibly politically explosive. Because more than one person had talked in a this archive at Boston College about the circumstances of Gene McConville's death. And it emerged that people were pointing a finger at Jerry Adams. So Jerry Adams, we should explain, is somebody who was always thought to be a leader of the provisional IRA involved in violent acts. He's always denied it. He was also a member of Parliament in Britain and a leader of the Irish political party

Sinn Féin. And he became a pivotal figure in the reconciliation in the 90s. So why would this be such a big deal all these years later? Well, for a variety of reasons. One is that Adams, who I feel pretty comfortable saying, was in fact a commander in the IRA for many years. How do you know? Because I've interviewed a whole bunch of people who are in the IRA with him. And because really it's Adams who maintains today that he was never in the IRA and there's nobody else.

So you're saying that he ordered the killing of Gene McConville. Yes. Yes. And more than one person who was involved has said this. He denies it, but he denies he was ever in the IRA. Look, it's funny, I did want to talk to Adams. But I was also mindful of that just because you get the interview, doesn't mean he's going to tell you anything.

I had this hilarious encounter when I was doing the reporting where I talked to a former IRA guy who's known Adams for a long time. And he was saying, look, even if he talks to you, he's not going to tell you anything. and I sort of said, hey, don't underestimate me. You know, I've got my ways. And the guy kind of chuckled and he said, he said, you know, Jerry's had what they call counter interrogation training. This means you could be torturing the man and he wouldn't tell you anything.

And he looked at me and he says, but if you want to go in with your wee notebook, good luck to you. Listeners, please note that was Patrick Keefe doing the imitation. not David Remnick. Now, Adams, you're saying, ordered this murder and ordered Dolores Price to do it. What was their relationship like and did it stay the same? It didn't, and that's part of the dramatic arc of the book, is that there were a handful of people who were characters in the book who were very, very close when they were young members of the IRA in the early 1970s. And it wasn't just Dolores Price.

It was our sister, Marion Price. It was a guy named Brendan Hughes, who was involved in many of these operations. And they did some awful things. They set bombs in public places. They killed people. And they did so in the name of the United Ireland. And then in the 1990s, Adams, whose political instincts had always been a little bit more evolved, perhaps, than some of his contemporaries in the IRA, starts to realize we're not going to fight the British

into the sea. And so he starts taking part in this peace process. And what that means for Dolores Price and Brendan Hughes and some of these other people who took orders from Adams, they feel betrayed. Is that they feel betrayed, is that they say, I did these things telling myself that the ends would justify the means. And what you've done is you've changed the means. That they would be United Ireland. There would be a United Ireland and there might be a great deal of bloodshed in order to get there, but we would get there. And you've changed the game. And then in addition to doing that, Adams would rather blithely say, oh, well, I personally was never in the IRA. I didn't order any of these things. I don't have any of that blood on my hands myself.

And that drove some of these people mad. I mean, I think some of it was PTSD and trauma, but there was also a sense of a very acute sense of betrayal. Clearly, you do not find Jerry Adams an attractive figure in many, many ways. on the other hand, this is a question of incredible historical significance in the region, and it was resolved and it was resolved with Jerry Adams at the center of it. So in the end, how do you think history will treat Jerry Adams? This is one of the great ironies of Adams as a figure. I find him emotionally very unsympathetic, downright sociopathic in his kind of clinical tendency to just cast aside anybody who's not useful to him anymore. But politically,

Adams was the one who realized that you need to end this fight. And so I do think that there's an enduring irony in the idea that this is a man who was guilty of ordering perhaps the most notorious war crime of the conflict that he then helped to end. So, so, say nothing is in my mind two books at once first it's the best book about the troubles i've ever read and that's on one side on the other it's a murder mystery and you solve it your book discusses dolores price she was a possibility in your mind an IRA member named patrick mcclure who was a possibility for reasons that you get into and there's a third person and in a sense this this book is a who done it i don't want to make light of it but there's a there's a mystery that's solved here in

The third person is named. What does it like to accuse somebody of murder in a book, and have you heard from this person? It was certainly the most intense decision I've ever made in my career as a reporter and writer. I'll tell you that. There was a lot of lawyering, as you'd imagine, and this person is still alive and had never been associated with this murder. Had he or she been associated with any other murder? Yes. So it was a former IRA member. But I, I'll put it to this way, leaving aside the legal issue, morally, I would never have named the name and pointed the finger at someone and accused them of carrying out, you know, one of the most heinous war crimes of the troubles, of a terrible conflict. Have you gotten a response from the accused?

So I initially reached out to this person's lawyer in May and got nothing and got in touch again, got nothing, and it said, I'm going to publish this book accusing your client. Nothing. The book came out in... Not even a response, a negative response, a cease and desist, anything? Nothing. And the book came out in November in the UK and Ireland, in part because it had this news in it, which they wanted to get out because it was a fairly newsworthy thing over there. and it was excerpted in the Sunday Times. They got in touch with the lawyer a few days before publishing the excerpt, got a no comment. A few days after the book came out, this person released a statement saying it wasn't true, but that they wouldn't be saying anything more about it. And I've heard nothing since. Now, one thing we've forgotten here is ten kids lost their mother and became orphans instantly.

What became of those ten children, the McConville children? Well, things didn't get any easier for them. It was heartbreaking. They initially tried to stay in the family apartment because they thought their mother might be coming back. But eventually the state stepped in and they said, look, if you're going to put us into a home, can you at least have us all be together? And the state split them up and put them in different orphanages. And those orphanages were every bit as bad as you might imagine that Irish orphanages would have been in this period. time. And so the kids were re-victimized in a whole series of awful ways.

When you made this name public, how did the kids, who are now obviously well-grown, how did they react? It was an intense experience. I wrote a letter to Gene McConville's children prior to the book coming out, telling them what I'd learned. And they'd always had a different idea of what might have happened. They were extremely surprised about the identity of the who I pointed to. But what I heard from a lot of people who have watched this case closely and know some of the parties involved is, again, this idea that they were both shocked to learn the identity of this person, but when you thought about it, it made perfect sense. Patrick, in many ways the troubles feel like a long time ago. You found that sources were still

sometimes reluctant to talk to even now for fear of the IRA. And as recently as last month, a car bomb was discovered in Northern Ireland, which is not good news. Do you feel as though the troubles are somehow bubbling up again in some form or another? Well, I think that... And why is there an IRA?

Well, that's a big question. There's a line that Jerry Adams used famously. he was giving a speech and somebody in the audience, he yells, bring back the IRA. And Adams leaned into the microphone and said, they haven't gone away, you know. And this is a big question in Northern Ireland. Is this idea of, is the IRA still there? And there definitely is some form of it that continues to exist. And tensions are high.

And I think they're only going to get higher if with Brexit, we see some possibility of the return of a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and the North. So on one level, to the extent that there's a thesis in this book, it's that the past will not stay buried. And if you ignore this kind of history, it will come back and have its revenge. And I think we're seeing that a little bit in the Brexit context. Having said that, some of the more alarmist coverage of the situation recently has suggested that you could get a return to the bad old days of 1972. And I think that's pretty unlikely. I think that you could see on the margins, great tension and maybe a little violence here and there. But I don't think there's the appetite

for people to go back at this point. Patrick Keefe, thank you very much. Thank you. The New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe. His book about the troubles and the murder of Gene McConville is called Say Nothing. And it comes out this week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We are here with the alternative Oscars, better known as the Brodies, named for Richard Brody, who writes about film for The New Yorker. And I'm also here with Alexandra Schwartz,

who writes about damn near everything for the New Yorker. Books, theater, politics, and what have you? And Richard, I've got to ask you, what's going to win the lowly real Oscars, do you think, just to start? I think that Roma's going to win. And you're anti-Roma. I'm not a big fan of Roma. I think that Roma has its own problems of aesthetics and of politics.

And the political problem that you see with it is that in a sense that the main character, the cleaning woman, the nanny, doesn't have a voice. Doesn't have a voice, exactly. We don't know her past. We don't even know her real relationship with the children in the house. But at least, Richard, you could say that it's an otorist movie and you look. love otters. Well, not necessarily. You know, there's a great line from André Bazin.

Oteur, yes, but of what? Touchet. There we go. We're off to the races. Richard, let's just go through your nominees for best picture. You have a couple of them are pretty well-known, and some of them are. So just go through them. One of the ones that's well-known is, sorry to bother you.

Boots Riley's first feature about a young man, a young black man in Oakland, played by Lakeith Stanfield, who is working as a telemarketer and is encouraged by a colleague, played by Danny Glover, to put on his white voice in order to succeed. Hey, young blood, let me give you a tip. Use your white voice. And I've got no white voice. Oh, come on, you know what I mean.

You have a white voice in there. You can use it. It's like when you pulled over by the police. Oh, no, I just use my regular voice when that happens. I just say, back the fuck up off the car and don't nobody get hurt. I'm just trying to give you some game. You want to make some money here? Then read the script with a white boy.

And it's a movie about class, as much as it is about race, isn't it? It's about class. It's about politics. It's about labor politics. It's essentially an apocalyptic revolutionary film. Okay. Second nominee.

Second nominee, Black Klansman, Spike Lee's historical drama and at the same time sort of historical fantasy about the combating of the KKK in a Colorado police precinct by a white and a black officer. How do you propose to make this investigation? Well, I've established contact

and created some familiarity with the Klansman over the phone. I'll continue in that role, but we'll need another officer. Surprise, surprise, a white officer to play me when they meet face-to-face. That's my point, exactly. Chief. Black Ron Stallworth over the phone, white-Rond-Stalworth face-to-face, so there becomes a combined bronze stalwart.

Can you do that? I believe we can with the right white man. We can do anything. It's an outrage that Spike Lee has never been nominated for directing Oscar before. Now, how do you think Spike Lee will make out, and what was your view of Black Klansman? It's weirdly hopeful retroactively. And at the same time, it's a history lesson.

There's a tremendous amount of cultural context in Black Klansman. It's, in effect, a movie that takes the cultural background and pulls it into the foreground. And brings it up to the present. I mean, one of the things that I think about most often with Black Klansman was the kind of use that Spike Lee made of footage that all of us have watched on TV, you know, Charlottesville and I think in other events, and how emotional and freshly terrible it felt to watch that kind of footage that we've all seen but re-contextualized. And finally the film that I think it really is the Brody film of the year is, and I can't do a drum roll.

There we go. Madeline's Madeline. Josephine Decker's film. Madeline's Madeline is a very classic and somewhat classical coming-of-age story. The story of a high school student in New York who is both a theater prodigy and who is suffering from mental illness.

And also who, like all teenagers, is in a very stressful relationship with her mother, played by Miranda July. But what's so exciting about this film is that Helena Howard, who was a teenager at the time she made the film, gives what I consider one of the greatest teen performances in the history of cinema. There's one scene, an improv exercise in her theater troupe, where she's impersonating her own mom, and you see some of the raw fury she feels toward her mother coming out in that scene.

When you were just a little baby, I stroked your head so soft. I said to myself, I said this baby, she's so perfect. She's going to be so strong. And look at you now. You are sick. You're so sick. So Madeline's Madeline is sweeping best picture and best director and best actress in the Brodies. Now we come to Best Actor, Richard.

And this, I think, is going to surprise a few people. I thought that Robert Redford's performance in The Old Man in the Gun, a movie with a New Yorker connection because it's based on a story by David Gren that originally ran in The New Yorker, is the most extraordinary performance I saw from a man this year. Right, and it's about a guy who, in the beginning of the film, you think he's just a charming rogue and he robs banks, but he doesn't hurt anybody and he doesn't really mean it.

But you realize after a while, he's a sociopath. He can't live without knocking over banks. This place is not my style. I'd say it was a bank. And instead of that counter up there, that was really a teller's window. That lady standing there was the teller behind the window. And you just walk in real calm. And you find yourself a spot and you sit down.

Just like we're sitting here. And you wait and you watch. And that may take a couple of hours, might take a couple of days even. But you wait. It's got to feel right. The timing has to feel right. And when it does feel right, you make your move. So you walk right up, look her in the eye, and you say, ma'am, this is a robbery.

And you show her the gun like this. Redford does something here that I've never seen him do before. It's a performance of tremendous intimacy. Every tremor of his eyebrows, every half smile on his lips, every wink, every gleam is picked up by the camera, and seems to convey a lifetime of experience and slyness. And now we're going to talk about the real Oscars for a moment. So we come to two films that seem to dominate the nominations. You've got Roma and The Favorite.

I have to say, I've already expressed my admiration for Roma. I really love the favorite. And I thought it was incredibly funny. And I had no reason to know this film was going to be what it was, having seen that director's predecessors, which you're the lobster. The lobster. And that movie with killing a deer. I'm killing of a sacred deer.

I thought the favorite was incredibly funny and interesting. Did you see it? Yeah, I did see it. And, you know, I was not a fan of The Lobster, which I felt to be too, yes, the face that you're making, David conveys my feelings about it as well. I felt that it was too solubstistically invested in its own conceits. But the favorite was something really different and fresh. And it is about Queen Anne, who in the movie is played by Olivia Coleman, who is wrapped up in sort of governing England as it is at war, but more in her own personal affair. She has 17 rabbits in cages kept in her bedroom.

And she, her lover, is played by Rachel Weiss in a fantastic performance. who guides her and uses her erotic influence to get political favors accomplished. And her standing at court is compromised when Emma Stone as a sort of tumbleweed figure arrives, falls out of a carriage into the mud and arrives and screws everything up. You have become close to Abigail. She's been a dear, yes. To such a shame, but I've had to dismiss her for theft. She's a liar and a thief.

Your tongue seems uncharacteristically still. I heard you. She's my servant. She's not dismissed. I've made her my maid of the bedchamber. Did you not hear what I said? Yes, you regard her as a liar and a thief? Yes.

I do not, obviously. Alex and Richard, if you look at the sort of sum total of the nominees this year, are the Oscars doing better? Are they doing worse, or just kind of the same old, same old? Well, two things that come to my mind looking at the nominees are one. I am perpetually disappointed by how few women directors are nominated. I mean, first of all, it's a major imbalance in the industry in general. But this year, there were definitely contenders, and there was no reason to have this total shutout once again.

So it's disappointing to me, and it brings the Academy's credibility down in my eyes, not simply for some kind of gender ratio ideal, but really for, you know... Gender ratio at all. Yeah, at all. And just appreciating quality when it's there. It's hard for me to believe that if a movie, like, can you ever forgive me, had been made by... a man that would not be nominated. I think you were going to make another point, though, Alex. Yeah, the one thing I'd say is the enemy is inside the house.

You have Netflix. It has arrived. Roma has, is nominated up the wazoo for all these awards. The Oscars have had to deal with increasing competition from TV, from people, you know, sitting at home and flicking it on. It's interesting to me that Netflix is now going to be sitting inside that ceremony and has every reason to have a pretty smug look on, you know, its face. Is there anything wrong with it? I don't think there is actually. I mean, independent producers have been rivaling Hollywood studios for years.

In fact, this is one of the reasons why the ceremonies have been transformed in recent years. For quite a while, studio films have more or less been shut out of the Oscars, at least the Best Picture Awards, because independent producers were coming in and producing the higher quality films that were then getting nominated. See, I think the Oscars' mistake is actually to broadcast itself at all. It ought to be a movie. Martin Scorsese. Martin Scorsese ought to direct the Oscars the way he directed the last waltz,

and then it ought to be shown in theaters a certain amount of time later. That's a pretty great idea. That's a great idea. But I think Martin Scorsese's view of the Oscars after Raging Bull lost to Ordinary People, something I still haven't gotten over quite, too jaunders for him to carry that off year after year. So I'm guessing, by the way, a star is born was not your favorite for the year. You know who was originally supposed to direct?

the star is born. That was going to be directed by Eastwood. Beyonce was going to have the lady Gaga. Exactly. I think you once told me, Richard, Clint Eastwood could put two sticks and rub them together, and it would be a great movie. Richard, Alex, thank you so much. Thank you. Alex, thank you. You can read Richard Brody on film at New Yorker.com all the time, and Alexander Schwartz is a staff writer. Step to the right, please.

Costume designer Ruthie Carter has had a pretty remarkable. career in movies, going all the way back to Spike Lee's third film in 1988. She's been nominated three times for the Academy Award, but it's her work on last year's film, Black Panther, that really blew up. You saw people all over the country in homemade Black Panther costumes on Halloween. Now Ruth Carter is getting her due as one of the leading designers in Hollywood, and her work was shown at this year's Fashion Week in New York. So we're at Spring Studios for,

the Ruth Carter exhibit called Next of Kin. Next of Kin features designs from and inspired by I'm going to get you Setha, School Days, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, What's Love Got to Do With It, Selma, Shy Rack, and Black Panther. And that, of course, is only a fraction of the projects that Ruth Carter has worked on. In fact, she's so busy that when staff writer Doreen St. Felix wanted to interview Carter, She had to catch her at the star-studded opening night party, where the costume from 1988's I'm going to get you sucker was on display.

They were platform shoes with live goldfish swimming around in the soles. The goldfish shoes are a necessary addition, of course. Hopefully there won't be any snafooze with the fish. No, they got us. I remember on the set we had extra fish, so if something, heaven forbid. So let's go back to the 80s. You're a student at Hampton University, and you decide that you want to switch to theater arts.

What inspired that? I know that you weren't necessarily thinking that you wanted to work in costume and design when you first enrolled there. Well, I was always hanging out with the theater students anyway. I was auditioning for plays. I came from experiences with theater in high school, after school, summer school.

What were some of the plays that you were in when you were in high school? Oh, thank you for asking. Yes. I was Benitha in a Raisin in the Sun. Yes. I was Alberta in Stye of the Blind Pig. My directing final was Day of Absence. Wow.

I had the best instructors. They were my mentors, my first mentors, because they were the ones that introduced me to Alice Walker and Wolei Soyinka. and all of the plays that the Negro Ensemble Company was doing at the time when I was in college, I wanted to be around them and I wanted to be doing black theater because I was reading all the plays. I still have the books I had back then. And when I graduated, I wanted more. And I knew I needed more training as a costume designer.

So I did internships. At the Santa Fe. Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. I was there for a season. And then I drove to L.A. Still thinking, I'm going to get to N.E.C., you know. But it didn't quite happen that way. No, I got to Spike Lee.

Right. Yeah. How did you then come from, you know, meeting him and then working on school days? Well, it actually was him coming to a performance, a dance performance where I had did the costumes for the dancers. and my senior recital was dance costumes at Hampton. I did our touring company. And he came and he told me to get more experience in film. He inspired that.

And from there, I, you know, just thought about film but really didn't think that it was dynamic enough because I had just done opera. And I felt like film was so realistic. It didn't translate immediately to me. I had to learn how to be a film costume designer because theater, you have aesthetic distance. And the eye just eliminates detail as it travels to its subject.

And with film, it's blown up 600 times its size. So the details are much more prominent than they are if they were on stage. So I had to actually learn how to dial it back. But for school days, because it was a little bit more theatrical, it was the perfect film to start with. We had the fraternity pledges. We had the gamma rays, and we did a musical production, two of them, three of them in that film. There was a step show, and it was a subject that I had lived, having gone to an HBCU, Hampton University, I knew all of that.

I think a lot about how costumes are so important in terms of establishing continuity in the film. And I was wondering, I know film sets can end up being a little crazy. Were there any times where a piece got lost and the character needed it and you had to find a way to create it again? Okay, so in school days, Kime Hershey wears a sweater that I designed with African masks on it. A dear, dear friend who was a part of my internship. She was a draper, and she knit every day. I sent her the idea, and she knit that sweater for me. So my first film, I thought about Georgia Carney Darling, who could knit,

and she told me how to lay out the pattern, that she could count the stitches and make that sweater with African masks on it. Incredible. And at the end of the show, which I thought the, it was the end of school days. It was the last day of shooting. I was hell bent on keeping that sweater. So towards the end of school days, I packed the sweater with my personal belongings and sent it to the airport. And we needed that sweater for another scene and I didn't realize it. And it was one of a kind. So we in the middle of the night traveled to the air strip and we managed to get the sweater.

Wow. So you're on an airstrip in the middle of the night getting his sweater. Oh, my God, digging out of my boxes, that's what I was helping on keeping it. And then Spike gave it to Kime Hershey. He didn't even give you this sweater? No, he did not. Ruthie Carter, who's been nominated for the Oscar in costume design for her work on the film Black Panther. She spoke with Doreen St. Felix, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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